I’ve always wondered if the Comedy Of The Absurd is a criticism of the human condition: Life is a series of accidents that veer towards a pointless milieu of pain, …
VIFF
Taiwan’s contemporary cinema thrives with the personal story. Korean films glorify spectacle while Japan prefers its offbeat genre-benders. Contrary to this metric, Taiwan keeps to its path of elegant simplicity …
Every year, I gravitate towards the anime offering for VIFF from classics such as Wolf Children and duds like Red Turtle, every year I roll a proverbial dice. Children of …
We fall because we’re alive, an adage that resonated throughout the film as a drunken warning by herald Sakamoto to protagonist Dazai as he set off in his plagiarism. Sakamoto …
And then again, Suzie asked me to catch another film with her, this time Present. Perfect. The write-up and premise was interesting. Seven hundred hours of live streaming media had …
Review of “We Are Not Princess” at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) 2019
We Are Not Princesses, directed by Bridgette Auger and Itab Azzam, tells the powerful stories from four women, Syrian refugees living in Lebanon, as they prepare for their roles in …
Weirdly enough, as a passage in my own work, I write about my stint as a venue manager at Vancouver International Film Festival in my novella The Seven Muses of …
When I saw the trailer for Birthday, my first impression of the film was that it would be a manipulative sob-fest, and I steeled myself for the emotional exploitation and …
Clifton Hill centers on pathological liar Abby’s return to Niagara Falls after her mother’s death, and follows her obsessive quest to solve the mystery behind a potential kidnapping she witnessed …
Samsara posits that nothing is perfect in this world – a point that it unintentionally proves itself. Although Heyjin’s road – from head priest to troubled boy and back again …