Vancouver: the art cinema capital of the West Coast

My statement may sound surprising: Vancouver is the place to be if one is interested in art cinema. Seattle may have the older film festival. San Francisco may have more (many more) independent art house cinemas and Los Angeles may have more independent-minded filmmakers, but for real cutting edge film culture we need to go up North to Vancouver.
First, the Vancouver International Film Festival, although smaller and less glamorous than Toronto and Montreal, is certainly one of the most exciting film festivals not only in Canada but in North America. The main reason for this is that the Vancouver International Film Festival reinvented itself as the film festival that represents films from Asia. This was a natural path to take, given that this city has the largest percentage of Chinese, Japanese and Korean inhabitants of any North American city, and that some parts of greater Vancouver have distinctive Asian ambience.
In short, Vancouver is home to minorities that happen to come from those countries (Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea) that have produced the most exciting films in the last few years. The festival was lucky that as good European films were in increasingly short supply, the films from these countries became more and more exciting and valuable artistically.
But it is not only during the film festival in October, when Vancouver is the place to be for art film lovers. The city has many smaller, more focused film festivals throughout the year. The most recent of these is the Vancouver Korean Film Festival, which shows some of the most recent Korean films as well as earlier works by directors who became successful recently – films that have not been shown at many festivals that that have never made it to theatrical release.
Even more importantly, the city has two venues that stand out among the best North American art house cinemas in terms of their programming. I attended the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California regularly for seven years and I was convinced that that is the best possible way of running an art movie theatre. But Vancouver has two such cinemas with, if possible, even braver, more uncompromising and experimental programming.
The Pacific Cinematheque is a relatively small venue that puts on films that are absolutely impossible to see elsewhere. Their last big series was on the Czechoslovakian modernist films of the thirties – a period not even film critics always know about and that does not even get taught in most film history classes. These films, however, were some of the most innovative and formally rigorous works in Europe before the second word war – real hidden gems.
The next big month-long series at the Pacific Cinematheque is a tribute to, and this is quite unusual in itself, a film distribution company, Janus. All the great European and Japanese films of the fifties and sixties were distributed by Janus in North America: from the French nouvelle vague through Bergman to Kurosawa. This series gives a very good overview of what made the late fifties and the sixties the period that transformed filmmaking, in Europe and what changed the way of thinking about films in North America.
The other major art house theatre in Vancouver is the Vancouver Film Centre, a venue run by the same programmers as the International Film Festival. The programming here is maybe even less mainstream and more uncompromising than at the Pacific Cinematheque. Just one example: it was the second venue in the world that screened a full retrospective of Pedro Costa’s films.
Pedro Costa is the new sensation in the world of off-mainstream, avant-garde cinema. Influenced mainly by the great French nouvelle vague directors, and above all by Jean-Luc Godard as well as Jean-Marie Straub – Danièlle Huillet, he makes films that are disturbing but at the same time are full of perfectly composed, yet, entirely functional images. His last and probably most mature work, Colossal Youth, the most important discovery for many critics last year in Cannes, creates a feeling of vertigo in the viewer with the consistent and ingenious formal trick that in the course of this two and a half hour long film we do not see any horizontal line at all – everything is slanted. Costa’s documentary, Where lies your hidden smile, on the two iconic nouvelle vague filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièlle Huillet as they edit their film Sicilia! is one of the most striking tributes to the torturous joy of filmmaking.
Costa’s films are not very user-friendly. In Vanda’s room, for example, we see an extremely long take of a man shooting up in a room lit with a single candle. Even the most off-mainstream Vancouverite film buffs found this too much sometimes. The not too big movie theatre was certainly not sold out and some of the audience left during many of the films. Some may complain about this, but I am convinced that the brave and uncompromising programming that brought Costa to Vancouver is to be appreciated in spite of the somewhat cool reaction it received. Those who did stay may never see films in the same way again. And this should be the aim of every art house cinemas.
That Vancouver has two such venues is a luxury that is rare even in the largest and most discerning cultural capitals in North America.

Bence Nanay