Vancouver International Film Festival

The following are my A-List movies to check out. I am going to be a recipient of a festival pass, so any movie that falls in my schedule that anyone wants to see I am there.

Friday September 26, 3:20pm Aileen: Life & Death of a Serial Killer
Documentarians Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill return to the subject of one of their most successful films, serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who is, here, facing her final appeal. A haunting look at madness and a genuine attempt to come to grips with it.

Friday September 26, 7:00pm The Day My God Died
An informative and horrifying investigation of the brothels of Bombay, where the average age of the city's 200,000 prostitutes is 14. Director Andrew Levine reveals both startling human-rights abuses and the hope offered by grassroots activist groups, while also stressing the growth of sexual slavery as an international concern. Co-sponsored by the Amnesty International Film Festival.
Sure to depress.

Saturday September 27, 2:00pm Gozu
Miike Takashi and his Ichi the Killer scriptwriter have come up with a splendid, slow-burn yakuza ghost story. A young gangster (Sone Hideki) is ordered to deliver his deranged boss (Aikawa Sho) to Nagoya for termination, but he encounters cross-dressing, gender swaps and Gozu (a man with the head of a cow) along the way.
Miike, guys. MIIKE.

Saturday September 27, 10:00pm Vibrator
A woman in psychological trouble (Terashima Shinobu) happens to meet a trucker (Omori Nao, last seen as Ichi the Killer) and finds herself living out a road movie (or is that a sex movie?) in the cabin of his eight-ton truck. Her consciousness is the core of the film, and his very physical presence is the object that transforms it. Hiroki Ryuichi directs the best Japanese movie of the year.

Tuesday September 30, 7:00pm Wheel of Time
Inviting the viewer into another reality, cinematic legend Werner Herzog engages the mysticism of Tibetan Buddhism in a stunning, poetic documentary on the 2002 Kalachakra Initiation, the largest Buddhist ritual to promote peace, tolerance, and enlightenment, held first in Bodh Gaya, India.
Werner Herzog, guys. WERNER HERZOG.

Wednesday October 1, 12:30pm 8 1 5
Chugoku Shoichi's debut feature is a sprawling collage of sad fact and startling fiction, centred on the fallout from the collapse imperialist dreams in 1945--especially in the gay and Korean-Japanese communities. Often funny, sometimes sexy and always transgressive. Dragons & Tigers Award Nominee.

Friday October 3, 6:00pm Dream Cuisine
Documentary by Li Ying about the elderly Mrs. Sato, a restaurateur in Tokyo, who travels to Shandong to fight for a return to traditional cuisine: "No sugar, lard or MSG!" Her hopeless quest remains highly sympathetic, even when it emerges that she misses such essential ingredients as mice...

Tuesday October 7, 6:00pm A Boy’s Life
What begins as the story of an emotionally disturbed seven-year-old boy living in poverty with his grandmother in Eupora, Mississippi, takes on the dimensions of Greek tragedy and American Gothic in award-winning documentarian Rory Kennedy's utterly compelling tale.

Thursday October 9, 7:00pm Zatoichi
Kitano Takeshi returns to the fray as actor-director with a reinvention of the most beloved J-pop-culture hero of all time: the blind swordsman Zatoichi, who roams late feudal Japan righting the odd wrong, humbling the odd tyrant and wrestling with the odd moral dilemma. The film co-stars the ubiquitous Asano Tadanobu as Zatoichi's antagonist and The Stripes as the rowdiest peasant dancers since Yellow Earth.

Friday October 10, 2:00pm Elephant
Gus Van Sant's chilling, stylistic tour-de-force is a horror film about Columbine, with a typical American high school becoming a microcosm for a society gone horribly wrong. Shot like an aestheticized documentary, Elephant resonates as a film about self-image and self-presentation. Winner, Palme d'Or and Best Director, Cannes.
If you want to see this film, buy tickets soon. This is one of the pushed films that will sell out. I have almost no chance of seeing it unless I buy a ticket as well.