Engaging Cinema. Engaging Minds.
The Patricia Theatre
Opens with 12 VIFF Films
To pre-purchase passes and tickets for the festival, please visit our online ticket sales via Eventbrite.
Doors open 1 hr before screening for ticket sales and entry. Limited tickets will be available at the door 30 minutes before screening.
All films are $12 adult and $10 senior
Adult pass is $120 for 12 films, Senior pass is $100 for 12 films
Oct 1,2,3
Friday, Saturday, Sunday
Oct 8,9,10
Friday, Saturday, Sunday
1:30pm & 7:00pm
Screenings each day
Important Notes:
· Powell River Film Society 2021 Membership required to attend PRFF+VIFF films
· In compliance with Provincial Health Orders, masks are required to be worn indoors while moving about, and proof of vaccination will be required for entry
· Theatre capacity will be limited to 50%
Returning Home
October 1st @ 1:30 pm
Director: Sean Stiller
Language: English, Secwépemc
(72 min)
Film is proceeded by a welcome from the Tla’amin Singers and Drummers
Intertwining narratives concerning residential school Survivors, including Orange Shirt Day founder Phyllis Jack-Webstad, and Indigenous peoples’ relationship with imperiled wild Pacific salmon, Sean Stiller’s documentary is a revelatory testament to resilience. Through stunning cinematography and clear-eyed testimonies, it lays bare the ravages of colonialism, illustrates what it means to be in good relationship with the land, and shares how healing people and healing the natural world are synonymous.
Read more about the film > here
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
October 1st @ 7:00 pm
Director: Will Sharpe
Language: English
(111 min)
Opening reception begins at 6:30 with jazz by Retro and a cash bar.
SOLD OUT — (Limited tickets at the door)
Running the gamut from slapstick comedy to tragedy, and aging across five decades, Benedict Cumberbatch gives a bravura performance as a Victorian illustrator and self-styled polymath who found lasting fame with his knack for drawing cute cats. An improbable subject for a biopic, perhaps, but Will Sharpe’s appropriately eccentric and empathetic film paints Wain as an outsider artist, someone whose considerable talents are out of step with his world—even his species—but who manages to make his mark.
Read a review > here
Wife of a Spy
October 2nd @ 1:30 pm
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Language: Japanese with English Subtitles
(115 min)
An espionage drama in the league of Hitchcock’s Notorious, a romance as glorious as David Lean’s epics, and a metafilmic charade touting cinema as savior of modern civilization. In WWII, a Japanese industrialist discovers a shocking secret in the labs of Manchuria. To turn the tide of war, his wife must outwit a ruthless secret police chief who adores her. This film explores the existential horror of humans with a conscience in a morally compromised society under fascist tyranny.
Read a review > here
Sin La Habana
October 2nd @ 7:00 pm
Director: Kaveh Nabatian
Language: Spanish with English Subtitles
(95 min)
A young, impoverished Afro-Cuban couple dreams of wealth and success outside Cuba. An Iranian-Canadian divorcée yearns for personal freedom. These three lives converge in Sin La Habana, a film that explores the lengths people go to in order to achieve their life goals. The film is a visual feast: the stunning cinematography captures the vibrant heat and colours of Cuba in sun-drenched scenes and pulsing rhythms, and the chill grey and the white blowing snow of a Montreal winter.
Read a review > here
Charlotte
October 3rd @ 1:30 pm
Director: Eric Warin and Tahir Rana
Language: English
(92 min)
Charlotte is an animated drama that tells the true story of Charlotte Salomon, a young German-Jewish painter who comes of age in Berlin on the eve of the Second World War. Fiercely imaginative and deeply gifted, she dreams of becoming an artist. Her first love applauds her talent, which emboldens her resolve. But the world around her is changing quickly and dangerously, limiting her options and derailing her dream. When anti-Semitic policies inspire violent mobs, she leaves Berlin for the safety of the South of France. There she begins to paint again, and finds new love. But her work is interrupted, this time by a family tragedy that reveals an even darker secret. Believing that only an extraordinary act will save her, she embarks on the monumental adventure of painting her life story.
Read a review > here
Quickening
October 3rd @ 7:00 pm
Director: Haya Waseem
Language: English, Urdu
(90 min)
Q&A with actor Quinn Underwood after the film.
Sheila, a Pakistani-Canadian teenager, struggles to define her identity as she is pulled between her newfound social life at university and her family’s traditional values. In Sheila, Waseem and Azeem create a character who exists in an intriguing liminal state: drifting between childhood and adulthood, and incapable of code switching sufficiently to fit in with either her white university friends or the traditional Pakistani girls she grew up with. Relatable to many, her struggles to overcome feelings of isolation and inadequacy are a potent reminder of just how elusive a sense of belonging can be.
Read a review > here
The Last Tourist
October 8th @ 1:30 pm
Director: Tyson Sadler
Language: English, Hindi, Quechua, Spanish
(99 min)
As the world is poised to re-open for international travel and we consider how to move forward in the face of mounting global challenges, could tourism be a part of the solution? Traversing some of the most remote, ancient, and stunning locales on the planet, The Last Tourist addresses the myriad moral and ethical dilemmas at play when sojourning to different cultures. Travelling our vast world will soon have its revival—tourism is dead, long live tourism!
Read more and see trailer > here
My Childhood, My Country – 20 Years in Afghanistan
October 8th @ 7:00 pm
Director: Phil Grabsky, Shoaib Sharifi
Language: Dari, English
(90 min)
This film documents two decades of a precious life—and, beyond that, the tumultuous recent history of a nation. When directors Phil Grabsky and Shoaib Sharifi discovered him, Mir Hussein was just a headstrong little boy living in rural Afghanistan. He and his family agreed to be recorded, and the result is a work of intimate proximity and epic timespan. The directors have, in collaboration with Mir himself, created a rich human portrait and a powerful political statement.
Read a review > here
Bootlegger
October 9th @ 1:30 pm
Director: Caroline Monnet
Language: French, Anishinaabemowin
(81 min)
Looking to complete her thesis, Mani (Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs) leaves Montreal for the Algonquin community where she spent her youth. Her reintegration is complicated by a conflict with Laura (Pascale Bussières), a settler bootlegger, and a contentious referendum over alcohol sales on the reserve. Deftly outlining the dissenting perspectives and implications of this standoff, Caroline Monnet’s first feature explores how patriarchal oppression, self-determination, and sovereignty take myriad forms.
Read a review > here
Portraits From a Fire
October 9th @ 7:00 pm
Director: Trevor Mack
Language: English, Tsilhqot’in
(92 min)
Undaunted by the paltry audiences that turn up to watch his DIY films on the Tl’etinqux Reserve, teenage Tyler (William Lulua) remains convinced that he’s bound for bigger things. But when a DV tape resurfaces that casts new light on his family’s history, Tyler must abandon escapism in favour of unearthing difficult truths. Mingling authenticity and invention, this accomplished open-hearted first feature by Trevor Mack asserts that, where there is trauma, there is also the opportunity for healing.
Read more about the film > here
Bye Bye Morons
October 10th @ 1:30 pm
Director: Albert Dupontel
Language: French with English subtitles
(88 min)
Think the visual stylings of Jacques Tati and Michel Gondry—and a little Jerry Lewis—crossed with the wit of Charlie Kaufman, and you may be able to conjure the worlds created by French national treasure Albert Dupontel. Political and social critique, laugh-out-loud verbal comedy, farce, fantasy, genuine emotion, and visually sublime madness come together when dying mother Suze (Virginie Efira), suicidal IT genius J-B (Dupontel), and blind archivist Serge (Nicolas Marié) team up to find the child Suze was forced to give up for adoption years before.
Read a review > here
The Sanctity of Space
October 10th @ 7:00 pm
Director: Renan Ozturk, Freddie Wilkinson
Language: English
(102 min)
In their quest to traverse Mooses Tooth in Denali National Park, climbers Freddie Wilkinson and Renan Ozturk come across the story of pioneering photographer and cartographer Bradford Washburn—a friend of Ansel Adams—who mapped the mountains from single-prop planes, and in doing so opened up Alaska and the Yukon for future generations of climbers. Washburn’s photography is revelatory, and brings a deeper spiritual dimension to what is already a breathtaking mountain movie.
Read more > here