Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story follows filmmakers and couple Grant Baldwin and Jen Rustemeyer as they scrounge and subsist on discarded food for six months.
This film that won the Emerging Artist Award at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival is one of 13 feature films included in the Vancouver International Film Festival’s B.C. Spotlight program.
Another is Everything Will Be, a meditation on the changes that loom over Vancouver’s Chinatown that brings the neighbourhood’s often overlooked older occupants and ways to the fore in a beautifully shot doc.
Visitors to VIFF’s mustseeBC microsite can help decide (until Sept. 24) which feature will screen at the BC Spotlight gala, Oct. 4.
Jacqueline Dupuis, the new executive director of the Vancouver International Film Festival Society, introduced B.C. Spotlight last year.
“It’s really important for any festival to really focus on engaging community and showcasing local artists,” she said. “We have such a vibrant arts and cultural community here and a very vibrant film industry as well, so it was a really important way to put a stake in the ground and put forward our support of these amazing local artists.”
The 33rd annual festival, which runs Sept. 25 to Oct. 10, features more than 350 films from more than 65 countries, including 223 features and 130 shorts. VIFF boasts 32 world premieres, 38 international premieres, 22 North American premieres and 47 Canadian premieres.
Emerging themes this year include income inequality, or what the festival has dubbed “the great divide” and troubles that affect an aging population, called “Gentle on My Mind” after a song by Glen Campbell.
The documentary Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me, Sept. 27 and Oct. 1, focuses on the Rhinestone Cowboy’s journey with Alzheimer’s on his farewell tour, with Bruce Springsteen, the Edge and Bill Clinton weighing in.
VIFF has also joined forces with Eco Fashion Week to launch a Style in Film series that includes six features that spotlight fashion, style, art and design and is complemented by fashion panels and a party at Holt Renfrew.
Dupuis has too many favourite films to mention, but in addition to Just Eat It, she recommended two films that have received much buzz.
One of the Style in Film selections, Advanced Style, profiles seven New York women aged “between 50 and death” as one of them used to respond when asked her age, whose approaches to style sing with vitality. The film was inspired by Ari Seth Cohen’s blog and directed by Lina Plioplyte, who will attend the Oct. 3 and 5 screenings.
Dupuis hasn’t seen director Shira Piven’s film Welcome to Me, which stars Kristen Wiig (of Bridesmaids and Saturday Night Live) as a woman with borderline personality disorder who wins the lottery and launches her own talk/variety show, but Dupuis didn’t hesitate to recommend it.
“It’s supposed to be hilarious,” she said.
VIFF opens with director Jean-Marc Vallee’s Wild, staring Reese Witherspoon and based on Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling memoir. The festival closes with the American thriller Whiplash about an ambitious jazz drummer and his savage instructor.
Details at see viff.org.
crossi@vancourier.com
