VIFF '10: Wrap-up

Well, we're back home after our best film festival experience yet.  23 features in nine days is also a new record, as was the fact that there was only one day when the wife questioned why she agrees to go to these things with me.  I'm sure this is going to change several times as I get some distance from the craziness of the festival environment and all these movies to settle in a separate themselves in my brain, but here's an initial ranking of what we saw, including four of the best and most distinctive shorts.

1. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
2. Oki's Movie (Hong Sangsoo, 2010)
3. Uncle Boonmee Who Can recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
4. Carlos (Olivier Assayas, 2010)
5. 607 (Liu Jianyin, 2010)
6. I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhangke, 2010)
7. Thomas Mao (Zhu Wen, 2010)
8. Hahaha (Hong Sangsoo, 2010)
9. The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Breillat, 2010)
10. Get Out of the Car (Thom Anderson, 2010)
11. The Drunkard (Freddie Wong, 2010)
12. Poetry (Lee Changdong, 2010)
13. Gallants (Clement Cheng & Derek Kwok, 2010)
14. Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt & The Magnetic Fields (Kerthy Fix & Gail O'Hara, 2010)
15. Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette, 2009)
16. The Strange Case of Angélica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010)
17. Merry-Go-Round (Clement Cheng & Yan Yan Mak, 2010)
18. Crossing the Mountain (Yang Rui, 2010)
19. My Film and My Story (Kim Taeho et al, 2010)
20. Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole, 2010)
21. The Fourth Portrait (Chung Mong-hong, 2010)
22. Inhalation (Edmund Yeo, 2010)
23. Of Love and Other Demons (Hilda Hidalgo, 2009)
24. The Indian Boundary Line (Thomas Comerford, 2010)
25. The Tiger Factory (Woo Ming Jin, 2010)
26. Icarus Under the Sun (Abe Saori & Takahashi Nazuki, 2010)
27. Rumination (Xu Ruotao, 2010)


And here's index of my posts:
Day One: Made in Dagenham and My Film and My Story
Day Two: Of Love and Other Demons, Get Out of the Car & The Indian Boundary Line, Poetry and Icarus Under the Sun
Day Three: The Drunkard, Thomas Mao and Crossing the Mountain
Day Four: 607, Hahaha, The Fourth Portrait, I Wish I Knew
Day Five: The Sleeping Beauty, Rumination, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Day Six: Around A Small Mountain and Oki's Movie
Day Seven: The Strange Case of Angélica, The Tiger Factory & Inhalation and Gallants
Day Eight: Carlos and Certified Copy
Day Nine: Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields and Merry-Go-Round


For more on VIFF, I can't recommend highly enough the website of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson.  Today's dispatch from them points out that Rumination, which I saw a few days ago and didn't particularly like, actually runs in reverse chronological order, something that went complete over my head.  I don't know if I like the movie better knowing that, but it certainly makes it more interesting.