Ashes to ashes, buzz to dust: empty seats plague the Vancouver Internaltional Film Festival.
That’s the reality that’s sinking in for organizers, programmers and hangers-on of the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF), now celebrating its 30th - and perhaps final - year. An aging audience, niche events like the Jewish and Asian film festivals - not to mention a myriad of other movie-viewing options and formats - have made the VIFF irrelevant.
Suffering from a lack of vision, direction, and the “pull” required to attract event movies, the festival has always been a pale imitator of its more successful Toronto counterpart. As far back as the early 1990s a communications coordinator with the VIFF openly complained that promising filmmakers – in a devastating indictment of the VIFF’s lack of clout – consistently skip the Vancouver festival in favour of opening their film to the public directly.
“When the festival is top-heavy with documentaries and short on celebrities it calls itself a ‘real film’ festival,” said a former VIFF official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “When it thinks it’s snagged a ‘somebody’ (usually a minor TV celebrity) it emphasizes the ‘glamour’ angle. Neither sticks nor works and the clock’s run out.” Indeed, Netflix now offers movies and TV shows on demand and libraries have been stocked with obscure, foreign films on DVD for years.
But this year is proving to be particularly painful for the VIFF. The festival is being largely ignored by the major media and the public in favour of a story about the newly renovated B.C. Place Stadium. And those outlets that are covering the festival report that the VIFF – which prides itself on showing movies championing social causes – chose a venue for the opening gala that’s been behind picket lines for months. In a comment that seems prescient and prophetic of the future of the festival itself, the VIFF estimates about a third of patrons expected to attend the opening gala did not attend. By Jason Lee
With additional research by Ken MacDonald in Vancouver, Canada
Special to TheNationalDocumentarian
