Beyond the Big Titles: Eight VIFF Films Worth Your Time

The 45th Vancouver International Film Festival screened films from 76 countries, and its most talked-about titles weren't the whole story. Jesse Eisenberg's "The Debut" generated awards buzz for Julianne Moore, Martin McDonagh closed the festival with the black comedy "Wild Horse Nine" starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, and Peter Farrelly's "I Play Rocky" took the Audience Award in Special Presentations. But the lineup's real depth sat further down the program.

Here are eight narrative and documentary films from VIFF that took familiar subjects from unexpected angles — or captured lives rarely seen on screen.

The holdout and the demolished building

"The Loneliest Man in Town" (Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel, Austria, Panorama) follows an aging Vienna-based blues musician. He's the last tenant in an apartment building slated for demolition — a home he's occupied his entire life. As he says goodbye to vintage blues records, memorabilia and an out-of-tune piano, he weighs a new beginning while firmly in his life's last chapter.

What does a historical documentary without talking heads look like?

Matthew Rankin's "Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney" (NFB, Canada, Showcase) answers that question. Rankin skips interviews entirely and remixes archival footage, animation and music to trace the late Canadian prime minister's rise to power. The result reads like an experimental vintage fever dream. The film doesn't assess Mulroney's political legacy; it examines how his image was built and how his party transformed along the way.

A pickpocket in a cashless city

Noah Segan's "The Only Living Pickpocket in New York" (Sony Pictures Classics, U.S., Special Presentations) stars John Turturro as an aging pickpocket whose craft is dying in a cashless world. After he targets the wrong mark, a crime family entangles him, and he races the clock to save his disabled wife. Segan uses the thriller format to ask what progress leaves behind — shared values, ways of life, technologies people once trusted. With its melancholy jazz score, the film works as an elegy to a vanishing New York.

School for the children of defectors

Jeremy Workman's "School for Defectors" (South Korea/U.S., Showcase) follows teenagers at Jangdaehyun School in Busan, which helps children of North Korean defectors adjust to life in the South. Many grapple with insecurity, shame, trauma and discrimination. The school builds their confidence and belonging while helping them understand what their parents fled. For several students, the full story of their family's escape surfaces for the first time on camera.

Zvyagintsev's domestic decay

"Minotaur" (Andrey Zvyagintsev, Mubi, France/Germany/Latvia, Special Presentations) centers on Gleb, CEO of a Russian transport company, living in a sleek modern home with his wife and son — and a clear disconnect between them. His discovery of her infidelity sends him down a dark path, laced with morbid humor. Russia's invasion of Ukraine runs in the background: the mayor pressures Gleb and other executives to hand over employees for the draft. His household becomes a microcosm of societal moral decay — detachment, indifference, corruption, complacency, the pursuit of comfort. Zvyagintsev is a Cannes Festival Grand Prix winner.

A dinner party at Duke Ellington's home

In 1972, filmmaker William Greaves gathered Harlem Renaissance artists and intellectuals for an intimate dinner at Duke Ellington's home and shot their conversations on 16mm. "Once Upon a Time in Harlem" (Neon, U.S., Insights), completed by his son David Greaves, is that time capsule — an evening of a generation's wit, debates and style.

Flight PS752, five years on

Soran Mardookhi's "The Flight" (NFB, Canada, Showcase) revisits the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 in January 2020, which killed all 176 people aboard, many of them Iranian Canadians. Mardookhi follows three grieving Iranian-Canadian families seeking answers and accountability from the Islamic Republic of Iran years later. The film turns the victims from names in a news report into individuals whose absence still shapes those left behind.

A chambermaid in two worlds

Radu Jude's "Diary of a Chambermaid" (Ritual Films, France/Romania, Showcase) updates Octave Mirbeau's novel. Gianina (Ana Dumitrașcu) is a Romanian migrant working as a live-in housekeeper and nanny for a wealthy family in present-day Bordeaux, while her young daughter waits in Romania, growing more upset with each video call and postponed promise. At her employers' urging, Gianina joins an amateur stage production of the same novel, and rehearsals thread through the film. Jude builds the story on juxtapositions: the care she gives her employers' son versus the FaceTime she offers her own daughter; elegant French interiors against rural Romania; performative progressive speeches against how she's actually viewed.

What does this change for viewers who missed Vancouver? Most of these titles carry distribution — Sony Pictures Classics, Mubi, Neon, Be For Films — which means festival pickups will likely reach theaters and streaming platforms over the coming months.