VTIFF Program Guide 2025 - Flipbook - Page 22
FILMS A TO Z
FH: FILM HOUSE | BB: BLACK BOX THEATER | SR: SCREENING ROOM • All at Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center, Burlington
PUT YOUR SOUL ON YOUR HAND AND WALK
REEDLAND
Directed by Sepideh Farsi
France, Palestine, Iran | 2025 | Documentary | 110 min | English w/subtitles
Directed by Sven Bresser
Netherlands, Belgium | 2025 | Fiction | 112 min | Dutch w/subtitles
Sponsored by: Bridget and Nick Meyer
Sponsored by: Arnie Malina
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21 | 1:30 PM | BB
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 26 | 1:45 PM | BB
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24 | 4:15 PM | FH
Screenlife movies are usually the terrain of low-budget horror, but Sepideh Farsi’s
documentary seizes on the style to do something far more rewarding. Over the course of
a year, she corresponded with 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona,
who lived in Gaza, via FaceTime. These two women, separated by thousands of miles,
collaborate to amplify the plight of a people living through war crimes every day. Fatma
holds the center as a courageous young idealist enduring an unfathomable situation. As
the war takes a toll on her spirit, her hope, resilience, and ambitions never fade. Not
content to film just talking heads, Farsi constantly reframes the compositions, catching
glimpses of her surroundings, capturing the dust on the screen. The layers of mediation
emphasize our detachment from the crisis, as Farsi imbues her own helplessness into
the very format of the movie. But even through all the pixelation and hitchy connections,
Fatma’s megawatt smile and incandescent personality still light up the screen. ~OO
A movie that gets this far under your skin is a rare thing indeed. In director Sven
Bresser’s atmospheric debut, a spectral thriller set deep in the Dutch countryside, a
solitary farmer (real-life reed cutter Gerrit Knobbe) discovers the lifeless body of a girl.
Overcome by an ambiguous sense of guilt, he takes it upon himself to root out the killer
and make sense of the evil encroaching around him—and possibly within him.
Reedland’s masterful sound design is hypnotic and surreal, recalling the elemental
menace and supernatural whispers of Kaneto Shindō’s folk-horror masterpiece Onibaba.
The uncanny sensation created by wind passing through fields of dried-out reeds feels
like sinking into an abyss. There are shots and scenes in the film that you can’t really
account for or solve—including a middle school pageant that drifts into beguiling
unreality. Everything has a sinister charge that builds and builds without release. ~OO
RENOIR
Directed by Chie Hayakawa
Japan, France, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, Qatar | 2025 |
116 min | Japanese w/subtitles
Sponsored by: Patricia Fontaine
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18 | 7:15 PM | BB
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22 | 1:30 PM | BB
In her elegant and thoughtful sophomore feature, Renoir, director
Chie Hayakawa casts a glance backward to 1987 to tell the story of
11-year-old Fuki (fabulous newcomer Yui Suzuki). An introverted
student with a vibrant internal life, Fuki has the usual stresses of a
child her age, compounded by her hospital-bound father’s serious
illness. Largely left to her own devices, she engages in a series of odd
adventures in and around Tokyo. Hayakawa does a masterful job of
eliciting character through action rather than dialogue, and the film is
a subtle visual feast. Hayakawa made the film in order to return to her
own childhood, when her father was dying, and his gift to her—a print
of a Renoir painting—gives the film its appropriately poetic title. ~SM
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VTIFF.ORG | VERMONT INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2025
