Aicha’s shattered family lives an isolated existence in the North African desert. Her two oldest sons have left home to fight for ISIS, breaking Aicha’s heart. Then one son returns, suffering badly from PTSD and bringing with him a pregnant bride, who remains covered and silent. Things get weird, then go bad, and Aicha is […]

Romantic, tragic, and beautiful, Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio is a captivating period piece with a wonderful feel for its place and time. Every scene is composed as a sonnet, beautifully photographed in desaturated, painterly tones, and filled with emotion. Toward the end of the Second World War, in a high, remote mountain village in the Italian […]

Nocturnes speaks to the lepidopterist in all of us. Through remarkable patience, keen observation, and beautiful compositions, directors Anupama Srinivasan and Anirban Dutta conjure a transportive, deeply immersive sensorial experience. Nocturnes’ is a celebration of meticulous, rigorous observation, imploring us to look closer at the hidden interconnectedness of the natural world. Following a research team […]

SOLD OUT. WAIT LIST STARTS 1 HOUR IN PERSON AT THE BOX OFFICE. Global politics, jazz, decolonization, and assassination all play key parts in Johan Grimonprez’s absolutely thrilling Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which takes a deep dive into a mostly forgotten dark chapter of world history—the murder of the Congo’s elected leader Patrice Lumumba. […]

SOLD OUT. WAIT LIST STARTS 1 HOUR IN PERSON AT THE BOX OFFICE This double feature of shorter films brings together two filmmakers living in Vermont who made films about Vermonters in Vermont.  Angelos Madsen Minax’s lovely One Night at Babes is certainly a left-turn from Madsen’s more experimental work, but it’s a fabulous cinematic […]

Set in the Bolivian capital of La Paz, The Dog Thief is told through the wild eyes of Martin, a teenager scraping together a living as a shoeshiner. Martin is an orphan and a loner with few friends and fewer opportunities, but he hatches an ill-conceived scheme to take advantage of his best client, the […]

NOTE: THIS SCREENING, OCTOBER 24TH, IS IN THE FILM HOUSE, NOT IN THE BLACK BOX, AS INDICATED ON YOUR TICKET. It’s a story that is depressingly familiar, especially over the last few years: a powerful man (and sexual predator) drugs and assaults a young ambitious woman trying to build her career. What makes Black Box […]

Set in a strict, well-to-do boarding school in India in the ’90s, Girls Will Be Girls has all the hallmarks of your standard coming-of-age gauntlet: hormonal teens crushing hard; dirty tricks from clashing cliques; overachievers and ne’er do wells; and a self-contained setting where uniforms are mandatory, decorum is unimpeachable, and tradition is sacrosanct. But, […]

Amal, the latest from Moroccan-Belgian director Jawad Rhalib, works as both an urgent philosophical dilemma and a tightly-wound thriller. It drops us in the middle of a secondary school class body that is starkly divided and introduces a catalyst that inflames this volatile setting. Set in Brussels, the school where idealistic, progressive teacher Amal works […]

All films in The Screening Room @ VTIFF go on sale the day they occur, at 9 AM. A group of four award-winning Vermont filmmakers explore what it means to be a family in Vermont. The program features four short fiction films ranging from horror to drama. All films offer a uniquely Vermont perspective on […]

North American premiere A wildly clever and frequently hilarious film in which an actress plays a film director named Narges Shahid Kalhor (whom we often see in conversation with the director Narges Kalhor), and directs her in a film…which we watch. It’s called Shahid. Basically, Kalhor has decided that she no longer wants the “Shahid” […]

Mamifera is both a lovely, well-observed character study and a thoroughly relatable portrait of a quarter-life crisis in slow-motion. The film focuses on Lola—a fabulous Maria Rodriguez Soto—a woman who has always been certain that being a mother is not for her. Of course, this being a movie, you can guess what happens next: Just […]

All films in The Screening Room @ VTIFF go on sale the day they occur, at 9 AM. A group of four award-winning Vermont filmmakers explore what it means to be a family in Vermont. The program features four short fiction films ranging from horror to drama. All films offer a uniquely Vermont perspective on […]

This wildly irreverent comedy/horror provocation was written by director/actress Noemie Merlant and Celine Sciamma, who last worked together on the excellent Portrait of a Lady on Fire, with Sciamma directing and Merlant starring. Be forewarned, aside from a baseline theme of female self-reliance, this film is nothing like that! Raunchy, violent, hilarious, gory, fun, supernatural, […]

Winner of Best Director at Cannes, Miguel Gomes’ latest period piece dramedy is the work of a filmmaker with a truly unique conception of cinematic grammar. Split into two mirroring halves, Grand Tour is sumptuous and enchanting, a cracked adventure yarn with its own fairy tale logic. The first part follows Edward, a haute British […]

It all sounds blissful and idyllic and totally of a different era: in 1968 a group of radical journalists leave New York City for the country, landing in Western Massachusetts and Southern Vermont, where they set up a commune and become pioneers in back-to-the-land organic farming. But what happens next? Where do the lives of […]

Cabin fever is rarely as mesmerizing as it is in Who By Fire, the latest from respected Québécois writer-director Philippe Lesage. Albert and Blake were once successful filmmaking partners—the former as writer and the latter as director—before creative and philosophical differences drove them apart and set them on different career paths. After years of estrangement, […]

A large-canvas story told on a basic human scale, Made In Ethiopia is a textbook example of how to take an overwhelming topic and make it engrossing, informative, and cinematic. The topic is China’s investment in Africa, specifically a mind-bogglingly gigantic factory complex that China is building in Ethiopia. The film follows the progress of […]

The 1970s was the Golden Age of the paranoid thriller, and Francis Coppola’s The Conversation was the most paranoid and most thrilling of them all. Sometimes referred to as “the movie Coppola made between the two Godfather films”—which is true, and mind-blowing—it is also an absolute masterpiece that more than stands on its own. We’re […]

SOLD OUT. WAIT LIST STARTS 1 HOUR IN PERSON AT THE BOX OFFICE In 2019, 1,000 Palestinian homes were selected for demolition in the village of Masafer Yatta, the largest mass expulsion order in the West Bank since the Israeli occupation began. Local resident Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham document this destruction house […]