Take a Trip with Us: VIFF’s Documentary Series Spans the Globe

The Vancouver International Film Festival marks its 45th year with a lineup of 165 feature films and 90 shorts, taking audiences around the world through the medium of cinema.

This year’s Insights series presents documentaries that cover ground as far away as Kenya and as close as Nitassinan, the ancestral homeland of the Innu. Each of these films depicts a search, be it for political justice, personal fulfilment, cultural affirmation or some mix of the three.

A Place of Absence documents a quest for answers: the Caravan of Mothers of Missing Migrants travels along migration routes through Mexico to the United States, searching for Central Americans who have gone missing in their bid for a better life. Who Moves America highlights UPS workers, their 2023 contract dispute and their invaluable contribution to their country. Revolutionaries Never Die pays tribute to Jocelyne Saab, the late Lebanese journalist and filmmaker, highlighting her vital work over a decade of turmoil in the Middle East. Kikuyu Land brings historical injustices in Kenya to light, exposing British land seizures and the legacy of dispossession they created. Environmental concerns are front and centre in Nuisance Bear, which follows a polar bear’s struggle to adapt to a changing climate, and the pointedly titled Heat, a portrait of migrant workers toiling in the rapidly warming Middle East.

The personal and the political collide in Birds of War, co-authored by a couple who fell in love documenting the Syrian civil war. Closure explores the powers of technology in its story of a Polish youth’s disappearance and his father’s obsessive search for answers. The decade-spanning Gabin documents a French boy’s journey from childhood to adulthood, while A Fire There explores the hopes and dreams of three Armenian friends in southern Georgia.

Community, history and culture come together in four Insights selections. School for Defectors takes us to Busan, where 20 North Korean defectors are working through education in a new country. Whispers in May explores gender, ritual and the approach of adulthood in the Liangshan Mountains of China’s Sichuan province. A Distant Call is the study of one of Indonesia’s last remaining bissu — gender non-binary Indonesians traditionally regarded as spiritual leaders. Nitassinan is a testimonial in documentary form, celebrating the Innu people and their homeland.

Each of these 14 documentaries is an act of bearing witness, and each of them reflects a unique artistic vision, be it collaborative or individual. There are as many avenues to truth as there are people willing to tell it, and what Insights offers is a rich array of voices with one thing in common: belief in a better world.

For more information on the Insights series, visit VIFF’s website.