Windsor International Film Festival Scores Jim Jarmusch’s Venice Winner

Clockwise: “Father Mother Sister Brother” ⎜ Vincent Georgie, WIFF head/programmer⎜ “Mile End Kicks.”

Peter Howell

Movie Critic

When a distributor asked Windsor International Film Festival head Vincent Georgie whether subtitles would “work” with his fest audiences, Georgie knew convincing movie companies to take his southwestern Ontario city seriously would take effort.

“I told him, ’People here do read!’” he recalls with a laugh.

Now in it’s 21st year, WIFF no longer needs to prove itself. Running Oct. 23 to Nov. 2 across downtown theatres, WIFF has grown from 1,000 attendees in its first edition to a record 47,000 last year — and aims to surpass 50,000 this fall.

WIFF is also increasingly establishing itself as a cinephile’s town and attracting films on the awards circuit.

The fest’s big “get” this year is Jim Jarmusch’s “Father Mother Sister Brother,” a cool riff on family ties that won the Golden Lion top prize at the recent Venice film fest. It didn’t screen at last month’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which has long been both an inspiration and rival for WIFF. Windsor this year beat Toronto for the number of features screening: WIFF has 231 compared to TIFF’s 209.

“Father Mother Sister Brother” is a slyly funny anthology that drifts from the U.S. heartland to Dublin and Paris, where Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Charlotte Rampling and Vicky Krieps trade deadpan wit and quiet heartbreak in Jarmusch’s low-key style.

Georgie, who also selects all the films, said when he saw “Father Mother” he decided he had to get it for WIFF, one way or another. He assumed, incorrectly as it turned out, it would first be going to TIFF.

“One thing I don’t lack, good or bad, is I’m persistent,” said Georgie, who has been the fest’s sole programmer for 12 of the 17 years he’s been at WIFF, selecting films from festivals around the globe.

“If I get a no, I’m like, no problem, I’ll come back next week. When I see a film that’s good, then getting a no on it (from a distributor) it’s like, you gotta be kidding me, right? So I just went back and back and back to MUBI (the “Father Mother” distributor) and we got it. Middle of August, we got it locked up. It’s persistence but also relationship building with the distributors. We’ve got some pretty good relationships, with some back-and-forth and cajoling.”

In 2023, WIFF got another screening coup by landing Sofia Coppola’s music biopic, “Priscilla,” the story of Priscilla and Elvis Presley’s stormy marriage, starring Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi. It also didn’t play TIFF, and Georgie thinks there’s been an unofficial shakeup to the traditional awards season premiere pattern of Venice-Telluride-TIFF that is playing to Windsor’s advantage.

“What I sense is there’s no longer this cemented Venice-Telluride-TIFF thing. You actually can’t assume every (film) is going everywhere.”

He’s noticed that if films skip TIFF and head straight to the New York Film Festival near the start of October, it means that Windsor has a good chance of grabbing them for WIFF at the end of the month. It’s partly because New York has become more competitive for world premieres and partly because filmmakers, studios and distributors want to keep up the momentum for films during awards seasons.

“This works to our advantage. We’re late October, early November, so we’re attractive to films that need to still keep their profile up and build support. If you’re on an Oscar campaign, you need to keep going.

“And I think the other piece, too, when I’ve talked to different distributors, is that they’re aware that our audience is a warm audience and typically their film will go well. This worked very well for us with our special screening of ’American Fiction’ in 2023, for example.”

Georgie doesn’t play the game of competing for world premieres, although he’s happy to have them. He just wants to show the best films he can find. Three of the hot movies at WIFF ’25 arrive in Windsor with their reputations established elsewhere.

“Mile End Kicks,” a comedy set in Montreal’s indie music scene and the sophomore feature of Chandler Levack (“I Like Movies”), opens the fest Oct. 23, as it did TIFF in September.

Maxim Derevianko’s audacious “Ai Weiwei’s Turandot,” a reframing of Puccini’s classic as an essay on power and resistance that screened at Hot Docs last spring, will be celebrated as WIFF’s Centrepiece Film, complete with a live opera singer.

And Luca Guadagnino’s #MeToo provocation, “After the Hunt,” starring Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield, closes out the 11-day cinema celebration on Nov. 2, having screened at the Venice and New York fests.

WIFF also showcases homegrown work, handing out a $25,000 prize to one of 10 Canuck films competing for the annual WIFF Prize in Canadian Film, selected by a jury and awarded during the fest’s opening weekend.

This year’s WIFF Prize competitors are:

• Compulsive Liar 2, Émile Gaudreault

• The Cost Of Heaven, Mathieu Denis

• In Cold Light, Maxime Giroux

• Lovely Day, Philippe Falardeau

• Montreal, My Beautiful, Xiaodan He

• Peak Everything, Anne Émond

• The Pitch, Michèle Hozer

• Shamed, Matt Gallagher

• Two Women, Chloé Robichaud

• Where Souls Go, Brigitte Poupart

Georgie is proud of how much Windsor residents and visitors — many from nearby Detroit — love the fest and trust it to make worthy selections, even when it programs controversial titles like “Russians at War” in 2024 (which caused an uproar at TIFF but barely a murmur at WIFF) and this year’s “Shamed” (a documentary about a Windsor man who seeks to entrap pedophiles).

“In most cases, people are saying, if (WIFF) is showing this and they’ve decided it’s okay to show it, that’s all I need to know,” Georgie said.

“I think because WIFF was built here and it’s ours people take a sense of pride in it. There’s a lot of people I meet who love WIFF yet never go to it. They’ll even volunteer at it and not watch movies. Which always seems odd to me as a movie guy but I love what it says about community pride.”