VIFF picks B.C. film Ari’s Theme to kick off 43rd festival

The 43rd edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival has gone local for its opening night film.

Set to kick off the festival, which runs Sept. 26 to Oct. 6 in theatres around Vancouver, is the documentary film Ari’s Theme from Vancouver directors Jeff Lee Petry and Nathan Drillot.

Ari’s Theme is one of 140 feature films (including more than 70 premieres) and 81 short films from 72 countries that make up the program for this year’s VIFF.

“I think it’s incredibly deep,” said Curtis Woloschuk, director of programming for VIFF, about this year’s festival. “On a lot of evenings there are difficult choices for people to make between which films they are going to see.”

Ari’s Theme, which will also screen on Sept. 28, 1:30 p.m. at the VIFF Centre — Vancity Theatre, centres on Victoria’s Ari Kinarthy, who lives with spinal muscular atrophy, as he sets out to create music that will capture his life.

While it will tug at your heartstrings, at its core, the film is about perseverance and the creative experience.

“We very purposefully or mindfully approached this film as this is a film about an artist with a disability, not a disability film,” said Petry.

The veteran documentary-makers reached out to Kinarthy after reading about him in a local magazine. Once they spoke to Kinarthy, it was clear there was more to the story. What they discovered was that Kinarthy was creating music as a way to leave his mark.

Kinarthy, who creates his music using a computer, says this in the film: “(SMA) will shorten my time here, I know this. But what actually scares me is what happens to my memories when I am gone? If they just disappear? I want to leave behind a legacy, a capsule of my life. And most importantly, memories through music.”

Now 32, Kinarthy traces his desire to create a legacy project back to his early 20s.

“As a kid, I was just very carefree. But as an adult, I started to notice my body starting to decline because it is a progressive disability,” said Kinarthy, who really locked into music when he started musical therapy at age 16. “I guess I started to get more and more worried about what I would leave behind.”

While the film, which is slated to air on TELUS originals online platform in 2025,  is uplifting and inspiring, there are tough moments where viewers see the adult composer confronting childhood memories.

“I did feel sometimes a bit uneasy looking back at the memories and putting myself back there,” said Kinarthy, adding that revisiting the time pneumonia almost took his life at age 13 was very difficult. “I had to really put myself back into the fear of that experience and leaning on that fear is how I created the really tense sounds for that scene.”

For the most part, the music in the film was created as the filmmakers and Kinarthy had conversations about his life and the memories that would be highlighted.

“After talking to Ari we kind of went to our cave and (Nathan) and I talked about it a lot,” said Petry. “The issue of Ari’s mortality became a factor and then we kind of shaped it around that and then we came back to Ari.

“A lot of times it was this sort of folding back and forth in on ourselves to see who would influence who. Ari would tell us these great stories and we would parse out what part of that story we felt was interesting, from a cinematic point of view or how that could fit within the greater story. We would write scripts. Ari would write music. We would write more scripts. Ari would write more music.”

The two-year process of making the film was an emotional journey for Kinarthy, who was tentative and guarded when the project began.

“It wasn’t the easiest thing for me to open up,” said Kinarthy.

Petry explained Kinarthy’s reticence proved beneficial for the film’s narrative arc.

“I think it would have turned out differently if he would have just opened up right away. It maybe wouldn’t have had the journey that it has in the film,” said Petry. “A lot of the music that got written off the top, or the very beginning, was like the heroic stuff: The things that I think of myself, or I like to think of myself, and the second half of the film was like, ‘Oh, this is how I feel.’ ”

Kinarthy is understandably thrilled that Ari’s Theme, which premiered at Toronto’s Hot Docs to much acclaim last spring, has been selected to open this year’s VIFF. And to make that night even more magical and musical, VIFF is bringing in eight members of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra to live-score select passages within the film.

“It’s literally a dream come true. I’ve wanted my music to be played by an orchestra most of my life, so this is really a dream come true,” said Kinarthy.

Ari’s Theme is just one of the many strong offerings that have been selected for VIFF’s special presentations program. The program includes American Sean Baker’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner Anora and the Cannes Grand Prix winner All We Imagine as Light, from Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia.

Also under the special presentations banner is The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal. The four-part documentary series is from director, and brother of the late Hip frontman Gord Downie, Mike Downie.

Downie and the surviving The Tragically Hip members Rob Baker, Johnny Fay, Paul Langlois and Gord Sinclair will be at the Vancouver Playhouse on Sept. 28 at 6 p.m. for a screening of the first two episodes of the series that will be on the Prime Video streaming service starting Sept. 20

Pulling from archival and personal footage that includes previously unseen performances, unreleased music and candid conversations, the series is a serious deep-dive — conflicts and all — into the four decades of the much beloved Canadian band of brothers.

“When you see the footage of the concerts with The Hip just that communal experience that they created for people and people feel like they belonged to something. It feels like every one of those concerts was a festival unto its own,” said Woloschuk. “As we think about cinema as a communal experience, there’s just a natural parallel just in terms of the atmosphere they created with those shows as well.”

The festival, while rich in daily screenings, also offers dozens of filmmaker Q&As, talks with top creatives, live performances, and artist and industry development programs and parties during its run.

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