News

Published: 15 July 2024

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 Festival passes and single tickets are now on sale for this October’s Vintage Film Festival, with a fabulous program celebrating the Great Directors!

Follow this link to the Capitol Theatre’s events page, and click “On Screen”. Festival passes—which include all 13 of this year’s movies plus the Sunday lunchtime film talk—are still only $89, which represents a saving of nearly 50% over the cost of individual tickets! But single tickets to any of these great motion pictures are still just $12.50.

The directors represented in this year’s program are all “great” in so many different ways! They include actor-directors Buster Keaton and Orson Welles, screenwriter-directors John Huston and Preston Sturges, and producer-directors Robert Wise and Billy Wilder. They include Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and John Ford, three directors who exercised tremendous control over the look and feel of their movies. And they include two important foreign language filmmakers whom you may be encountering for the first time: Japanese “golden age” master Yasujirō Ozu, and French screenwriter-director Agnès Varda, whom Martin Scorsese called “one of the Gods of Cinema”.

The movies on this year’s program span more than half a century (from 1921 to 1974) and a range of genres: musical, suspense, comedy (including black comedy and screwball comedy), crime, melodrama, western and neo-noir. They include two silent films—Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924) and Lois Weber’s The Blot (1921)—which will be accompanied live on the piano by VFF favourite Jordan Klapman.

As usual, there’ll also be a Sunday lunchtime film talk. Journalist, author and award-winning lecturer Mark Kearney will tell us all about the movie career of London, Ontario's own Al Christie, a forgotten Hollywood film pioneer who made more than a thousand short comedy films and features over the course of a 30-year directing and producing career. (You can pre-order a tasty box lunch to enjoy during the presentation while you’re buying your Festival passes or your single tickets to the talk.)

And, also as usual, single tickets to any of the movies are free for anyone age 25 or under; and there’s free popcorn all weekend!

Click on this link to go to the Capitol Theatre’s events page (capitoltheatre.com/events) to buy Festival passes and single tickets for the 2024 Vintage Film Festival – Friday, October 18^th through Sunday, October 20^th – at the beautiful Capitol Theatre, 20 Queen Street, Port Hope!

Published: 17 January 2024

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This year's Vintage Film Festival celebrates Great Directors!

Alfred HitchcockWhat is it that makes a director a Great Director? Is it the critical or box office success of their movies? The number of Oscar or Golden Globe wins and nominations? Dominance in Hollywood? Election to auteur status by French film critics? The staying power and artistic significance of their body of work?

It can be any or all of the above, of course; and the thirteen directors we've chosen to highlight this year all check many or most of those boxes. Here are the directors, and the representative films of theirs which we plan to share:

• Robert Wise – West Side Story (1961) – starring Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer and Rita Moreno
• Billy Wilder – Some Like It Hot (1959) – starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe
• Alfred Hitchcock – The 39 Steps (1935) – starring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll
• Buster Keaton – Sherlock Jr. (1924) – starring Buster Keaton
• Yasujiro Ozu – Tokyo Story (1953) – starring Chishū Ryū and Setsuko Hara
• Orson Welles – Citizen Kane (1941) – starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten
• Roman Polanski – Chinatown (1974) – starring Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston
• Stanley Kubrick – Dr. Strangelove (1964) – starring Peter Sellers, George C. Scott and Sterling Hayden
• Agnès Varda – Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) – starring Corinne Marchand and Antoine Bourseiller
• Lois Weber – The Blot (1921) – starring Claire Windsor and Louis Calhern
• John Huston – Key Largo (1948) – starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Edward G. Robinson
• John Ford – The Searchers (1956) – starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter and Vera Miles
• Preston Sturges – The Palm Beach Story (1942) – starring Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrae and Rudy Vallee

Read more: Vintage Film Festival 2024 celebrates Great Directors

Published: 27 November 2023

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To mark its 30th anniversary, the Vintage Film Festival worked with its friends at Two Blue Shirts Productions to produce a short video documentary that surveys the Festival’s 30-year history, and the events that led up to its establishment. The story is told through interviews with past and present VFF organizers, and illustrated by a wealth of images from the Festival’s first 29 years, and before. We’re very pleased with the result: please join us in enjoying it!

Published: 03 October 2023

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At the recent Lang Pioneer Village Museum Apple Fest, Vintage Film Festival representatives were there and had a draw for 2 full Weekend Passes to the 2023 Festival. 

We have a winner - Mr. Dick Winters.

Lang Pioneer Village Museum Web site.