One of my most strangely cherished MIFF traditions doesn't actually have anything to do with MIFF as such. It has to do with keeping up with my normal viewing of new theatrical releases.
Because I don't want to entirely fall behind on what's actually in cinemas for the festival's 17-day run, I almost always try to go to one double feature that is a MIFF movie and a non-MIFF movie.
It's a tradition that dates all the way back to 2016, the first year I went to more than just a handful of MIFF movies. I paired Embrace of the Serpent with the MIFF movie Certain Women on July 31st that year. In subsequent years, my non-MIFF double feature halves have included The Dark Tower (2017), Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018), Ophelia (2019), skip a couple COVID years and a third year when I was out of the country during MIFF, Asteroid City (2023), It Ends With Us (2024), Alien: Romulus (2024) and Weapons (2025). So I haven't missed an eligible year in the ten years I've been doing it, and even had an unintentional bonus viewing in 2024, when I had to cram in a viewing of It Ends With Us in order to fulfill our obligation to review it. My critic attended an advanced screening, but then said he didn't know what he'd write about it.
My original schedule for this year did not entail such a double feature, a grievous oversight in retrospect. I think it was in the interest of consolidating my MIFF screenings to result in fewer total days out of the house. But then I cancelled Tuesday night's viewing of Mile End Kicks in order to review it as part of my MIFF preview -- it was already available on my U.S. iTunes -- which opened up a spot on Tuesday before my expected MIFF viewing of Mark Jenkin's Rose of Nevada at 9 p.m.
How to fill this spot was something I went back and forth on for the few days leading up to it. I really wanted to see Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which would have been kind of an echo of MIFF 2024 when I watched I Saw the TV Glow as part of the festival. But another critic already reviewed this, so my editor's brain had me thinking about The End of Oak Street, which does not yet have a review. The latter, though, did not time up very well with the start of Rose of Nevada. I'd have to leave work early to get to a 4:30 showing, and then I would have more than two hours of downtime before Nevada -- not enough to get to another movie, but too much for just having dinner. Remembering my aimless downtime from the start of the festival, I opted for the perfectly timed 6 p.m. Camp Miasma.
Except it did not opt for me. After dinner at my favorite CBD Indian restaurant, I got to Cinema Kino, a usual MIFF venue that I otherwise wouldn't be attending this year, at about 10 to 6, only to find that the movie was sold out. If you were to ask me the last time I rocked up to a movie only to find no tickets available, I don't even know that I'd be able to produce an answer. I have to wonder if the general enthusiasm around MIFF was causing an uptick in other ticket sales during the same period, because Camp Miasma had already been out for ten days at this point. Only The Odyssey still sells out after ten days, and only in its more unique venues like IMAX and 70 mm.
For a second I thought about pivoting to One Night Only, but it didn't start for another full hour, and would almost certainly prevent me from getting to Rose of Nevada on time. The Invite matched up almost perfectly, but I've already seen that, and didn't want a second viewing just to kill time, even though I loved it.
But that was a lot of time to kill. Nearly three hours now. I had to do something.
I started walking in the direction of the other CBD theater that takes my critics card, the Village at Crown Casino, for a One Night Only showing that also started at 6. But I had to get real with myself. It would take me almost a half-hour to walk there, and even if I lined up with public transportation just perfectly, at least 20 minutes by that route. Even with the extended ads and trailers that play at Village, I wouldn't get there on time.
I came to this realization right in front of ACMI, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, which is also a MIFF venue. So I decided to see what was playing there.
Lo and behold, a 6:45 showing of a documentary called Joybubbles was not sold out. And given the movie's scant 79-minute running time, it was no threat to the start of Rose of Nevada.
So hence arose my first-ever spontaneous MIFF purchase. The $31.50 price made me balk for half a second, but the opportunity for an unplanned 12th movie in my 11-movie 2026 schedule was too good to pass up, especially as a MIFF first. And you can't put a price on killing time.
Plus there's something beautiful about seeing a movie you didn't choose for yourself. It broadens your horizons and can lead to unexpected loves.
There was only one challenge about Joybubbles, though: It had audio description for the blind.
In the past I've vaguely noticed that such screenings exist at MIFF, but never bought a ticket to one, even accidentally. And it more than made sense in the context of this particular film.
See, Joybubbles is about a man of the same name, a blind man who changed his name, legally, to Joybubbles. Relying on his other senses to compensate for his lack of sight, as a boy in the 1950s he became very interested in telephones -- how they worked, and how they could allow him to connect with others. His perfect pitch whistling allowed him to whistle the tones necessary to call long distance for free, and it even earned him the attention of the police, including an arrest and trial. Later he managed to parlay this into a career in telecom.
I'm not sure if we had any actual blind people in our audience, but if we did, they were certainly well served by the accompanying audio description, which it is safe to say was a totally new experience for the rest of us. You could hear titters throughout the crowd as the movie started and the man providing the commentary track would describe even the production company logos on screen. Those of us who weren't laughing probably were thinking instead: "This is going to be a long 79 minutes."
You do get used to it, but it's quite odd. Example of what it was like: "A man walks down the sidewalk, running his hands through the plants along the side. Close-up of that man."
Some of this was quite funny in and of itself. It requires this close to making actual judgments about what was appearing on screen. At one point, the commentary was something along the lines of "White boys are on telephones," and this was particularly funny because the commentator, or at least the person who wrote the commentary, had felt that the race of the boys was relevant in this case. We all laughed because in that moment we detected that there was a sense of privilege about what was being described. The commentator sounded like he might be Black, which might have made it a little funnier.
Fortunately, any time someone was talking, there was no commentary. So that meant that some of the images went undescribed, if they conflicted directly with spoken dialogue. But there was never any actual silence in the film, which is a strange phenomenon. The lack of someone speaking would allow the commentator not only to fill the space, but also possibly to catch us up on images that might have gone by a few moments earlier while someone was speaking.
And then there were the things that were sort of hard to describe. Even though we had stopped laughing purely because of the novelty of it, we did laugh sometimes if the particular commentary taxed a person's descriptive abilities, such as a visual sequence that accompanies Joybubbles' experimentation with psychedelic drugs. I won't try to recreate the language used, but it was an attempt to describe shapes on screen, at one point comparing them to a lava lamp.
I'm glad I did get used to it, because the movie itself was the first of MIFF to receive four stars from me on Letterboxd. Usually that's not an issue with MIFF, which almost always puts at least one movie in my top ten for the year. (Last year it was two.) But even my previous favorite, The Fox, only received a favorable 3.5 stars from me, which I decided I could not quite nudge up to four. Anyway, needless to say I'm glad I saw Joybubbles, and got to know the unique Joybubbles.
Rose of Nevada, unfortunately, made me wish I'd prioritized seeing the non-MIFF movie in my double feature and not worried about the MIFF movie.
The director, Mark Jenkin, made a movie a couple years ago called Enys Men. It's a sort of nautical horror movie about a woman alone -- or at least we think she's alone -- on an island off the coast of England. It looks like it was made in the 1970s, as the vibe you'd get most from it is something like the original The Wicker Man. I'm not going to say it was an easy film to watch and I have mixed feelings about it, but the vibe was mostly positive, and it identified Jenkin as filmmaker whose next movie I wanted to see.
This one is a sort of leveling up for Jenkin, I suppose, as it features two actors you may know: George MacKay and Callum Turner. And I suppose it is technically more accessible than Enys Men, while also remaining in that same genre of nautical horror that looks like it was made in the 1970s.
But my God was this movie slow and boring.
Just to give you a general plot overview, since I know this piece is running pretty long. MacKay and Turner play the crew of a Cornish fishing vessel, but this is no ordinary fishing vessel. Rose of Nevada actually went missing at sea some 30 years ago, and it has mysteriously shown up again, docked and ready to go, even with 30 years of rust. The story involves a reckoning with that lost vessel 30 years ago, which traumatized the local village and resulted in the eventual suicide of one of its surviving crew. Expect the supernatural and possibly even ... time travel?
I've just made the movie sound a lot more interesting than it actually is. Certainly Jenkin's style is slow and gradual and lacking a desire to give its audience definitive exposition, and I'm usually game for such an approach. But I needed this narrative to be a lot more propulsive, and when it does go for "blow your mind" moments, for my mind to be a lot more blown.
I have to acknowledge that discomfort could have factored into my experience. This was my third and I believe final screening at my favorite MIFF venue, the Capitol. But I ended up in a row that had a wood barrier cutting us off at the knees, which is a lot less forgiving than a row of seats. Fortunately there was no one seated to my left, but even with that, I still couldn't get my legs in a position that I could maintain for more than about three minutes before needing to shift again. The only real relief came when the guy to my right also moved seats, presumably for reasons of discomfort as well. This allowed me to cross my legs into the space he had been, and only then, with about 30 minutes remaining in the movie, did I finally achieve some semblance of comfort.
If I'm really into a movie, my discomfort becomes just dull background noise. But if the movie is slow and largely has no identifiable momentum toward a clear narrative climax, it can consume me.
Okay down to my final two MIFF nights, with an ambitious triple feature this Friday followed by one final film on Sunday.
