Sleeping Sickness ... drifts in an eerie suspension, at once beautifully attentive to mood, place, and what we might call the climate of people's souls, yet holding the press of story and theme at arm's-length. The setting is Africa, where director Ulrich Köhler spent much of his childhood.

A couple of years ago, U.S. audiences were riveted by Red Riding Trilogy, a production for Britain's Channel Four exploring a history of crime, of both the organized and the darkly obsessive varieties, twisting its way through a community in the North of England over the span of a decade. The trilogy was a unified work pursuing a narrative involving a teeming cast of characters, yet each of the three feature-length components was handled by a different director, and each director took his own, quite distinct stylistic approach to his part of the saga. Much the same is true for Dreileben, a 2011 triptych for German television that played this year's Vancouver International Film Festival......

By Kat Murphy

After getting up early and driving for three hours, perhaps the first film you watch in the Vancouver International Film Festival should not be Chantal Akerman's Almayer's Folly, all two-plus hours of it. Akerman is not the liveliest of directors; her style is lengthy staring, to frame a scene and contemplate it with lacerating intensity, as though seeing clearly could be an acid test for truth. Tired as I was, this provocative director's exploration of cultural, ethnic and gender powerplays held me captive for much of its long running time.