A volunteer pass can also ease the way into the hard-to-get-into movies, such as the documentary The Union: The Business Behind Getting High, a detailed outline of B.C.’s marijuana industry, from growers and clippers to pharmaceutical companies.

My recent foray into Oscar-, bafta- and every-other-award-nominated films has left me with “movie glow,” that special feeling you have after watching a particularly good film. You are giddy. You can fly. The dvds that I picked up were Volver (Pedro Almodóvar) and Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro).

My recent foray into Oscar-, bafta- and every-other-award-nominated films has left me with “movie glow,” that special feeling you have after watching a particularly good film. You are giddy. You can fly. The dvds that I picked up were Volver (Pedro Almodóvar) and Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro).

Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film Celine and Julie Go Boating (British Film Institute dvd) is set in a Paris that is half Wonderland, half real, a Paris in which events unfold according to the same dream-like logic that astonished Alice, and that entrances readers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Remember those student days when, in preparation for your final exam, you’d optimistically sit through a movie version as a substitute for the book itself?

Mathieu Kassovitz was just twenty-eight years old when he made La Haine (Criterion dvd), a 1995 film released in black and white and set in les banlieues, the racially volatile suburbs that surround Paris like an explosive vest.

Forbidden Lie$ tells the story of Norma Khouri, who shot to fame when her book, Forbidden Love, became a bestseller. The book claimed to tell the story of Khouri’s best friend, who was murdered by her own family because she dated a man of a different religion. Readers and members of the media around the world joined a campaign against the practice of honour killings in Jordan and other countries. The only problem was that Khouri’s book was a fake—a fact that came to light after a few Jordanian journalists pointed out numerous factual errors in the story.

Forever is a Dutch film made by the experienced documentarian Heddy Honigmann. Its subject is Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris but its scope includes life and death, history and memory, art and beauty.

This year’s winner of the People’s Choice Award for Most Popular International Film was Persepolis, a mostly black-and-white animated film adapted from the graphic memoir by Marjane Satrapi, who documents her childhood in Iran, first living under the Shah and then under fundamentalist Islam.

The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence is a classic Canadian novel, and nothing short of a great film would do it justice. Kari Skogland's film is a subtle meditation on Prairie social life and taboos in the mid-twentieth century. It’s also a complex and funny story about the difficult reversal of roles when parents need to be cared for by their grown children.