Cedar Woman is a prayer in a long line of prayers. It is sx̌ʷəx̌ʷəy̓em̓, a Coast Salish story of ancestral resilience and hope, honouring our relationship with these lands and a legacy of matriarchs spanning all the way back to a cedar tree. Through song, dance, and ceremony, Tasha Faye Evans and her ensemble call upon Cedar Woman, one of our first grandmothers who faced The Great Flood with fierce love. In this collective vision of hope for the future, we remember our sacred responsibility to all our relations and protecting what we know from the depth of our soul to be sacred.

VIFF strives to engage and empower communities, encourage dialogue, educate, and champion local artists.

Through decades of experience and inspired program development, VIFF has evolved into an acclaimed annual festival, a premier arthouse cinema, and now the home to the Institute for the Moving Image.

With a complex and impactful festival and year-round program that boasts over 1,500 annual screenings and events, VIFF has become the most prolific and engaging cinematic entity in the region, connecting audiences to bold storytelling while advancing the art and industry of the moving image.

A body in the hot tub. A chemist with no pulse and a museum full of people who all claim they were elsewhere when poor Dr. Distillation took his final soak.

Murder? Or just a bad case of the cramps?

The guests become the suspects, sleuths and stars in 90 minutes of laugh-out-loud, fast-paced intrigue. Six people chosen from the attendees will become the suspects—the heroes of the night.

Everyone else forms teams of junior detectives who grill suspects, compare notes and dig deeper… Doug Manure smells a little off. Fanny Flapper, the grieving widow, is crying a little too large. Jane Frame, the safari adventuress, might be eyeing bigger game. Nana, the nanny, resents identical twins Atom and Molecule Distillation, who finish each other’s alibis a little too smoothly. One of them is the killer hiding in plain sight.

Hit the clue table for the autopsy report, run theories by the senior detectives, and sort red herrings from real evidence—and solve it before tea-time!