By Victor Fanucchi

Flying to the Victoria International Film & Video Festival (VIFVF) on a turbulence-bucking, 37-seat propeller plane, passing over lush green islands of temperate rain forest, I'm thinking of Fitzcarraldo and the opera house in the jungle. What kind of film festival would I find in a British Columbia frontier town, on an island reachable only by little prop planes and long-distance ferries? As it turns out, Victoria is a popular tourist destination during the summer and there are all sorts of cosmopolitan amenities – microbrews, day spas, peeler bars ("strip joints" in local parlance). Nevertheless, Victoria's breathtaking, domed capital building – worthy of a major European country – seems out of proportion for the city in which it sits, suggesting a visionary, "build it and they will come" optimism.

The organizers have been growing the VIFVF for the past five years with the intention of making it an international event no longer overshadowed by Vancouver. As Victoria is to Vancouver, so Canada is to the U.S., and it is the festival's mission to bring Victorian and Canadian films out of obscurity. The organizers did an excellent job of culling and presenting the best Canadian films from last year's festival circuit, such as Song Catcher, The Law of Enclosures, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, Century Hotel, Un Crabe Dans la Tete, Mile Zero, Lunch with Charles, Turning Paige and the documentaries Lilith On Top and Obaachan's Garden. The Award for Best Canadian Film went to Carl Bessai's LOLA, a psychological portrait of a woman consumed by a crisis of identity.

Winner of the Audience Award was The Business of Fancy Dancing, the directorial debut from Sherman Alexie (writer, Smoke Signals). The film asks what is success and what is selling out for a Native American writer who capitalizes on his tribe's storytelling heritage. The award for Best Feature Film went to Five Years by U.S. director Brett Wagner, a film about a recovering substance abuser, fresh out of prison, and his seemingly successful older brother who takes him in to keep an eye on him. Dysfunctional family dramas were prevalent in the festival's programming.

L.A.-based Canadian David Birdsell won for Best Short Film with the hilarious and disturbing Bad Animals. You've never seen a chicken more menacing. Another entertaining short was Christy Garland's Dual Citizen, about a Canadian retiree in Florida whose patriotic neighbors drive him to knee-jerk Canadian nationalism on the 4th of July. Most impressive was Virgil Widrich's Oscar-nominated Copy Shop, a visually, conceptually and technically stunning short film – each frame's smudgy, black-and-white image a photocopy of a blown-up frame of film.

The western Canadian premiere of Mr. In-Between was disappointing. In his directorial debut, cinematographer Paul Sarossy (The Sweet Hereafter) conjures a cool-looking atmosphere for what is essentially a British gangster film with existential pretensions. An excellent brooding performance from Andrew Howard almost lifts the film's sadistic killer protagonist to the level of existential anti-hero, but in the end the script fumbles away any such possibility.

Gabriel Fleming was on hand for the Canadian premiere of his DV feature, One Thousand Years. In a San Francisco counter-culture setting where the guide posts for romantic relationships are gone, Maria falls for a guy whose signals she can't decipher, even while she herself sends mixed signals to her possibly lesbian best friend. Intelligent, subtle and intimate, Fleming's depiction of life and love in turn-of-the-millennium San Francisco is the genuine article.

As part of Victoria's plan to focus on a different foreign country each year, the festival featured four films from Austria, a country chosen partly because its film industry is generally overshadowed by Germany's. Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher and Florian Flicker's Hold-Up were joined by two North American premieres: the highly entertaining Come, Sweet Death, Wolfgang Murnberger's good-naturedly nihilistic farce set in the world of ambulance driver burn-outs, and Everyman's Feast, a visually ambitious but meandering film from Fritz Lehner that retells a Faustian morality play. Klaus Maria Brandauer plays Jan Jedermann, a fashion designer who strikes a deal with Death so that he might live to see his greatest desire fulfilled – moving beyond the fashion backwater of Vienna to make it big in Paris.