With big shoes to fill, taking over for PuSh Festival founder Norman Armour who unfortunately passed away late last year, Indigenous scholar and storyteller Jarrett Martineau has planned five unforgettable shows for 2024. The programme includes a two-time Polaris Music Prize winner, a secretive film from an Oscar-winning director, an iconic nonagenarian, and a regenerative documentary on a famously reclusive musical legend.

Primarily interested in what he calls “intergenerational continuity, conversation and dialogue,” Martineau seeks to inspire audiences to ponder questions about how archival work and pieces that become part of a cultural consciousness, passed down through generations, allow stories to live on forever. He has also been inspired by successful blending of artistic disciplines that he’s recently seen at Montreal’s MUTEK Festival.

“They’re pushing beyond the static arms of what it means to present a conventional festival,” he says of MUTEK. “For the VIFF Live series in particular, there’s a real focus on the experiential part of it. What I was thinking about was artists who are creating something that’s more of a different experience than just a regular concert or a regular film screening.”

We caught up with Martineau below to chat about why each of the shows he curated this year is a can’t-miss experience. 

Elisapie – Uvattini

With a title meaning “home” in her native Inuktitut, Elisapie melds poetry, local footage, narration and video projection together with her music to paint the picture of her hometown of Salluit, Quebec.

“Elisapie has a background as a filmmaker, and historically there have been some visual elements in some of her presentation before, but this is the first time that she’s built a custom, fully multimedia show,” Martineau says. “It incorporates a record that she just won the Juno for, it’s called Inuktitut, which basically takes a bunch of music from her childhood – super familiar stuff, I think there’s Cyndi Lauper, Metallica, Led Zeppelin – all done in her language. She’s interweaving the songs with stories from her homeland with the cinematic element. It’s kind of a whole cohesive exploration of her life and childhood and cultural upbringing and context. They don’t have clients to tour it very extensively, so I think there’s only ever going to be eight to 10 performances of that show, and we’re lucky enough to get one of them.”

Sept. 28 at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, 8PM | Tickets& Info

Eno – with a Q&A with director Gary Hustwit

Dubbed as “the world’s first generative documentary,” just as you might expect from Brian Eno, the film’s subject didn’t agree to anything that would resemble a typical music documentary. Instead, drawing from Eno’s extensive personal archive and the assistance of AI technology, Hustwit will create a unique film live for each screening. 

“I actually had a chance to see a version of it at MUTEK. As was repeated clearly to me by the director, that version is not to be repeated again,” Martineau says. “What I find fascinating in terms of the approach, and I think sometimes this stuff can get a little bit lost in the technological fanfare, is, does it still hold up as a good viewing experience? It’s not leaving it entirely to the AI to make the creation, they basically built a playable version of their software that allows him to do these live cuts and live renderings from this insane archive of stuff that Eno gave to Hustwit. It’s this meeting of the hands-on directorial voice and authorial opinion set against what’s happening on the algorithm side, and I think that’s really interesting.”

Sept. 29 at the Vancouver Playhouse, 6pm | Tickets & Info

GIFT – A Film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi x Live Score by Eiko Ishibashi

A companion piece to the Japanese auteur’s 2023 film Evil Does Not Exist, composer Eiko Ishibashi will play a live score set to a reworked, new story compiled of shots from the parent film – one that’s instructed to never be shown without live accompaniment.

“I love Hamaguchi’s work, and I’ve been super fascinated by this collaboration,” Martineau says. “Ishibashi was like, ‘Hey, Ryusuke, can you make a filmic thing for me that I can do a live performance with?’ Rather than creating something like that he hadn’t shot yet, he decided to take the cinematic archive and recut the cinematic content for the film in a totally non-linear and new way, and basically gifted her with this new revised version of the film that she’s created this live performance score with. This is not a film that will be presented in any other context, and having listened to the composition, I think it’s going to be a super interesting performance, especially if you have a good baseline for understanding the cinematic world of Hamaguchi.”

Oct. 1 at the Rio Theatre, 7pm | Tickets & Info

William Basinski – Arcadia Archive

Similarly to the performances it sits alongside at VIFF, the LA-based ambient and avant-garde composer’s latest tour is based around archives – he will set his earlier recordings to visual components crafted by longtime creative and life partner James Elaine. 

“The show draws on a bunch of archival recordings he made at the Loft in Brooklyn called Arcadia, so the tour that’s followed now is drawing from that work, and he has an interesting long-standing presence of visual component to his musical performances,” Martineau says. “We were initially looking at doing a whole package of short films that James Elaine has made and Basinski has soundtracked, but after talking with Basinski about what he’d be interested in doing for VIFF Live, Elaine is creating basically a whole new video piece that will accompany his performance of material from this Arcadia archive. It’s all analog, real-time manipulation of tape loops using all of his assorted old tech gear, which is the bread and butter of the Basinski experience, but all set in dialog and interaction with this video work by Elaine, which will be debuted here.” 

Oct. 2 at the Rio Theatre, 8pm | Tickets & Info

Jeremy Dutcher & Alanis Obomsawin

Fresh off his history-making second Polaris Music Prize win, Jeremy Dutcher teams up with one of Canada’s most prolific documentarians – who is set to perform her cult classic 1980s collection of musical work, Bush Lady, at age 92. 

“Most people, if they know (Alanis) Obomsawin and know her work, they know her as a filmmaker. But as I’ve learned from following her career and getting to know her a little bit over the years, she really started out in music in the emergent folk scene in the ‘60s,” Martineau says. “She has only ever done three or four performances of this music, maybe ever, so the fact that she said yes is pretty incredible. I’ve been asking her to do a music performance for a long time. There was a big retrospective of her work at the Vancouver Art Gallery last year, and I thought that would be a great occasion to be able to bring her out to do a music performance, but she wasn’t feeling confident and ready to do a music show then. She is this year.” 

“I wanted to carry forward this idea of this new intergenerational dialog and conversation. So on the one hand, you have Obomsawin drawing on this material that she created in the 80s, and you have an artist like Jeremy Dutcher, who obviously is pretty well-known now to a lot of Canadians, given the critical acclaim that he’s had. What’s interesting about Dutcher’s work is that there’s a similar navigation and question around how you relate to these stories and songs and histories from your nation and from your community. They have a lot of mutual admiration and respect, which is part of the reason we decided to bring them together for this performance. I have not been promising anybody that they’re going to do anything together, because Obomsawin wants to focus on her set and Dutcher on his, but who knows!

Oct. 4 at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, 8pm | Tickets & Info