Though it commits itself to screening films from countries as far flung as Spain, Indonesia and Hong Kong, every year it works hard to showcase cinema from Iran.
"It's simple math, really," Alan Franey, the director of the Vancouver International Film Festival, says of bringing Iranian films to the festival.
"You've got good films on one side, and then a good audience on another.
"We have a very large, well informed, well educated and well cultured Iranian community here in Vancouver, that I understand is second only in size to that of Los Angeles. I don't know if that's still true, but it's a very significant community here."
Every year sees a bevy of screenings of Iranian film, and every year sees filmmakers put themselves at risk of reprisal for making anything that contradicts their government's line.
This year alone, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, a co-director of the work This is Not a Film, was among six filmmakers arrested by the Iranian authorities on charges of espionage. His film, codirected with Jafar Panahi, was ironically about a filmmaker trying to put together a critical work of art while under house arrest.
Franey said there is always a risk for directors making films that contradict their government's message. a phenomenon that isn't particular to Iran.
"This particular phenomenon is all too familiar," he says. "It's not just Iran, there's a number of other countries where prominent filmmakers who have international reputations are at odds with the government that really wants to repress or contain independent voices.
"Beyond the human rights and the political issues, there's the question of esthetic freedom and the value of their work, which is significant."
The 2011 festival has seen Iranian films emerge among its most popular screenings.
They included A Separation, the story of a couple struggling over whether to stay behind in a country dominated by religious zealots, or else escape to the west, where they can give their children a chance at a better life.
The festival also screened Circumstance, the story of two young women carrying on a romantic relationship in Tehran's underground club scene whilst ducking the watchful gaze of one of their siblings, a reformed drug addict now working tangentially for the Iranian secret police.
Also screening at the festival was The Green Wave, a documentary that, with a mix of animations and on-camera interviews, has drawn some comparison to Waltz with Bashir, an Israeli film that screened at the 2008 festival.
Jan Kruger, a German-based producer of The Green Wave, doesn't eschew the comparison but he says it wasn't an inspiration for the flm, which aims to document by dramatizing blog posts, Twitter feeds and Facebook updates the 2009 Green Revolution, which saw Tehranis out in the streets to protest what they saw as a fraudulent election that put Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in office.
Kruger was with Green Wave's director, Ali Samadi
Ahadi, at the world premiere of an earlier film they made together in June 2009 when they heard about what was unfolding in Iran.
"We started following with iPhones the elections and the situation in Iran," he says.
"The whole team was actually shocked. We were there a couple of days at that festival, a team of Germans and Iranians, they were all devastated."
Ahadi told him that very day that he had to make a movie about the revolution, that it would be the only way of bringing his voice to his people.
"From the very beginning he said, I have to do this movie because I have to do it as a filmmaker," Kruger says.
The film recounts in brutal detail the attempts by the Iranian government to shut down its opposition. Well documented already in social media, tactics to shut down dissent included beating, raping and torturing dissidents. and, in one particularly disturbing incident, riding through the streets on motorcycles and slashing passersby with knives.
Kruger admits that there were attempts by people affiliated with the Iranian regime to stop the movie getting released, but he won't give too many specifics.
"I'm not supposed to talk about that totally freely," he says. "But I can say so much, yes, there were some, I think you say suppressions by the regime. Not to me personally, but to other people involved in this movie, and they keep their voices really really low on comments on that movie because they don't want to push it in their country."
