#VanPoli | The Cruel and Corrupt Administration of Ken Sim, and His ABC Vancouver Colleagues

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Mayor Ken Sim’s majority ABC Vancouver administration at Vancouver City Hall is the most morally bankrupt and cruelest civic administration the woeful citizens of Vancouver have witnessed in the past 60 years, and perhaps even longer than that.

The Vancouver Mayor with the worst attendance record at Vancouver City Hall, and on the Metro Vancouver Board, in our city’s history, who in his first three years as Mayor, took off right after his early November 2022 Inauguration for Qatar, where he watched the World Cup with his well-heeled billonaire backers and friends, who when he returned to Vancouver three weeks later, decided to “take control”, coming up with one hare-brained (and, dare we say, illegal) scheme after another.

No wonder current Vancouver Mayoral aspirant, Kareem Allam — the mastermind of ABC Vancouver’s massive majority victory in 2022, who went on to become Mayor Ken Sim’s Chief of Staff, and now strongest opponent — lasted only 34 miserably short days in his post, so cruel and off-putting, so mean-spirited and just plain idiotic Ken Sim proved to be that Allam simply couldn’t take it anymore, and resigned, his heart broken, and his spirit wounded.

Allam drew up ABC’s Vancouver’s platform.

Yes, ABC Vancouver committed to removing the homeless from Hastings Street, early in their term of office. Allam was clear: no person living in a tent on Hastings Street would be “removed” without the permission of the individual, but would leave of their own volition when more than adequate housing had been found for the cruelly abused unhoused who had taken up residence on Hastings Street.

Kareem Allam’s plan was not dissimilar to that of the late Brenda Prosken, a senior official at BC Housing (and neighbour and friend of VanRamblings), achieved at Oppenheimer Park, or when Ms. Prosken died from cancer six months after being diagnosed with her terminal illness, BC Housing Vice-President, Stephanie Allen — COPE’s recent candidate to be Mayor — achieved at the Strathcona encampment.

A cruel Ken Sim had other ideas: bulldoze (literally, bulldoze) the unhoused on Hastings Street, send in Vancouver’s (reluctant) police force to “help” clear the street, which a cruel and heartless Ken Sim and his ABC Vancouver Councillor colleagues managed to do.

Kareem Allam was aghast, disheartened and disgusted at the cruelty and inhumanity of Mayor Ken Sim and Mr. Sim’s ABC Vancouver colleagues.

Chief of Staff Kareem Allam and Mayor Ken Sim Arguing During Mr. Allam’s last day at City Hall.

The final straw came on Monday, February 6, 2023, when Ken Sim called Mr. Allam into his office, where current ABC Vancouver Council candidate David Grewal was standing excitedly by the Mayor’s side.

Mayor Ken Sim told his Chief of Staff the following …

“Kareem, David and I have come up with the perfect way to ensure that over the next four years, businesses and homeowners in Vancouver will not have to pay one red cent in property taxes. We’re thrilled with the idea we’ve come up with.”

Here’s what Ken Sim and David Grewal came up with: Mayor Ken Sim was going to order the sale of the 100  of the 242 parks in Vancouver that are not officially designated as parks. Not only that, Mayor Sim proposed to sell off billions of dollars of property owned by the City to his friends, at cents on the dollar, properties that constitute our city’s Property Endowment Fund, created by Mayor Art Phillips in 1972, a fund that sustains to this day.

As Kareem Allam turned briefly away from Mayor Sim, and rolled his eyes, he then turned to face the Mayor, telling him …

“With all due respect, Mr. Mayor, the Vancouver Charter, and both provincial and federal legislation would prevent you from carrying out your plan to sell off the officially non-designated parks, many of which sit on provincial and federal Crown land, or have been gifted to the City under a long term contract to be kept in place as parks.

As for selling property lodged in the Property Endowment Fund, that is something you might consider, or re-consider. There would be a big hue and cry were you to attempt to sell off properties in the Property Endowment Fund to your friends. Legal challenges would likely follow, and the stories around your plan would dog your days for the next four years of your administration. I would strongly advise you against taking this precipitous, and potentially calamitous course of action.”

By the time, the Mayor’s Chief of Staff had completed making his statement to the Mayor, Ken Sim was livid, firing Mr. Allam on the spot. Thus, February 6, 2023 was Kareem Allam’s last day serving as Mayor Ken Sim’s Chief of Staff.

Ken Sim’s Cruelty. Where Does It End? Hint: It Doesn’t.
Ken Sim’s Vancouver: The Cruelest City Hall in a Generation — And Why He Must Go

There is a word that increasingly defines Ken Sim’s Vancouver.

It is not “better.”

It is not “inclusive.”

It is not “compassionate.”

It is not even “competent.”

It is cruel.

And as Vancouverites prepare to go to the polls on October 17, we should all ask ourselves a profoundly simple question:

Do we really want four more years of Ken’s Sim’s ABC Vancouver administration?

In the more than half-century since Mayor Tom “Terrific” Campbell presided over Vancouver City Hall, it is difficult to think of a civic administration that has so consistently demonstrated such disdain for people with the least power, such contempt for political opponents, such indifference toward vulnerable Vancouverites and such extraordinary self-regard as the Ken Sim–led ABC Vancouver administration.

Campbell was a different kind of Mayor. He was brash, confrontational and openly hostile to the counterculture of his day. His administration became infamous for its treatment of Vancouver’s hippies, culminating in the 1971 Gastown Riot, when mounted police moved against a peaceful smoke-in and dozens were arrested. Campbell also tried to suppress the Georgia Straight, and championed the destruction of neighbourhoods in the name of development.

His was a politics of confrontation.

Ken Sim’s is something more modern.

It is the politics of indifference.

And sometimes, indifference is every bit as cruel as confrontation.

As a First Order of Business Ken Sim Undercut the Interests of Workers

The first great moral statement of the Sim administration came almost immediately after ABC Vancouver took power.

It was not a new housing programme.

It was not an investment in poverty reduction.

It was not an expansion of social services.

It was the cancellation of Vancouver’s Livable Wage Programme.

The programme required companies supplying goods and services to the City to pay their workers a livable wage. At the time it was approximately $25.68 an hour; today, the comparable living-wage figure is roughly $27 to $28 an hour.

Think about that.

In one of the most expensive cities in Canada, an administration elected promising to make Vancouver “a better city” decided that workers employed by companies doing business with the City did not need to be paid a wage sufficient to live in the city in which they worked.

The decision was made without the kind of public consultation one might reasonably expect for a policy with direct consequences for low-wage workers. City records subsequently included residents writing to the Mayor that they were “infuriated and disgusted” by the decision to withdraw from being a living-wage employer.

That is not merely a budget decision.

It is a statement of values.

And then came the renters.

Half the city rents. Ken Sim shut their office.

Again, more than half of Vancouver’s residents are renters.

Yet one of the first things ABC Vancouver did was eliminate the City’s Renters Office — an office that provided renters with information about their rights, referrals to organizations capable of helping them and assistance navigating the City’s rental bylaws and permitting system.

In January 2023, ABC Councillors voted as a bloc to discontinue the office.

Yes, ABC promised that funding would be redirected to the Tenant Resource & Advisory Centre, and that TRAC would receive additional support and City-owned office space.

Surprise, surprise. Under Ken Sim, that did not happen. Renters were left high and dry by the Ken Sim-led ABC Vancouver administration.

But the larger political message was unmistakable.

The City’s own dedicated institutional resource for renters was expendable.

The people who rent — the 54% of Vancouverites who do not own the homes in which they live — would be told to find somewhere else to turn.

This is what structural cruelty looks like.

It doesn’t necessarily arrive with a fist.

Sometimes it arrives as a line item in a budget.

Sometimes it arrives as an office closure.

Sometimes it arrives as a decision made in a Council Chambers by people who will never have to worry about whether the next rent increase will force them out of their neighbourhood.

That was the argument made in VanRamblings’ August editorial, Cruelty vs. Kindness: The Moral Choice at the Heart of Vancouver Civic Politics.

Cruelty is not simply yelling at someone.

Cruelty can mean deliberately disregarding their well-being.

And when that disregard is embedded in government policy, thousands of people can suffer.

Then Came the Scandal of the Mayor’s Personal Gym

And while renters were losing a dedicated office at City Hall, Ken Sim found a rather different use for City Hall space.

A Committee Room used by civic Advisory Committees was converted into a personal gym for the Mayor.

When under the Vision Vancouver Gregor Roberston administration, then City Manager Dr. Penny — at a cost of more than $6 million — moved her office, which took up two-thirds of the third floor at City Hall, and moved her office to the newly-opened (at her outrageously expensive bequest) “renovated” fifth and six floors of City Hall, converting her old offices into a luxurious suite for the Mayor, replete with a large dining room, and the services of a chef and serving staff, not to mention a full suite with a luxurious bedroom, full spa bathroom, and comfortable living space with all of the amenities and latest hi-tech gadgetry.

Even so, living the life of Riley, a “Nothing is Too Good for Me” Mayor Ken Sim felt he needed additional space, converting a well-used Committee Room into a personal gym for himself.

At City Hall.

Converted for the personal use of the Mayor.

There is something almost breathtaking about the symbolism.

At a time when Vancouver faces a housing crisis, a homelessness crisis, an affordability crisis, a public-health crisis and a crisis of aging civic infrastructure, Ken Sim’s administration found space for the Mayor to work out.

That juxtaposition would be almost humorous if the consequences of this administration’s priorities weren’t so serious.

And Then There Is The Issue of Mayor Ken Sim Shotgunning Beer

Broadcaster and political commentator Jody Vance has gone on and on during the course of Rachael Segal’s Beyond a Ballot political podcast, where Ms. Vance, Ms. Segal and former Vision Vancouver City Councillor Andrea Reimer are broadcasting daily, commenting on the current Vancouver civic election.

Ms. Vance was present for what she calls Mayor “Ken Sim’s egregious error in judgment earlier in his term if office.”

At Khatsalano Days in the summer of 2023, in front of a family audience that included impressionable young children, Ken Sim appeared on stage and shotgunned a beer, more than one, actually.

Some people thought it was hilarious.

Others did not.

For many parents in the audience, the spectacle was less “mayoral leadership” than an extraordinary lapse in judgment.

And that matters because leadership is not merely about policy.

It is also about setting an example as a municipal leader.

The Mayor of Vancouver is not simply another guy at a neighbourhood beer garden.

He is the city’s principal elected representative.

The office carries responsibilities of conduct, decorum and judgment.

And when a Mayor appears to revel in behaviour that causes families in the audience to recoil, it tells us something about the office-holder’s understanding of the difference between being popular and being responsible.

The Case of The Disappearing Mayor Who Fails to Turn Up for Work

Then there is the extraordinary question of attendance.

Ken Sim’s relationship with the job of Mayor has often seemed remarkably casual.

For much of his first three years in office, VanRamblings observed, he was rarely seen participating meaningfully in Council debate. When he did attend, the Mayor was often dressed casually in a T-shirt and sweatpants and, critics argued, appeared to remain in Chambers only long enough to vote before leaving.

More consequentially, in January 2025 Sim announced that he would boycott Metro Vancouver meetings, declaring that the regional government was “broken.” Global News reported that his attendance at Metro Vancouver had already been sporadic, with Sim attending roughly one-quarter of meetings the previous year.

This is not an argument that a Mayor must attend every meeting under every circumstance.

It is an argument that showing up is part of the job.

Vancouver did not elect Ken Sim to be an occasional Mayor.

It elected him to govern.

And then the attacks began

There is something particularly disturbing about what happens when political disagreement becomes personal.

Ken Sim filed formal complaints against then-OneCity Councillor Christine Boyle, requiring her to spend time and resources defending herself against the Mayor’s allegations.

And then came Sean Orr.

This may be the ugliest episode of the entire ABC Vancouver story.

In February 2026, Mayor Ken Sim told Chinese-language media that COPE Councillor Sean Orr had been handing out illegal drugs on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside on Christmas Day.

The allegation was false.

It was subsequently revealed that ABC Councillor Lenny Zhou had repeated the allegation in a Chinese-language video, which was later removed, and Zhou apologized, saying his comments were based on incorrect information. CityNews subsequently reported that the information had originated with Mayor Sim himself.

Orr has said he was not even in Vancouver at the time but was visiting friends and family on the Sunshine Coast.

The political implications are enormous.

A Mayor accusing an elected City Councillor of distributing illegal drugs is not ordinary political criticism.

It is not a disagreement over zoning.

It is not an argument over homelessness.

It is not even a nasty election-season barb.

It is an attack on a person’s reputation.

And it was made publicly.

In Chinese-language media.

The consequences were serious enough that Orr subsequently filed a defamation lawsuit against Sim.

This is the Politics of Cruelty in its Purest Form

When you disagree with someone, debate them.

When you think they are wrong, defeat their arguments.

When you believe their policies are harmful, expose them.

But do not invent or repeat allegations that can destroy a person’s reputation.

Political opponents are not enemies.

They are fellow citizens entrusted by voters to represent them.

The Granville Street Bridge Tells the Whole Story

And then there is the issue that, more than any other, exposes the moral bankruptcy of the Sim administration’s priorities.

Suicide-prevention barriers on the Granville Street Bridge.

For years, Vancouver has known that Granville Bridge is a suicide hotspot.

Health professionals know it.

First responders know it.

The Crisis Centre knows it.

Families know it.

And City Hall knows it.

The evidence for physical barriers is overwhelming. Vancouver’s own documentation has cited research associating bridge barriers with a 93 per cent reduction in suicide deaths.

There is also Vancouver’s own experience.

Barriers were installed on the Burrard Street Bridge in 2017.

There have been no known suicide deaths from the Burrard Street Bridge since.

Similar barriers were installed on the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge in 2015.

Again, the evidence is striking.

Yet in March 2026, ABC Councillors voted to remove funding for Granville Bridge suicide-prevention barriers from the capital plan. VanRamblings subsequently documented that Vancouver had set aside $13.4 million for FIFA hospitality packages while the City continued to delay actual construction of the barriers.

Let us be absolutely clear.

The argument is not that FIFA is bad.

The argument is that a government that can find millions of dollars for international sporting hospitality ought to be able to find the political will and financial commitment necessary to protect people from dying at a known suicide hotspot.

Dr. Brandon Yau, Vancouver Coastal Health’s Medical Health Officer, described suicide deaths from the bridge as “preventable tragedies” and barriers as “critical, life-saving infrastructure.” Crisis Centre executive director Stacy Ashton has said, in substance, that the barriers work and save lives.

That is the moral test.

Not whether the project is convenient.

Not whether the Mayor gets good photographs.

Not whether FIFA executives are impressed.

Do we save lives?

A suicidal person standing on Granville Bridge does not care about FIFA.

Their family does not care about FIFA.

The police officers trying to talk them back from the edge do not care about FIFA.

The firefighters and paramedics who respond do not care about FIFA.

They care about whether that person lives.

And yet Ken Sim’s City Hall has demonstrated vastly greater urgency when the subject is a global sporting event.

That is not merely bad policy.

It is a question of values.

Ken Sim and ABC Vancouver Practice the Politics of Fear

And now, as the election approaches, ABC Vancouver has added another dimension to the politics of cruelty: fear.

The administration’s public-safety plebiscite, pushed through Council at a cost estimated at approximately $400,000 to $550,000, asks voters to weigh in on drug use and mental-health/addiction beds.

The questions are non-binding.

They do not themselves create a treatment bed.

They do not build a hospital.

They do not provide a mental-health worker.

They do not put a roof over anyone’s head.

They are, however, extraordinarily useful election-season political theatre.

The administration that had four years to govern is now asking voters whether they want the Mayor to govern.

That is not leadership.

That is campaigning.

What kind of city do we want?

This is the question VanRamblings posed in “Cruelty vs. Kindness.”

Politics is ultimately a moral choice.

A government can make life easier for people with less power.

Or it can make life harder.

It can expand dignity.

Or it can withdraw support.

It can build institutions that help renters.

Or close them.

It can protect low-wage workers.

Or abandon the living-wage standard.

It can protect people contemplating suicide.

Or delay.

It can disagree with political opponents.

Or attempt to destroy their reputations.

It can treat vulnerable people as human beings.

Or turn them into election props.

And it can govern.

Or campaign.

Ken Sim has shown Vancouver what his administration chooses.

Again and again.

And again.

This is why the comparison with Tom Campbell is not hyperbole.

Campbell’s Vancouver was an angry city.

Ken Sim’s Vancouver is increasingly an indifferent one.

Campbell fought the counterculture openly.

Sim’s administration too often appears to fight the people who have the least power to fight back.

Campbell’s police confronted the hippies of Gastown.

Sim’s political machine has made political capital out of the unhoused, the drug-dependent, renters, political opponents and people in crisis.

Campbell’s era was defined by confrontation.

Sim’s is defined by something colder:

the willingness to inflict pain, or simply not to care when pain is inflicted.

That is cruelty.

And cruelty should never be rewarded with another term in office.

Vancouver deserves better

The great lie of modern politics is that kindness is weakness.

It isn’t.

Kindness is recognizing that the renter facing eviction is not a statistic.

That the low-wage worker trying to live in Vancouver is not a disposable input in a procurement contract.

That the person standing on Granville Bridge is not a problem to be managed.

That a Councillor with whom you disagree is not your enemy.

That the unhoused person sleeping on a Vancouver sidewalk is still a human being.

That the people who disagree with you are still Vancouverites.

A Mayor’s job is not to punish those people.

It is to govern for them.

All of them.

The Ken Sim ABC Vancouver administration has had four years.

Four years is enough time to learn.

Enough time to correct course.

Enough time to demonstrate compassion.

Enough time to demonstrate leadership.

Instead, we have witnessed the dismantling of the Livable Wage Programme, the closing of the Renters Office, the attempted weakening of accountability mechanisms, the Mayor’s personal gym, the extraordinary conduct at Khatsalano Days, chronic questions about attendance and engagement, attacks on political opponents, the disgraceful Sean Orr episode, the abandonment of urgency on Granville Bridge suicide barriers, and an increasingly aggressive politics built around fear of the vulnerable.

There is a pattern here.

And patterns tell us more about governments than slogans ever will.

So, on October 17, Vancouverites have a choice.

Not merely between Ken Sim and another mayoral candidate.

Not merely between ABC Vancouver and another civic party.

We have a choice between two fundamentally different ideas of what government is supposed to be.

One says government exists to protect the vulnerable, strengthen communities, respect disagreement and reduce unnecessary suffering.

The other says government is about power, control, political advantage and winning the next election.

VanRamblings knows which Vancouver we want.

A Vancouver where government is measured not by the size of its FIFA hospitality budget, but by the number of people it helps.

A Vancouver where renters have a voice.

Where workers earn a living wage.

Where people in crisis are protected.

Where political opponents are debated rather than defamed.

Where the Mayor actually shows up.

Where City Hall belongs to the public — not to the Mayor’s gym.

And where kindness is not dismissed as weakness, but understood for what it really is:

the most basic responsibility of government.

Ken Sim has had his opportunity.

He has had four years.

He has shown Vancouver who he is and what kind of civic administration he has lead this past four years, and intends to lead for the next four years.

Now Vancouver gets to answer.

No more.

No more cruelty.

No more politics of division.

No more City Hall that turns its back on the people who need it most.

On October 17, Vancouver must turn the page.

Ken Sim must not be re-elected Mayor of Vancouver.

#VIFF2026 | Two More Oustanding, Must-See Films Screening at the 45th Annual Vancouver International Film Festival

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Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur

Minotaur: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Chilling Russian Masterpiece

There are filmmakers who make movies. And then there are filmmakers who seem to stare directly into the soul of a country and, with an almost unbearable patience, wait for its darkest secrets to reveal themselves.

Andrey Zvyagintsev is one of the latter.

With Minotaur, winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the Russian master has created another unmistakably political, bleak and methodical work — a film that holds you in its grip from beginning to end.

At first glance, Minotaur appears to be a domestic thriller.

Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), a wealthy logistics-company owner living in provincial Russia, is under mounting professional pressure as the war in Ukraine reaches into every corner of civilian life. Local authorities demand that he provide 14 employees for military service. Unwilling to sacrifice his existing workforce, Gleb recruits unsuspecting truck drivers with promises of lucrative employment, knowing full well that they will soon be sent to war.

At the same time, Gleb discovers — or believes he has discovered — that his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is having an affair. Suddenly, the pressures of business, marriage, family and war collide.

And that is where Zvyagintsev’s genius becomes apparent.

Because Minotaur is not really about choosing between a political thriller and an erotic thriller. It is about recognizing that, in a morally diseased society, there is no such choice. The personal is political. The political is personal. And, most damningly, we can never deal with one crisis at a time.

Mazurov is extraordinary as Gleb, a man whose outward confidence masks an almost bottomless moral vacancy. Lebedeva is equally remarkable as Galina, giving the film a quietly devastating emotional centre. Together they inhabit a marriage that feels less like a relationship than a sealed chamber in which privilege, resentment, desire and fear have been slowly accumulating for years.

Zvyagintsev’s filmmaking is icily exacting. His camera waits. And waits. And waits some more. Minotaur is morbidly humorous at times, but its humour only makes the surrounding dread more unsettling. Shot with extraordinary patience, the film allows latent anxieties to creep gradually to the surface.

The film’s midway turning point is especially bracing. What initially appears to be one more ugly consequence of Gleb’s private predicament suddenly becomes something much larger — an eruption of violence that propels the narrative forward while exposing the corruption at the heart of the Russian state.

This is an urgent film, yet remarkably restrained.

Searingly political yet controlled and understated, Minotaur is a denunciation of the Russian state that is never spelled out in so many words, but expressed through intricate layers of irony. Russia under Vladimir Putin is not merely criticized; it is rendered as an amoral ecosystem in which ordinary people have learned to accommodate corruption, violence and complicity.

Zvyagintsev had to make the film outside Russia. Unable to shoot in his homeland, he filmed in Latvia, using a Latvian town to stand in for provincial Russia. Given the film’s subject matter and its uncompromising portrait of Putin-era Russia, it is difficult to imagine the Kremlin permitting such a production to be made there.

The audacity of Minotaur lies in its oscillating sprawl.

Against the backdrop of a war that has blotted out almost everything else, Zvyagintsev somehow makes room for a bourgeois love triangle, corporate venality, family dysfunction, murder and the machinery of state violence.

The result is a thriller about corruption that becomes a thriller about corruption of the soul.

Zvyagintsev sets his own deliciously ink-black stamp on Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle, the 1969 erotic thriller on which the film is loosely based. Yet he deliberately flattens both the eroticism and the thrills for much of Minotaur, a carefully judged gambit that makes the eventual nudity and violence land with considerably greater force.

This is Zvyagintsev at his most devastating: patient, furious, darkly funny and morally clear.

Minotaur doesn’t roar.

It waits.

And then it strikes.

VanRamblings Grade: A. A quietly devastating and lacerating look inside Putin’s corrupt Russian state, told as a personal — yet still political —  story of betrayal.

There are two more scheduled screenings of Minotaur at VIFF 45, this upcoming Friday at 8:30 PM, at the Lindsay Family Stage at Granville Island.

And, Sunday October 11th, 2:30 PM, at the Vancouver Playhouse.

Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky

 

Sometimes you walk out of a movie knowing you have just seen a good film.

And sometimes you walk out knowing you have just seen a hit.

I Play Rocky is a hit.

Not merely a respectable little biographical drama about the making of Rocky, not simply another Hollywood movie about Hollywood, but the kind of genuine crowd-pleaser that sends audiences out of the theatre grinning, talking, arguing over their favourite scenes — and, inevitably, telling everyone they know that they absolutely have to see it.

Word of mouth is going to send I Play Rocky into the stratosphere!

Directed by Oscar-winner Peter Farrelly (Green Book), this wonderfully entertaining film tells the improbable story behind the making of Rocky: how a struggling young actor named Sylvester Stallone, repeatedly told no by Hollywood, refuses to surrender either his screenplay or his insistence that he play Rocky Balboa himself.

It is, in other words, the ultimate underdog story about the making of the ultimate underdog movie.

And Farrelly knows exactly what he has.

The brilliance of I Play Rocky is that we already know the ending. We know Rocky will get made. We know Stallone will become a star. We know the movie will become a cultural landmark. We know what is coming.

And yet Farrelly makes us care desperately about every seemingly impossible obstacle along the way.

Anthony Ippolito is sensational as Stallone. This is a career-defining performance — not an impersonation, but an extraordinarily charismatic recreation of a young man possessed by the belief that his life is waiting for him on the other side of one more locked door. Ippolito captures Stallone’s physicality, voice, vulnerability and sheer stubbornness with astonishing precision.

AnnaSophia Robb is superb as Sasha, Stallone’s girlfriend and eventual wife, giving the movie its emotional heartbeat. Sasha believes in him with all her heart, even when almost everyone else believes he is deluding himself. Robb brings warmth, intelligence and genuine emotional force to a role that could easily have been reduced to supportive-girlfriend shorthand.

Then there is Matt Dillon, almost unrecognizable as Stallone’s father, Frank Sr., whose crazed, unsupportive presence gives the film another layer of tension. Tracy Letts, meanwhile, is once again terrific as the kind of obstacle — half villain, half immovable force of Hollywood reality — that every great underdog movie requires.

And Canadian actor Stephan James as Carl Weathers? Fantastic.

There is palpable magic here.

I Play Rocky captures the chaos, setbacks and unlikely collaborations behind an independent production that somehow became one of the defining movies of the 20th century. But more importantly, it understands what made Rocky so beloved in the first place: hope, ingenuity, persistence and the almost irrational belief that you might just be able to change your life if you refuse to give up.

Stallone is a man battling homelessness, rejection and obscurity, a man who finds love and writes his way into a cultural phenomenon. The parallels are almost too perfect. Yet Farrelly never allows the story to become syrupy. There is a ton of wit and charm here, along with an infectious sense of movie-loving joy.

This is the feel-good film of the year.

And yes, I am going to go out on a limb: come January, when the Academy announces its Oscar nominations, don’t be surprised if I Play Rocky is sitting there with multiple nominations — Best Picture, perhaps Best Original Screenplay, potentially Best Director for Farrelly, and acting recognition for Robb, Dillon, Ippolito and James.

The film has that has that rare quality audiences recognize immediately.

It makes you feel good about movies.

Little wonder its November theatrical release is positioned to carry the film into the holiday season, when word of mouth can turn a sleeper into a phenomenon. The film already finished as first runner-up for the 2026 TIFF People’s Choice Award, an encouraging sign of exactly the audience affection it is likely to generate.

I Play Rocky is a resounding success — funny, touching, exuberant and enormously entertaining.

It doesn’t just tell us how Rocky was made.

It reminds us why we go to the movies in the first place.

And that, in a year desperately in need of a little cinematic optimism, may be the most wonderful thing of all.

VanRamblings Grade: A+. The feel good film of 2026 that is not a cheat, but a genuinely inspirational story that reminds us: we can create the conditions of our own lives.

There in one final screening of I Play Rocky, this upcoming Sunday, October 11th, 6:15 PM, at The Rio Theatre. You are going to want to arrive early.

#VIFF2026 | Two Outstanding Films That Took Cannes by Storm, Now Screening at VIFF

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Fjord

Fjord — A Moral Avalanche at the End of the World

There are films that win the Palme d’Or, and then there are films like Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, movies that seem almost preordained to carry the weight of such a prize.

This is filmmaking of extraordinary moral ambition: riveting, nuanced, cathartic and profoundly unsettling, a slow-burning epic that burrows beneath the skin until its questions become our questions, its anxieties our anxieties, its moral dilemmas impossible to shake.

Set in a remote Norwegian fjord, Fjord follows a devout Romanian Norwegian couple, Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, who relocate to a small community where their children form a friendship with the children of their neighbours. When adolescent Elia arrives at school bearing bruises, however, the community begins asking increasingly uncomfortable questions about the Gheorghius’ parenting, their religious beliefs and the boundaries between cultural difference and unacceptable behaviour.

And Mungiu — whose 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days remains one of the great Palme d’Or winners of the modern era — is having none of the easy answers.

Instead, Fjord becomes a gripping moral and social quandary, a film that refuses to tell us where sympathy should end and judgment begin. What constitutes good parenting? When does intervention become persecution? How much cultural difference can a liberal society accommodate before its commitment to tolerance begins colliding with its responsibility to protect children? And who gets to decide?

These are thorny questions, and Mungiu grapples with them with an almost unnerving patience.

Shot in icy widescreen compositions against the stark beauty — and terrifying avalanches — of Norwegian precipices, Fjord is a brilliant epic of landscape and conscience. The mountains are magnificent, but they are hardly comforting. They loom over the characters like indifferent gods while Mungiu meticulously piles one ethical complication upon another. The film sustains nail-biting tension across its 146-minute running time through meticulous pacing, confirming the Palme d’Or laureate as one of contemporary cinema’s sharpest moral observers.

The central performances by an outstanding Sebastian Stan and an absolutely riveting and revelatory Renate Reinsve  are extraordinary precisely because nobody is reduced to a position in an argument.

Mungiu allows everyone their humanity, their contradictions, their fears and their blind spots. Variety called the result “riveting,” praising the ensemble’s careworn nuance, while The Telegraph described the film as a “slow-burn provocation” that confronts the contradictions of multiculturalism and public-sector institutions with unflinching seriousness.

What makes Fjord so powerful is that it never settles for the obvious culture-war narrative. It becomes a richly compelling and provocative culture war drama precisely because it understands that real culture wars are rarely about heroes and villains. They are about frightened people, competing obligations, incompatible understandings of responsibility and the terrifying possibility that everybody involved may believe they are doing the right thing.

There is something almost spiritual about the film, too.

Fjord is a triumphant work that tugs at the spiritual and soulful in all of us — regardless of nation, creed, faith, or the rejection of all three. Its tragic examination of the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, and of caregiving itself, unfolds as a meditation on what happens when private belief collides with public responsibility.

This is cinema that refuses complacency.

It watches. It waits. It tightens the screws.

And then, like an avalanche descending from those magnificent Norwegian heights, it leaves you wondering whether society can ever distinguish between protecting the vulnerable and protecting itself.

Fjord is not merely a Palme d’Or winner.

It is a moral earthquake.

Grade: A | A harrowing, provocative and controversial — yet always humane and moving — epic for the modern age, this Palme d’Or winner delivers in spades.

Fjord has one more screening at VIFF, on Wednesday, October 7th at 9 PM, at the Vancouver Playhouse.

Club Kid

Club Kid — Jordan Firstman Finds the Heart Beneath the Glitter

Jordan Firstman has spent years cultivating an online persona built on irony, provocation, bitchiness and the gleeful absurdity of internet culture. Then he went to Cannes with Club Kid and did something genuinely unexpected: he grew a heart.

Written, directed by and starring Firstman, Club Kid is a crowdpleasing queer family drama that somehow transforms the debris of New York’s hedonistic gay nightlife — drugs, parties, bad decisions, emotional wreckage and spectacularly questionable behaviour — into something earnest, heartwarming and surprisingly moving.

Firstman plays Peter, a washed-up New York party promoter whose carefully constructed life of perpetual nightlife is detonated by the arrival of a 10-year-old son he never knew he had. What follows is Peter’s fumbling, frequently hilarious and occasionally heartbreaking journey toward fatherhood.

And somehow, it works.

Indeed, it works gloriously.

Club Kid is an acidic, spikily funny portrait of the city’s hedonistic gay scene, but beneath all the bitchy humour is a celebration of empathy, community and the unconditional love between a father and his son. Firstman finally shirks the ironic pose he has taken online for years to emerge as a sincere storyteller with heart as much as humour. IndieWire specifically praised this transformation, describing a filmmaker who moves beyond his online persona to reveal himself as a storyteller of genuine sincerity.

The movie promises — and absolutely delivers — scenes of copious drug taking, gross-out comedy, chaotic nightlife and the sort of behaviour that makes responsible parenting manuals spontaneously combust. Yet Firstman understands the most important trick in the cinematic playbook: make us laugh first, then make us care.

By the third act, the emotional payoff is both well-earned and devastating.

Firstman’s performance is particularly bracing. There are moments when the armour falls away and Peter becomes vulnerable, frightened and utterly human. That vulnerability gives Club Kid its emotional force. AwardsWatch praised Firstman’s ability to strip away his persona for moments of “bracing vulnerability,” while The Film Stage singled out the film’s third-act payoff as devastating.

The supporting cast adds further pleasure. Cara Delevingne, used sparingly and effectively, plays Peter’s cutting business partner, while The Night Manager’s Diego Calva is wonderfully sympathetic as an extremely obliging social worker. Together with Firstman’s wonderfully chaotic ensemble, they make Club Kid nothing if not easy to like.

And then there is the film’s unabashed sweetness.

That may be Club Kid’s greatest surprise.

This is a bracing, vulnerable, redemptive movie alive with warmth. It is a celebration of unconventional lifestyles without pretending that unconventional lives are uncomplicated. It offers a vivacious look at the realities of parenting — especially parenting when you have absolutely no idea what you are doing — while insisting that love can arrive late, messily and from the least expected direction.

There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about its emotional generosity.

Club Kid wants us to believe people can change.

More importantly, it wants us to believe that they can love one another while they are changing.

And by the time Peter finally begins to understand what being a father might mean, Firstman has pulled off something considerably more difficult than a joke.

He has made us feel.

VanRamblings’ Grade: A– | A moving, tender drama set in New York’s trans & queer community, unprecedented in scope. A film that surprises while warming the heart.

Club Kid has one more screening at VIFF, this upcoming Monday, October 5th, 9:15 PM, at The Park Theatre on Cambie Street.

#VIFF2026: Vancouver’s 11-Day Passport to the World

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There is something faintly ridiculous about living in Vancouver and complaining that “there’s nothing to do.”

Nothing to do?

For 11 days every October, Vancouver becomes one of the great movie cities of North America. More than 160 films descend upon theatres scattered across the city.

Filmmakers arrive from around the world. Actors, critics, programmers, students, obsessives and people who simply love sitting in a dark room while somebody else’s story unfolds gather together.

And then, 11 days later, we go back to pretending that Vancouver is a city where nothing ever happens.

Enough of that.

The 45th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, running October 1st through October 11th, is back — and this year’s edition is shaping up to be one of those festivals where the problem isn’t finding something worth seeing.

The problem is deciding what you can possibly miss.

VIFF’s 2026 programme brings together more than 160 features and dozens of shorts, alongside VIFF Talks, live performances, special events, industry programming and conversations with some of the people actually making the movies and television that shape our culture. VIFF itself describes the festival as a showcase of exceptional cinema from around the globe, and the breadth of the programme makes that description difficult, near impossible, to dispute.

But let’s start where any serious cinephile should start:

The Galas and Special Presentations

This is the section where VIFF essentially says: Here are the movies everybody will be talking about.

And, frankly, it has put together a hell of a list.

THE PALME D’OR COMES TO VANCOUVER

Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord is the obvious place to begin.

The Romanian filmmaker — already a Palme d’Or winner for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days — returns with another morally complicated drama, this time about a conservative family confronting the progressive values of a Norwegian community.

Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve lead the cast, and the film’s central conflict concerns parenting, religion, state scrutiny and the increasingly uncomfortable question of where tolerance ends.

This isn’t the sort of movie that tells you who the good guys are.

Thank God.

Mungiu is interested in the uncomfortable grey territory where decent people make questionable decisions and societies convinced of their own righteousness discover that tolerance can become a very complicated thing indeed.

Fjord won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. It is exactly the kind of movie that makes a film festival matter.

And, yes, this is one of the films VanRamblings would put very high on the “see it before everybody starts talking about the Oscars” list.

THEN THINGS GET DARK

If Fjord is morally knotty, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur is downright ominous.

Set against the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the film follows a corporate executive attempting to keep the consequences of war outside his home — until his wife’s infidelity sends his carefully constructed life crashing down.

Zvyagintsev won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and Minotaur has the kind of icy, mythic quality that makes a domestic thriller feel considerably larger than the marriage at its centre.

This is a movie about betrayal.

But it is also about power.

And corruption.

And a political culture in which violence doesn’t remain outside the front door simply because the protagonist would prefer it to.

If Minotaur sounds bleak, well, Zvyagintsev isn’t exactly known for making Paddington.

But he is one of contemporary cinema’s great observers of what happens when private lives collide with rotten political systems.

VIFF gives Vancouver audiences three opportunities to see it, including screenings at The Park Theatre, Granville Island and the Vancouver Playhouse.

PAWLIKOWSKI’S POSTWAR EUROPE

Then there’s Fatherland, from Paweł Pawlikowski.

Pawlikowski won the Oscar for Ida, received three Academy Award nominations for Cold War, and has established himself as one of the most visually distinctive filmmakers working today.

Fatherland may be his most explicitly historical film.

Nobel laureate Thomas Mann returns to postwar Germany with his daughter Erika, confronting the moral wreckage of a country struggling to understand what it has become.

Shot in exquisite black and white, Fatherland won Pawlikowski the Best Director prize at Cannes.

The subject is Germany.

But the questions are universal:

What does it mean to return home?

What does it mean to be complicit?

Can a country reckon with its past without rewriting it?

And can a family?

Sandra Hüller, one of European cinema’s most extraordinary actors, is here too.

Put this one on your calendar.

CANNES ALSO GAVE US CLUB KID

Then, thankfully, VIFF gives us Club Kid, Jordan Firstman’s audacious début.

A hedonistic New York club promoter suddenly discovers that he has a 10-year-old son he never knew existed.

Cue chaos.

The premise sounds like the setup for a Hollywood comedy.

Firstman has something considerably stranger in mind.

Club Kid mixes queer New York nightlife, comedy, parenthood, redemption and unexpected tenderness. It is exuberant without being empty, funny without being disposable.

Cannes embraced it.

VanRamblings suspects Vancouver will too.

And this is where the great pleasure of VIFF begins.

You come for the Palme d’Or winner.

You stay because some filmmaker you’ve never heard of knocks you sideways.

MIKE LEIGH’S POSSIBLE FAREWELL

There is another film in this year’s Special Presentations that carries an entirely different kind of weight.

Tender Loving Care, from Mike Leigh.

Leigh is one of the great humanist filmmakers of the last half-century. His films have always been interested in people who don’t necessarily command headlines but whose lives contain entire universes.

Here he follows Amy and Rosie, best friends and social workers caring for some of society’s most dispossessed people.

Funny.

Sad.

Tender.

Sometimes all three at once.

And perhaps most significantly, this may be Leigh’s final film.

If so, Tender Loving Care becomes more than another Special Presentation. It becomes a farewell from one of British cinema’s essential chroniclers of ordinary human beings.

VIFF is giving audiences several opportunities to see it.

HELLO, OSCARS

And now we arrive at the annual VIFF parlor game:

Which of these films will we be talking about when the Academy Award nominations are announced?

The answer, of course, is that nobody knows.

But that doesn’t stop us from having fun.

Jesse Eisenberg’s The Début, starring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti, opens VIFF with an Invitation-Only Gala at the Vancouver Playhouse, followed by public screenings.

Moore plays Mona, a meek woman who gets cast in a community musical and gradually becomes consumed by the character she is playing.

It sounds funny.

It also sounds increasingly unhinged.

And Julianne Moore doing psychologically complicated, emotionally vulnerable, slightly dangerous is exactly the sort of thing that can get an Academy voter’s attention.

VanRamblings is not predicting an Oscar nomination.

We’re just saying watch Julianne Moore.

There is a difference.

Then there’s James Gray’s Paper Tiger, starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller.

1986 Queens.

Two brothers.

A Russian criminal syndicate.

Family.

Loyalty.

Ambition.

And the inevitable realization that American dreams have a nasty habit of becoming American nightmares.

Gray has spent his career making intimate crime stories that are really family dramas. Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own the Night, The Immigrant — his films understand that crime isn’t really about guns and money.

It’s about what people will do to the people they love.

Paper Tiger looks like classic Gray territory.

And that is very good news indeed.

DON’T IGNORE THE FILMS MADE HERE

Then comes Vancouver’s own Mina Shum with Whatcha Want.

A wealthy Hong Kong trophy wife discovers her husband’s infidelity and begins rediscovering her passion for dance.

Shum, whose Meditation Park was another beautifully observed portrait of Asian-Canadian life, returns with a hip-hop-infused film that is unmistakably Vancouver while reaching far beyond Vancouver.

This is precisely why VIFF matters to this city.

We are not merely importing movies from the rest of the world.

We are making movies that belong to the world.

Whatcha Want is one of them.

AND THEN THERE ARE ALL THE OTHER MOVIES

Here’s the thing.

We could keep going.

And going.

And going.

Because the Special Presentations are only one part of VIFF.

There is All of a Sudden, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s nearly three-hour meditation on mortality, care and human connection.

There is Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas, a mischievous comedy about autofiction and the dangers of filmmakers stealing their friends’ lives for art.

There is Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, with Mahershala Ali and John Cho, an action thriller involving an assassin, single parenthood and a far-right religious militia.

There is I Play Rocky, Peter Farrelly’s account of Sylvester Stallone betting everything on the screenplay that became Rocky.

There is The Liberation, starring Carrie Coon and Lily James.

There is Kore-eda Hirokazu’s tender Look Back.

There is Lukas Dhont’s Coward.

And there is Andrew Haigh’s A Long Winter, set in the Rockies in the 1950s.

That is before we even leave the Gala section.

Beyond it, VIFF spreads into Showcase, Panorama, Focus, Vanguard, Northern Lights, Insights, Spectrum, Portraits, Altered States, Leading Lights, Short Forum and MODES.

In other words:

Bring comfortable shoes.

DON’T FORGET THE SHORTS

And please, for the love of cinema, don’t treat the shorts as filler.

VIFF Short Forum offers programmes with titles such as The Scarier One, Anthropomaxx, Workers of the World, Immanence: A Life, Somewhere Else, Archive Lives!, War at Home, Queer Magic and Big Time Sensuality.

These are not cinematic leftovers.

They are where filmmakers take risks because they don’t need 120 minutes to justify them.

One Short Forum programme, Workers of the World, brings together films exploring working-class life and a system that has betrayed its promises.

Archive Lives! examines the relationship between memory and what eventually becomes history.

Queer Magic asks, rather wonderfully, whether magic is something we might actually believe in.

This is the stuff you discover at festivals — films you didn’t know existed, filmmakers whose names mean nothing to you at breakfast and everything to you by dinner.

AND VIFF IS MORE THAN MOVIES

Carrie Coon is this year’s recipient of the VIFF Luminary Award

One of the things that has increasingly distinguished VIFF is that it understands film culture isn’t confined to the screen.

The VIFF Talks series brings directors, writers, producers, showrunners, composers and other craftspeople into conversation with audiences.

This year’s programme includes Carrie Coon, recipient of a VIFF Luminary Award, and a conversation with composer and DEVO co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh, whose work has ranged from Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums to Thor: Ragnarok.

And then there is VIFF Live, which this year explores what the festival describes as “reworlding” — bringing music, electronic performance, comedy and other forms of live culture into the cinematic experience.

Among the offerings is an evening with composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer and Derrick Gee’s Radio Hour.

This is a film festival refusing to pretend that cinema exists in isolation.

It doesn’t.

Cinema is music.

Cinema is performance.

Cinema is politics, architecture, photography, costume, editing, sound, history and memory.

Cinema is culture.

HOW TO SURVIVE VIFF

Now for the boring but necessary part.

Tickets are on sale now.

A regular adult ticket is $22, seniors are $20, students/youth $19 and accessible tickets $17, before GST.

Six-ticket packs are $126; 10-ticket packs are $200.

The Festival Pass and Senior Festival Pass are currently sold out, while the Platinum Pass is $1,300.

The VIFF Centre is at 1181 Seymour Street, but during the festival every VIFF theatre serves as a box office.

That is important.

You don’t have to trek back downtown every time you need a ticket.

The theatres open their box offices 30 minutes before the first screening of the day; the Vancouver Playhouse opens 45 minutes beforehand. Most venues are cashless.

And don’t panic when a film says Sold Out.

VIFF releases additional ticket allotments closer to screenings when available, and there are standby lines.

The festival’s advice is essentially simple: get there early.

VanRamblings’ advice is even simpler:

Don’t arrive at 7:58 for an 8:00 movie on the other side of town.

Vancouver traffic has no respect for cinema.

WHERE TO GO

A full VIFF audience in attendance at the Vancouver Playhouse, one of VIFF’s première venues

VIFF’s venues stretch from the Vancouver Playhouse and VIFF Centre to The Cinematheque, International Village, The Rio, The Park Theatre, Fifth Avenue Cinemas, Granville Island, SFU Woodward’s and Alliance Française.

Some venues are 19+ — notably The Rio, Park and Fifth Avenue — so check before taking the kids.

The geographic spread is actually part of the fun.

International Village means Chinatown is downstairs and around the corner.

The Rio puts you in the middle of Commercial Drive.

The Park gives you Cambie.

Granville Island gives you, well, Granville Island.

The Cinematheque puts you downtown.

The VIFF Centre gives you the closest thing to festival headquarters.

And all of these neighbourhoods offer food.

Lots of it.

So don’t think of the gap between films as dead time.

It is the festival.

Go for dim sum.

Grab coffee.

Have dinner.

Argue about whether the ending worked.

Then go back into another theatre and discover that the film you thought you were seeing at 9 p.m. has absolutely nothing to do with the film you just spent two hours discussing.

That’s the point.

Transit is also your friend. VIFF directs audiences to TransLink for routes and schedules, and with venues spread across Vancouver, public transportation is generally preferable to attempting to drive and park between multiple screenings.

Accessibility is another important part of the festival. VIFF cinemas have hearing-assistance systems, selected screenings offer closed captions, and the festival provides accessibility information for individual venues.

THE REAL REASON TO GO

You can attend VIFF because Fjord won Cannes.

You can attend because Pawlikowski won Best Director.

You can attend because Julianne Moore might be in the Oscar conversation.

You can attend because Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller are in Paper Tiger.

You can attend because Mike Leigh may be saying goodbye.

You can attend because Mina Shum is bringing Vancouver to the world.

But those aren’t really the reasons to go.

You go because you don’t know what you’re going to discover.

A film festival is one of the last places in modern life where discovery still happens without an algorithm telling you what you are supposed to like.

Netflix knows what it thinks you want.

YouTube knows what it thinks you want.

Spotify knows what it thinks you want.

VIFF doesn’t care.

VIFF says:

Here. Watch this.

And sometimes the movie is magnificent.

Sometimes it’s infuriating.

Sometimes it’s boring.

Sometimes you walk out wondering what the hell you just watched.

And occasionally — gloriously — you walk out knowing you have just seen something you will remember for the rest of your life.

That’s why the 45th Vancouver International Film Festival matters.

Because for eleven days, Vancouver becomes something more than a city of glass towers, mountains and expensive real estate.

It becomes a meeting place.

A Romanian filmmaker meets a Vancouver audience.

A Japanese filmmaker meets a Canadian family.

A Palestinian story meets somebody who has never been anywhere near Palestine.

A Russian film asks uncomfortable questions about power.

A Korean film makes us laugh.

A Norwegian story makes us reconsider tolerance.

A Vancouver filmmaker tells a Hong Kong story.

A stranger sitting beside us laughs at precisely the same moment we do.

Someone cries.

Someone applauds.

Someone hates the movie.

Someone else thinks it is the greatest thing they’ve ever seen.

And for those two hours, none of that matters.

The lights go down.

The world comes in.

We sit together in the dark.

Borders disappear.

Languages cease to be barriers.

The lives of people we have never met become, briefly, our lives.

That is the extraordinary, almost old-fashioned magic of cinema.

And that is the real gift of VIFF.

It isn’t simply that Vancouver gets to see the world.

It is that, for eleven days, the world gets to remind Vancouver that we are part of it.

So forget the rain.

Forget the traffic.

Forget the usual Vancouver complaint that there’s nothing to do.

Buy a ticket, or two or three, or a pass.

Take the SkyTrain.

Walk into a theatre.

Sit down beside a stranger.

And let the lights go down.

For a little while, in the darkness, we are all watching the same world.

And maybe — just maybe — we will walk back out into it seeing one another a little differently.