#VIFF45: A Festival to Remember — The Films, the Discoveries, and the Magic of Cinema

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A three-part VanRamblings wrap-up of the 45th Vancouver International Film Festival | October 1–11, 2026

Part One: A Final Weekend Worth Celebrating

There is something gloriously bittersweet about the final weekend of the Vancouver International Film Festival. For 10 days, Vancouver’s moviegoing community has been living inside a world of discovery, moving from one cinema to another, comparing notes over coffee, arguing about performances, falling hopelessly in love with films we could never have anticipated, and wondering how on earth we are going to fit just one more screening into an already impossibly crowded schedule.

And then, suddenly, the end is in sight.

The 45th annual Vancouver International Film Festival has given Vancouver audiences an embarrassment of cinematic riches, with films arriving from Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Telluride, Toronto and the New York Film Festival. The final weekend offers one last opportunity to catch some of the year’s most accomplished international films, several of which have already become personal favourites here at VanRamblings.

Friday, October 9, begins with a particularly tantalizing double bill at the Park Theatre. At 6:15 p.m., Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Look Back offers another opportunity to experience the director’s extraordinary gift for finding tenderness in the everyday. Kore-eda has spent a career exploring the fragile bonds between parents and children, the families we inherit and the families we create. Here, he turns his attention to youth and the nature of storytelling, bringing his customary grace and emotional intelligence to a film that understands how imagination can transform the lives of young people. His work has a way of making the apparently ordinary feel quietly miraculous.

The Friday double bill continues with James Gray’s Paper Tiger, which has attracted considerable attention on the festival circuit. The intimate crime drama features Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller, three performers whose contrasting screen personas promise a compelling study in loyalty, ambition and the dangerous entanglements of criminal life. Gray is a filmmaker fascinated by family, betrayal and the moral compromises people make in pursuit of security. With a cast of this calibre, Paper Tiger is a particularly enticing prospect.

The final weekend also brings a remarkable collection of films shared with the prestigious New York Film Festival. Friday’s offerings include Once Upon a Time in Harlem and 9 Temples to Heaven at Fifth Avenue, with Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva at International Village 9 at 8 p.m. and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur at the Lindsay Family Stage on Granville Island at 8:30 p.m. For festivalgoers who relish the experience of discovering a film before it reaches a wider audience, these screenings are precisely what VIFF is all about.

And then there is Lukas Dhont’s Coward, VanRamblings’ favourite film at VIFF 45, screening Friday evening at the Park Theatre. The Belgian filmmaker’s First World War drama, whose stars Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne shared the Best Actor prize at Cannes, is a work of breathtaking emotional delicacy. More about that extraordinary film in Part Two of VanRamblings final column on VIFF 45.

At 9 p.m. Friday, the Vancouver Playhouse welcomes La Bola Negra, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s ambitious historical melodrama, which won the Audience Award at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Moving between 1932, 1937 and 2017, the film interweaves the lives of three gay protagonists, giving a traditional historical epic a thrillingly contemporary queer sensibility. The filmmakers also shared the Best Director prize at Cannes. It is precisely the sort of ambitious, emotionally expansive storytelling that makes international cinema so rewarding.

Saturday, October 10, brings another remarkable sequence of screenings. At 11 a.m., The Only Living Pickpocket in New York opens the day’s programme at the Vancouver Playhouse. At 1:45 p.m., Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, Japan’s Oscar submission, offers a quietly expansive meditation on human connection. Making his French-language debut, Hamaguchi explores the fragile structures that bind us to one another, with luminous, Cannes-recognized performances from Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto. This is cinema that understands the expressive power of conversation, observation and silence.

The evening’s centrepiece is Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, VIFF’s Closing Gala, at 6:15 p.m. at the Vancouver Playhouse. With John Malkovich leading the cast, the film arrives amid considerable awards-season anticipation. McDonagh’s gift for combining dark humour, moral unease and unpredictable human behaviour makes this a fittingly provocative way to approach the festival’s conclusion.

And for those determined to make the absolute most of Saturday, there is a 9:15 p.m. screening of NAZA at the Park Theatre. Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the investigative documentary examines Israeli military targeting practices in Gaza through interviews with military insiders. The title refers to a reported intelligence euphemism for anticipated civilian deaths in airstrikes. Produced by Jonathan Glazer and James Wilson, the team behind The Zone of Interest, NAZA has become one of the festival’s most controversial and politically urgent films. Its filmmakers argue that the systems used to calculate civilian casualties reveal a devastating process of dehumanization; its claims and implications have provoked fierce debate. The film received the Special Jury Prize at Venice. Whatever one’s response, this is documentary filmmaking that insists audiences confront uncomfortable questions about technology, accountability and the human cost of war.

Sunday, October 11, is the final day of VIFF 45, and the schedule is hardly a gentle winding-down. La Gradiva returns at the Lindsay Family Stage, while Everytime screens at Fifth Avenue. Mina Shum’s Whatcha Want brings a distinctly Vancouver perspective to the final day’s offerings at the Rio Theatre at 3:30 p.m. Meanwhile, Minotaur, Zvyagintsev’s Grand Prix winner at Cannes, offers another opportunity to experience the work of a formidable contemporary filmmaker.

At the Park Theatre, Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care screens at 6 p.m., followed by Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas at 9:15 p.m. And at 6:15 p.m., the Rio Theatre screens I Play Rocky, one of VanRamblings’ other personal favourites of the festival.

The beauty of VIFF, of course, is that the festival’s final screening need not be the final opportunity to see a film. Programmer Tom Charity and the VIFF Centre regularly help bring festival discoveries back to Vancouver audiences, while other titles secure conventional theatrical engagements across Metro Vancouver. It is worth keeping an eye on the VIFF Centre’s subsequent programming rather than assuming that missing a festival screening means missing a film forever.

But first, there are two films that deserve a special place in this year’s festival conversation.

Coward: Lukas Dhont’s Most Beautiful Film Yet

VanRamblings’ favourite film of VIFF 45 | Directed by Lukas Dhont | Belgium, France, Netherlands

Some films move you. Others quietly rearrange the furniture of your heart. And then there is Lukas Dhont’s Coward, an achingly beautiful, tenderly observed, emotionally transporting work of cinema that left VanRamblings with the extraordinary conviction that we had just encountered one of the finest films of the year — of any year.

At the 79th Cannes Film Festival, Dhont’s First World War drama earned the Best Actor prize for its remarkable young stars, Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne. Their performances are the beating heart of a film that could easily have succumbed to the familiar conventions of the tragic queer period drama, yet instead finds something infinitely more generous, more courageous and ultimately more life-affirming.

Set amid the brutal realities of the Belgian trenches, Coward introduces us to Pierre (Macchia), a young soldier arriving at the front eager to prove himself in a world in which courage is measured in blood, obedience and the willingness to march towards almost certain death. But Pierre’s understanding of the world begins to change when he meets Francis (Campagne), a fellow soldier with an unexpected idea: to stage a theatrical performance for their comrades.

It is an audacious proposal in a place where imagination might seem like an unaffordable luxury. Yet the makeshift theatre becomes something extraordinary — a sanctuary of beauty, laughter and human connection amid the machinery of destruction. And between Pierre and Francis, something tender and transformative begins to emerge.

Dhont, whose Girl and Close established him as one of contemporary cinema’s most sensitive observers of adolescent vulnerability, has made his most mature film to date. Here, his storytelling possesses an emotional restraint that makes every fleeting glance, every tentative touch and every moment of physical closeness feel almost unbearably precious.

The chemistry between Macchia and Campagne is simply magnificent. Dhont has a tactile, compassionate understanding of how men — queer men especially — watch other men, the way attraction and affection can reveal themselves in a look held a second too long, or in a gesture whose significance cannot safely be spoken aloud. Coward is, by turns, breathtakingly violent and sweetly, shiveringly sensual. Its most intimate moments feel less like conventional romantic scenes than like the discovery of an entirely new language.

And what a relief it is that Dhont refuses to drown that love in tragedy.

Unlike so many period tales of forbidden queer affection, Coward is not interested in dripping its canvas in despair. Dhont wants to leave us with a glimmer of hope. Actually, more than a glimmer: a wry smile of anticipation, a suggestion that all is not lost, that love can find a way even when the world seems determined to extinguish it.

This is a recuperation of queer representation as resilient and hopeful. Happiness — or, perhaps more importantly, contentment — is possible when we seek it and seize it. That assertion feels quietly radical in a film set amid the carnage of the First World War, where tenderness itself becomes an act of resistance.

Dhont does not minimize the horror surrounding his characters. Rather, he understands that the existence of beauty in terrible circumstances does not diminish suffering; it makes the preservation of our humanity all the more urgent. The theatre they create becomes an emblem of what art can accomplish when the world has seemingly abandoned its obligations to the living.

There is something almost miraculous about the film’s tonal balance. The violence is genuinely frightening, the romance achingly delicate, the humour unexpectedly liberating. Dhont allows the film to breathe, trusting his actors and the emotional intelligence of his audience. He never insists that we feel something when a glance or a silence can accomplish so much more.

And when Coward reaches its final passages, its hopefulness feels neither sentimental nor cheaply won. It emerges from everything these men have endured, from the risks they have taken and from the simple, extraordinary recognition that another person can make a life worth living.

This is sensitive storytelling at its most affecting: sweetly played, elegantly mounted, reaching towards hope not in light of war’s horrors, but in spite of them.

For VanRamblings, Coward is the film of VIFF 45. It is a reminder that cinema’s greatest achievement is not always to break our hearts.

Sometimes, it is to show us how beautifully they can mend.

VanRamblings Grade: A+

Fatherland: A Haunted Masterpiece of Memory and Exile

VanRamblings feels strongly Fatherland is the best film to screen at VIFF 45, one of the best films of the year | Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski | Poland, Germany, Italy, France

If Coward is the film that most tenderly captured VanRamblings heart at VIFF 45, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland is the film that most completely convinced us of cinema’s extraordinary power to transform history into poetry.

Pawlikowski, the modern master behind Ida and Cold War, has fashioned another immaculate black-and-white work of European cinema, an 82-minute elegy of such precision, intelligence and emotional depth that its brevity feels almost audacious.

Winner of the Best Director prize at Cannes, Fatherland is a gorgeous, gripping drama whose resonance extends far beyond its carefully chosen postwar setting.

The film centres on Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), the actress, writer and rally driver. In the summer of 1949, sixteen years after fleeing Nazi Germany for the safety of the United States, Mann returns to his native country. Accompanied by Erika, he embarks on an emotionally fraught road trip in a black Buick, traveling from American-controlled Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar through a Germany devastated by war and divided by ideology.

It is a journey across a shattered nation, but also across the wreckage of a family.

Pawlikowski understands that the aftermath of catastrophe is not merely a matter of rebuilding cities or redrawing borders. It is also about confronting the moral compromises of the past, the things people did, the things they failed to do, and the stories they tell themselves to make those failures bearable.

Mann is a towering literary figure, a man whose opposition to Hitler forced him into exile. Yet the film is not content to celebrate the Nobel laureate as a convenient moral monument. His relationship with Erika reveals a more complicated figure, a father whose public stature and intellectual authority cannot protect him from the consequences of private shortcomings.

Hüller, one of contemporary cinema’s most compelling actors, is extraordinary as Erika. Her performance is a study in intelligence, resentment, wit and barely contained pain. She gives the film its emotional counterweight, suggesting a lifetime of accumulated disappointment beneath the surface of an apparently formidable woman. Zischler is equally compelling, creating a Mann whose authority is unmistakable but whose capacity for self-understanding remains uncertain.

The relationship between them is the film’s beating heart. Every exchange seems to carry the weight of conversations that have never taken place, apologies never offered, affection expressed too late or withheld altogether.

Shot by cinematographer Łukasz Żal in exquisitely chiselled monochrome, Fatherland is a visual marvel. The landscape passes through the car windows like a wounded memory, the ruins and the uneasy coexistence of two political systems rendering history tangible. Pawlikowski’s compositions are austere but never sterile; his camera finds beauty in the contours of a devastated landscape without ever pretending that beauty can erase what happened there.

As the journey progresses eastwards, the film becomes increasingly preoccupied with grief and the responsibility of the artist. What does it mean to create art in the aftermath of catastrophe? Can intellectual achievement compensate for emotional failure? And what obligation does a celebrated writer have to the people closest to him, rather than to the abstract ideals he represents?

These questions converge in a beautiful, sad epiphany, delivered with the divine economy that distinguishes Pawlikowski’s finest work.

There are moments when Fatherland feels chilly, even deliberately withholding. But that restraint is part of its achievement. Pawlikowski trusts us to recognize what remains unspoken, to find the sorrow in a pause, the tenderness in an awkward gesture, the devastation in an exchange that appears almost incidental.

The result is a film of haunted, ravaged beauty. Its mournful meditation on national identity, private tragedy and the dangers of trying to remain apolitical in deeply political times speaks directly to our own fractured moment. The cultural riches that survive catastrophe offer no easy redemption, but they can provide small, crucial forms of solace.

Fatherland is an elegant, engrossing masterpiece, an extraordinarily economical film that leaves behind an emotional echo far greater than its running time might suggest.

If VIFF 45 has offered a reminder of why we go to the movies, Pawlikowski’s film supplies one of the most compelling answers: to experience the past not as a distant abstraction, but as a living, breathing presence in the room.

This is a gorgeous poem of a film, and, for VanRamblings, the best film to screen at this year’s festival.

VanRamblings Grade: A+

Part Three: The Movies, the Memories, and the Promise of What’s Next

What, then, has VIFF 45 achieved?

First, it has reminded us that the Vancouver International Film Festival remains one of this city’s most important cultural institutions. For eleven days, it has created a space in which audiences can encounter stories beyond their own experience, discover filmmakers they might otherwise never have encountered, and engage with works that challenge, provoke, entertain and occasionally change the way we see the world.

Second, this year’s festival has offered compelling evidence that 2026 may be one of the strongest years for cinema in a decade, both domestically and internationally.

From the moral complexities of Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord to the exquisite emotional restraint of Coward, from Pawlikowski’s haunted Fatherland to the imaginative daring of films arriving from Japan, Spain and elsewhere, the year’s finest work has demonstrated that ambitious filmmaking is alive and flourishing. Cannes’ awards have been especially revealing, recognizing films that are artistically adventurous while remaining profoundly attentive to the human condition.

And what a year for Canadian cinema, too. Mina Shum’s Whatcha Want is a welcome reminder of the importance of Vancouver filmmakers telling stories that emerge from the communities they know, while the festival’s wider Canadian programme has offered audiences opportunities to encounter the country’s extraordinary range of voices and perspectives. A healthy film culture depends not simply on importing the world’s best work, but on creating the conditions in which our own filmmakers can flourish.

There is, of course, a practical challenge awaiting us after the closing credits roll. How do we sustain the excitement? How do we ensure that these films find audiences beyond the festival’s eleven-day window?

The work of VIFF Centre programmer Tom Charity, and the subsequent theatrical engagements that some festival titles will secure across Metro Vancouver, is essential. A festival should be a beginning, not an ending. The conversation that starts in a crowded cinema ought to continue over dinner, in the pages of publications such as VanRamblings, and in the choices we make when deciding what to watch next.

Most importantly, VIFF reminds us that watching movies together is an act of community. We sit in the darkness beside strangers, laughing at the same unexpected joke, holding our breath through the same moment of suspense, or emerging into the Vancouver night with tears in our eyes and the sudden urge to talk to someone about what we have just experienced. For a few precious hours, another person’s story becomes part of our own.

That is the enduring magic of cinema. It allows us to inhabit lives we have never lived, to recognize ourselves in people whose circumstances are utterly unlike our own, and to discover that tenderness, courage, grief, longing and hope are not the possessions of any one nation or culture. They belong to all of us.

As VIFF 45 draws to a close, VanRamblings find ourselves thinking again about Coward, about those young soldiers who discover a measure of beauty in a world consumed by violence, and about Fatherland, with its wounded landscapes and its insistence that the past must be confronted if we are to make sense of the present. These films are very different, yet both understand that art can preserve something precious when the world seems determined to destroy it.

And perhaps that is the most hopeful thing we can take away from this year’s festival.

In a time of political division, technological upheaval and genuine uncertainty about the future, filmmakers continue to make works of astonishing beauty, intelligence and compassion. Audiences continue to seek them out. Cinemas continue to fill with people willing to give themselves over to a story.

For eleven days, Vancouver has been a city of movie lovers, united by curiosity and the shared pleasure of discovery. The festival ends, but the films remain with us, becoming part of our private histories, our conversations and our understanding of one another.

Here’s to VIFF 46. Here’s to the filmmakers who will surprise us, the performances that will break our hearts, and the stories that will remind us what we share.

And here’s to the simple, extraordinary miracle of sitting in a darkened cinema, surrounded by strangers, and discovering that, for a little while, we are all watching the world together.

#VanPoli | Vote for The MUST-ELECT Change Brigade At the 2026 Polls

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Kareem Allam as the Vancouver Liberals Mayoral candidate, and the 10 Vancouver City Council candidates whose names appear above represent Vancouver’s only hope for better; for an action-oriented government that will relieve your tax burden; build our city’s parks and recreation system; downsize the “managers managing managers” bloated bureaucracy at Vancouver City Hall; establish a blue ribbon panel to address the pestilence of the rat problem that bedevils our city, that is of so much concerns to residents in every neighbourhood across Vancouver; address street disorder and an out-of-control drug problem on the DTES in a humane, yet efficient and effective manner; spend money on our sidewalks that makes life difficult for seniors and persons with disabilities to traverse, and so very much more that is on the agenda of THE CHANGE BRIGADE asking for your vote.

Thinking of voting for Pete Fry for Mayor? Expect the same old, same old do nothing government that has defined every Vancouver civic administration this century. Rebecca Bligh. Same thing. Won’t achieve any more than a high single digit come Election Day. Colleen Hardwick. Puh-leeze. In a word, nightmare. Ken Sim. Undeserved second term.

You know what the difference is between Kareem Allam, and the 10 Councillors endorsed by VanRamblings? Every other person running for Council — although they might believe what they’re saying — are driven by ego, and what’s good for them, and not us.

The members of The Change Brigade are the only candidates for Vancouver City Council seeking a Council seat, because they believe in the good, that collectively as members of a Vancouver City Council committed to a civic administration of reconciliation that there is much good to be achieved.

In other words, The Change Brigade is in it for us, not for themselves.

Only the collaborative, achingly brilliant, ready to hit the ground running, man of vision who is a natural leader, Kareem Allam, possesses the wisdom and experience to be the best Mayor of Vancouver since the days of the Art Phillips.

Vancouver’s Government of Municipal Reconciliation Working for You

The 10 candidates whose names are listed above, the Vancouver Liberals’ achingly bright Kareem For Mayor and the 10 Council candidates endorsed by VanRamblings represent the 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲 we have waited more than 25 years for, the ‘can do’ Zohran Mamdani crew who mean to make a difference …

• Remove pay stations from parks, beaches and in front of and nearby community centres, pools and hockey rinks, which means that the City of Vancouver will — with The Change Brigade in charge — finally get around to spending some of those billions of dollars that languish in the capital budget, monies that we approved in referendums in 2008, 2011, 2014, 2018 and 2022, election after election as the money just sits in the capital budget unspent, instead of being spent on us; • Broken Promises and Rising FOI Fees, means transparency and accountability is needed at City Hall. Vancouverites are facing rising Freedom of Information fees while trust in City Hall continues to decline;

• Reinstate the Livable Wage Programme at City Hall, that mandates suppliers of goods and services to the City must pay their workers a livable wage (approximately $28 today), that doesn’t cost the city a penny, but helps workers;
• Renew Vancouver’s 24 community centres, most of all, the 11 community centres identified by Vancouver Auditor General Mike Macdonell in his scathing report to Council on the “severe state of disrepair” of 11 of those community centres; • Cancel Ken’s $800m Second City Hall, wherein Ken Sim and ABC want to spend $800 million just to build more office space for managers;
• Build community pools in neighbourhoods across the city, water parks and hockey rinks;

Luxury Yacht Tax (40ft+), to protect essential services without burdening everyday Vancouverites, The Change Brigade will implement a tax on luxury yachts over 40 feet;

 • Faster, Cheaper Housing Construction, because Vancouver is the only city in BC with its own building code — an unnecessary extra step for people seeking to build more housing in our city. The Change Brigade, led by Kareem Allam and the Vancouver Liberals — working in concert with COPE’s Sean Orr and Solomon Yi-Kieran, One City’s Frances Bula, and the Greens’ Stephanie Smith — will remove the Vancouver Building Code and align our city with the rest of the province, simplifying the process for housing construction;
• Hold developers feet to the fire, by insisting Wesgroup finally get around to building the community centre they are contracted to build in the River District, or QuadReal to build their contracted Oakridge Park community centre, or Concert Properties, to build a much needed SE False Creek community centre they said they’d build ages ago; Build affordable housing, focusing on democratically run housing co-ops, built on City land, working with Thom Armstrong, Executive Director of both BC’s Co-operative Housing Federation and the Community Land Trust, with child care centres built into the newly-constructed co-ops;
Protect Good Jobs and Industrial Land, because Vancouver needs more good-paying jobs, not policies that put them at risk. Ken Sim’s plan to eliminate the city’s remaining industrial land threatens to push businesses and well-paying jobs out of Vancouver; • A Ward System for Vancouver, because Vancouver’s current at-large voting system makes campaigns expensive and leaves many neighbourhoods without direct representation at City Hall. The Change Brigade support exploring a ward system that would divide the city into local districts, each electing their own dedicated Councillor;
• Ban Bitcoin cryptocurrency ATMs on the DTES and take the fight to the drug dealers, not the street-level drug dealers, but their suppliers; • Work to rid our city of the pestilence of rats, that are of concern to residents in every neighbourhood across our city;
• Address homelessness in a humane and caring manner, consistent with the values of the vast majority of us who call Vancouver home; • The Change Brigade Noise Policy, because we’re tired of noisy hot rods and motorcycles revving up at 3 a.m. in our neighbourhoods. So are the members of The Change Brigade;
• Downsize a bloated middle management bureaucracy, at Vancouver City Hall, because do we really need 95 people working in Vancouver’s communications department, or employ more middle managers in our development services and planning departments than on the ground CUPE workers — like plan checkers — who do the real work?; • Reduce Taxes on Medical Clinics, because The Change Brigade means to cut property taxes in half for family doctors and walk-in clinics in the City of Vancouver;
• Build UBC-style Food Hubs across our city, to address food insecurity;

Build More Public Bathrooms, because Vancouver’s chronic lack of public washrooms not only fails to provide basic facilities to residents but could cause even bigger public health problems;

 • Build Supportive Housing for Seniors & Veterans, because supportive housing is a lifeline for seniors, veterans, and those with disabilities. On Day One, The Change Brigade will reverse Ken Sim’s cruel ban on supportive housing and ensure that our most-vulnerable citizens receive the supports that they need;
• Restore strong fiscal management, at City Hall; • Stop the Sale of Vancouver Parks, because Ken Sim and ABC’s Councillors who tried to eliminate the Park Board, Sim who is all about putting Vancouver’s parks up for sale. The Change Brigade strongly supports our elected Park Board, a democratic institution that protects our parks from being chopped up and sold off;
• Develop a methamphetamine strategy — the leading cause of violent incidents that puts people at risk — just like Premier Wab Kinew has done in Manitoba (a plan that is working!); • Establish an Industrial Land Reserve, because keeping jobs in the city and surrounding them with affordable housing so that people can build their careers and keep their families in our city;
• Protect local businesses during transit expansion, by reducing property taxes by 50% for the duration of construction;

Build more public washrooms, including within our parks (I mean, when the kids have gotta pee, they’ve gotta pee);

 • Support taxation on land value, by capturing the land-owner windfalls caused by proximity to public amenities, speculation, and zoning;
• Reinstate library funding and hours, cut by a heartless and cruel Ken Sim administration that have so weakened these vital public spaces and community services; • Bring back the Renters Office, with teeth this time to give tenants an advocate who is empowered to fight for them;
• Better Front-Line Services, which means across the board, city services are failing: more potholes, missed garbage pickups, dirty streets, and so much more. • Identify why progress towards city goals of affordability, families, renters, and climate has stalled or reversed under Ken Sim, and get back on course;
• Fight for campaign finance reform, to close the loopholes the wealthy can use to, effectively, buy politicians and elections; • Fight for a fast and free public transit system in Vancouver, and take steps on that path immediately;
• Bring in a municipal lobbying registry, because the public deserves to know how and when the wealthy are influencing decisions made by the city government; • Half of bus stops in Vancouver have no bus shelters or benches, so work toward changing that circumstance.
• Expand VanWifi across the city, to allow for more free and open internet access, prioritizing currently under-served areas; • Train and hire lifeguards and swim instructors, because we need to keep pools open and staffed, stop line-ups, offer swimming lessons to meet demand, and keep people safe at Vancouver’s beaches.

#VIFF45 | #NYFF65 | When New York Comes to Vancouver For 11 Days

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There is a certain romance to New York in the fall.

The leaves begin to turn. The evenings come earlier. The city seems to acquire an extra layer of electricity. Manhattan becomes, for a few glorious weeks, the cinematic capital of the world as filmmakers, critics, actors, programmers, cineastes and assorted movie obsessives descend upon Lincoln Center for the New York Film Festival.

And then there is Vancouver.

Which, if you are lucky enough to be here during the Vancouver International Film Festival, is not such a bad place to be.

In fact, this year, it may be one of the best places in the world.

For 45 years — essentially from the beginning of VIFF in 1981 — Vancouver and New York have shared films, creating an extraordinary transcontinental cinematic conversation. The relationship was once considerably more complicated than it is today. In the 1990s, when movies arrived in enormous metal film cans, a shared NYFF/VIFF title could become a logistical ballet worthy of its own documentary.

A film might screen in New York on Sunday evening. Almost before the audience had left the theatre, its precious reels would be hustled away for shipment north. Victoria Shipping, then deeply involved in distributing film cans to cinemas throughout British Columbia, would get the reels moving toward Vancouver. By Monday evening, the same movie might be flickering on a VIFF screen.

And then, remarkably, the process would reverse.

The reels would be rushed back to New York for a Tuesday screening.

For VIFF staffers such as the late Cathy Evans and Selina Crammond —the latter who would later become director of Vancouver’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival — this was not romantic at all. It was a logistical nightmare.

Today, thankfully, the movies travel rather more elegantly.

The film can has largely disappeared, replaced by the Digital Cinema Package — those encrypted files residing on a CRU hard drive — and, increasingly, by the instantaneous movement of cinema through high-speed fibre or satellite transmission.

But something more important has remained.

The connection.

And this year, the connection is extraordinary.

A small correction before we begin: the 2026 New York Film Festival is the 64th edition, not the 65th; VIFF 2026 is indeed celebrating its 45th anniversary edition. And what a 45th it is. New York and Vancouver are sharing 23 films, an unusually rich cross-border exchange that makes VIFF 45 feel, in a very real sense, like a West Coast extension of the great New York cinematic conversation.

So, cinéastes of Vancouver, take note.

You don’t have to fly to New York.

This year, New York is coming to you.

THE LONELIEST MAN IN TOWN

Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s quietly devastating portrait of Austrian blues musician Al Cook is one of those films that seems to have wandered into the festival from another, more tactile age of cinema. Cook, playing a fictionalized version of himself, faces eviction from the apartment that has become an archive of his life — VHS tapes, records, photographs, newspapers, memories. The filmmakers turn the threatened demolition of a building into something larger: a meditation on disappearing cultures, ageing and the terrifying realization that the physical world we knew is being erased around us. The film won the Giuseppe Becce Award and a Special Mention from the Guild of German Arthouse Cinemas at Berlin.

PAPER TIGER

James Gray returns to New York — his spiritual home as a filmmaker — with an atmospheric crime drama starring Adam Driver, Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson. Set in 1986 Queens and Brooklyn, it begins with an apparently ordinary middle-class family becoming entangled with Russian criminals through an ill-advised business scheme. But Gray, as always, is less interested in crime than in family, loyalty, ambition and the terrible consequences of wanting a better life. NYFF chose it as its Opening Night film, and the festival calls it a “brilliant New York thriller.” Vancouver gets to see why.

ALL OF A SUDDEN

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, the Oscar-winning director of Drive My Car, has made a 196-minute film about care, mortality, friendship and the strange intimacy that develops between people who might otherwise never have met. Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes, playing an eldercare director and a terminally ill Japanese playwright. Hamaguchi’s great gift is making conversation feel like action and silence feel like dialogue. All of a Sudden is patient, humane and quietly immense — exactly the kind of film for which festivals were invented.

BEHEMOTH!

Tony Gilroy, director of Michael Clayton and creator of Andor, steps away from political espionage for a surprisingly personal drama about music. Pedro Pascal plays Alex, a brilliant cellist whose career and personal life have come apart, forcing him back toward family, memory and the unfinished business of his past. NYFF selected Behemoth! as its Centerpiece and describes Pascal’s performance as the best of his career. The film’s nine-composer musical collective gives the picture an unusually rich sonic architecture. It is a movie about music that understands something crucial: sometimes the score isn’t accompanying the emotion. The score is the emotion.

MINOTAUR

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s return is one of the major events of the festival year. The Russian master — now living in exile — won the Grand Prix at Cannes for this dark, mordantly funny tale of corruption, patriarchy and political power. Set in Russia in 2022, Minotaur follows a wealthy businessman whose suspicion that his wife is having an affair collides with an increasingly ominous political reality. Zvyagintsev invokes Claude Chabrol, but the film’s moral atmosphere is unmistakably his own: chilly, elegant, furious. After Leviathan and Loveless, this is another devastating anatomy of a society eating itself alive.

EVERYTIME

Sandra Wollner’s Everytime won the Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes, and it is one of those films whose description cannot prepare you for its emotional effect. Following a mother, younger daughter and boyfriend after a shocking accident, Wollner creates a suspended world in which grief seems to dissolve the boundaries between memory, reality and dream. The film eventually travels to Tenerife, where the past and present become almost indistinguishable. Gregory Oke’s cinematography is breathtaking, but the real achievement is tonal: Everytime feels like grief itself — beautiful, disorienting, tender and impossible to escape.

POSSIBLE LOVE

Lee Chang-dong’s first film since Burning is already one of the year’s essential Korean films. Two couples from radically different economic circumstances become connected when a wealthy documentary filmmaker turns her camera toward a working-class couple whose lives have been shattered by a factory layoff. The result is part relationship drama, part class critique, part inquiry into the ethics of documentary filmmaking. It won the Silver Lion at Venice and is South Korea’s submission for the 2027 Academy Awards. Lee has always understood that social inequality becomes most powerful when it enters the bedroom, the dining room and the intimate spaces of ordinary lives.

CLUB KID

Jordan Firstman’s feature début is one of the year’s great surprises: a wildly funny, sometimes outrageous New York comedy that gradually reveals a surprisingly tender heart. Firstman plays Peter, a washed-up thirtysomething club promoter whose hedonistic existence is interrupted by the arrival of the 10-year-old son he never knew he had. Suddenly, the professional party boy is responsible for another human being. NYFF calls it “wildly funny and remarkably assured,” and that seems exactly right. Club Kid begins as satire and ends somewhere much more affecting: as a story about the possibility that growing up can happen very, very late.

FATHERLAND

Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland is one of those films that makes black-and-white cinematography feel less like a stylistic choice than a moral necessity. Set in 1949, it follows Nobel laureate Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika traveling through a Germany still physically and morally shattered by the war. Sandra Hüller is extraordinary as Erika, simultaneously daughter, conscience and prosecutor. Pawlikowski won Best Director at Cannes, while Łukasz Żal’s austere images recall Ida and Cold War. Poland’s Oscar submission, Fatherland is a miniature — just 82 minutes — that somehow contains an entire country’s struggle with memory and guilt.

DAO

Alain Gomis’ Dao is cinema as ritual. Two ceremonies — a mourning gathering in Guinea-Bissau and a wedding in Paris — become intertwined in a formally adventurous film that moves between documentary and fiction, memory and performance, grief and celebration. Gomis’ camera observes Black French women speaking about identity and history before plunging us into ceremonies where life and death, tradition and modernity, performance and reality become inseparable. At 192 minutes, Dao asks for patience, but rewards it with something increasingly rare: the sensation of discovering a cinematic language rather than merely watching a movie.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HARLEM

This may be the most precious piece of cinema in the entire 23-film exchange. In 1972, legendary filmmaker William Greaves assembled luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance at Duke Ellington’s townhouse and filmed their extraordinary conversation. More than half a century later, his son David Greaves has transformed that footage into a living archive of Black American intellectual and artistic life. The film has already won the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film, worth $200,000. It is not simply a documentary. It is time travel — an invitation to sit in a room with people history has taught us to revere.

ROSE

Sandra Hüller is having one of those years actors dream about. In Rose, she plays a 17th-century woman who disguises herself as a male soldier after the Thirty Years’ War and attempts to build an entirely new life. Markus Schleinzer’s austere, beautifully composed historical fable won Hüller the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at Berlin and became Austria’s Oscar submission. The film is about gender, faith and intolerance, but also about the intoxicating possibility of becoming someone society has told you that you cannot be. Hüller gives the role an extraordinary mixture of severity, vulnerability and defiance.

CLARISSA

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway travels to contemporary Nigeria in this ambitious, tender adaptation from twin filmmakers Arie and Chuko Esiri. Sophie Okonedo plays Clarissa, preparing for an elaborate party while memories of old loves and unresolved emotions rise to the surface. The parallel story of a traumatized soldier brings Woolf’s exploration of interiority into the contemporary realities of Nigeria. It is an audacious transplantation: rather than treating Woolf as sacred literary property, the Esiris discover the universality underneath the geography. The result is intimate, political and unexpectedly moving.

FJORD

Cristian Mungiu has done it again. The Romanian master won his second Palme d’Or at Cannes for this searing drama about a Romanian family who immigrates to Norway and finds itself under suspicion after an allegation of child abuse. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve give performances of remarkable restraint as parents trapped between cultures, religious belief and the increasingly judgmental gaze of their adopted community. Mungiu refuses easy answers. What begins as a question of parental responsibility becomes a much more disturbing examination of prejudice, cultural difference and the moment when care becomes control. This is precisely the kind of morally uncomfortable cinema that stays with you long after the lights come up.

THE DREAMED ADVENTURE

Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure won the Jury Prize at Cannes and begins like one kind of film before quietly becoming another. An archaeologist returns to a Bulgarian border town searching for a vanished former lover. Gradually, the story slides into the territory of crime, masculinity and violence. Grisebach’s great achievement is the way she combines vérité observation with genre filmmaking. Like her acclaimed Western, the movie understands that borders are never simply geographical. They are emotional, cultural and psychological. At 170 minutes, it is deliberately immersive — a film that asks you to cross the border with it.

TENDER LOVING CARE

Mike Leigh may be approaching the end of his extraordinary filmmaking career, but Tender Loving Care suggests that his gaze remains as humane and penetrating as ever. Set in post-Brexit England, the film follows social workers Amy and Rosie as they struggle to care for people abandoned by increasingly fragile institutions. Leigh avoids easy political preaching, instead constructing a mosaic of lives — funny, desperate, stubborn, loving. The performances are superb, the humour wonderfully dry, and the compassion never sentimental. It is, perhaps, a fitting film for a filmmaker who has spent decades insisting that ordinary people are every bit as worthy of our attention as kings, politicians and movie stars.

BITTER CHRISTMAS

Pedro Almodóvar turns the cinema of autofiction inside out in Bitter Christmas, a deliciously complicated hall of mirrors about artists stealing from life — and then discovering that life may have been stealing from them all along. Bárbara Lennie and Leonardo Sbaraglia play filmmakers whose work becomes increasingly entangled with the lives of their friends and collaborators. The result is simultaneously comedy, melodrama, self-parody and confession. NYFF describes it as a meditation on the artist’s relationship with fiction and reality; VIFF calls it a “mischievously meta mea culpa.” Both are right. Almodóvar has spent five decades turning emotional chaos into cinematic colour, and he remains magnificently himself.

THE ONLY LIVING PICKPOCKET IN NEW YORK

There could scarcely be a more New York movie in this collection. John Turturro plays Harry Lehman, an ageing Bronx pickpocket whose profession has become almost obsolete in a cashless, digital city. When a theft goes wrong, Harry finds himself racing through the boroughs trying to repair the damage. Noah Segan’s film is both crime story and elegy — for an older New York, an older kind of movie and an older kind of human connection. NYFF calls it an “elegant love letter to New York.” RogerEbert.com calls it a film attempting to conjure the spirit of an era. It succeeds beautifully.

THE DEBUT

Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut — VIFF 45’s Opening Gala — gives Julianne Moore the kind of role actors live for. She plays Mona, an overlooked middle-aged housewife who impulsively auditions for a community musical and finds herself transformed by the stage. Paul Giamatti plays the theatre director who may be mentor, bully, genius or all three. Eisenberg walks a remarkable line between satire and genuine affection, skewering community theatre while celebrating the strange liberation that can happen when ordinary people suddenly find themselves illuminated by a spotlight. The result is funny, uncomfortable, unexpectedly moving — and a terrific way to open a festival.

NOWHERE TO LAY MY EYES

Hong Sangsoo’s 35th feature is another of those deceptively simple films in which almost nothing happens — and everything happens. A filmmaker returns to Jeju Island to visit her estranged mother, encountering a new stepfamily and the uncomfortable emotional geography of old wounds. Hong’s stripped-down visual style allows the smallest shifts in conversation to become revelations. The film won Best Direction at Locarno, while Kim Min-hee took the festival’s Best Performance prize. At only 72 minutes, it is a miniature Hong Sangsoo masterpiece: awkward, funny, melancholy and quietly profound.

9 TEMPLES TO HEAVEN

Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s feature début takes a simple premise and turns it into a spiritual road movie. After a fortune teller warns that his elderly mother may soon die, Sakol gathers his family and sets out on a pilgrimage to nine Buddhist temples in a single day. The film combines family squabbling, Thai architecture, ritual and mortality with the patient observational style associated with the filmmaker’s mentor, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Selected for Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight and Thailand’s Oscar submission, it is less a conventional narrative than a journey into the sacred and the everyday. A film about death that is, paradoxically, deeply alive.

THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID

Radu Jude’s modern reimagining of Octave Mirbeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid is quintessential Jude: political, mischievous, self-aware and quietly furious. Ana Dumitrașcu plays Gianina, a young Romanian woman working for a wealthy French family while yearning to return to her daughter in Romania. The great twist is that Gianina is also rehearsing the role of a chambermaid in an amateur theatrical adaptation of the very novel whose world she inhabits. Jude turns class resentment into comedy, then lets the comedy curdle. With a 94% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, it is among his more warmly received recent films.

LA GRADIVA

Marine Atlan’s feature debut is one of the great discoveries of Cannes 2026. A school trip takes a group of French teenagers to Naples and Pompeii, where the ancient landscape becomes the backdrop for a contemporary eruption of desire, jealousy, class anxiety and adolescent cruelty. Atlan, working as her own cinematographer, won the Grand Prize at Critics’ Week, and the film’s precision is astonishing. Every glance, gesture and silence seems deliberately placed. What begins as a school trip becomes something closer to a coming-of-age fever dream, in which the ruins of Pompeii become a metaphor for young people discovering that desire can be as dangerous as Vesuvius.

TWO CITIES. ONE CINEMA.

There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about this relationship between New York and Vancouver.

Before streaming. Before the infinite libraries of films available at the touch of a button. Before a movie could cross an ocean without anybody physically touching a film can. There was simply the movie, the screen, the audience — and the people desperately trying to get the movie from one city to another.

New York would see something first.

Vancouver would wait.

Then the reels would arrive, battered and precious, carrying with them the faint romance of another city: Manhattan streets after midnight, Lincoln Center reflected in rain, the conversations in Greenwich Village cafés, the arguments among critics outside a theatre, the whispered conviction that this movie — this particular movie — might be the one everyone remembers.

And now, 45 years after VIFF began, the miracle is that we don’t need to cross the continent to experience that feeling.

The cinema comes here.

It arrives at the Vancouver Playhouse, the Park, the Rio, International Village, the Fifth Avenue, SFU Woodwards, the VIFF Centre. It arrives in the darkness, carried not in steel canisters but in streams of data, transformed once again by the oldest technology of all: a room full of strangers staring together at a rectangle of light.

That is the real romance of VIFF.

New York may have the skyline.

It may have Lincoln Center.

It may have the autumn leaves and the taxis and the midnight screenings and the feeling that somewhere around the corner, Martin Scorsese or Paul Schrader or some impossibly elegant European filmmaker might be sitting at the next table.

But Vancouver has the mountains.

Vancouver has the rain.

And, for eleven days in October, Vancouver has New York.

More precisely, it has the cinema that New York has chosen to embrace.

Twenty-three films crossing the continent. Twenty-three little acts of cinematic diplomacy. Twenty-three reminders that movies have always been travelers, moving from country to country, festival to festival, audience to audience — carrying stories with them like passports.

Once upon a time, those stories traveled in film cans.

Today they travel through fibre-optic cables.

But when the lights go down, nothing has really changed.

There is still a screen.

There is still darkness.

There is still the extraordinary hush that falls over an audience just before the first image appears.

And somewhere, thousands of kilometres away, another audience may be watching the very same image.

New York.

Vancouver.

Two cities separated by a continent, joined by a beam of light.

And for a few glorious weeks each autumn, if you listen carefully enough, you can almost hear Manhattan breathing through the speakers of a Vancouver cinema.

You don’t have to go to New York.

New York has already come to you.

 

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

#VanElxn 2026, #VanPoli Civic Politics, Park Board, Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Development, Vancouver Votes 2026, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.