#VanPoli | VanRamblings Formally ENDORSES Kareem Allam to Become Vancouver’s Next Mayor

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There are moments in the political life of a city when an election becomes about more than choosing a Mayor.

October 17, 2026, is one of those moments.

Vancouver is not simply deciding whether to give Ken Sim and ABC Vancouver another four years. Vancouver is deciding what kind of city it wants to become — and, more importantly, who the city is actually going to work for.

For the past four years, City Hall has too often appeared preoccupied with grand announcements, expensive projects, political theatre and the interests of the well-connected while the everyday infrastructure of neighbourhood life has deteriorated.

Libraries have faced cuts. Community facilities are aging. Swimming pools are disappearing. Parking meters have appeared around community amenities, our beaches, parks and community centres.

Families are struggling with the cost of living. Seniors are wondering where affordable recreation opportunities are going to come from. Young people increasingly question whether they can afford to remain in the city in which they grew up.

The next Mayor of Vancouver should you cast your ballot for Kareem Allam, Vancouver Liberals.

Into that vacuum comes Kareem Allam and the Vancouver Liberals.

There  is a compelling case to be made that Kareem Allam must become Vancouver’s most progressive Mayor in more than half a century.

Not because he comes from the traditional left.

Not because he comes from the traditional right.

But precisely because he doesn’t fit neatly into either category.

Kareem Allam’s political proposition is something Vancouver has desperately needed: a government organized around people rather than ideology.

The Vancouver Liberals’ stated goal is refreshingly straightforward: create a Vancouver where young people can stay, work, build a career and raise a family. Their platform combines affordability, public investment, stronger frontline services, parks and recreation, public safety, accountability and neighbourhood infrastructure.

That is progressive municipal government in its most practical form.

Kareem Allam: The Vancouver Mayor Who Will Get To Work on Day One

For Vancouver voters looking for a Mayor who can begin governing on the morning after the 2026 civic election, rather than spending the first year learning how City Hall works, Kareem Allam presents a compelling case.

The Vancouver Liberals’ Mayoral candidate is not simply a political newcomer with an attractive platform. He is a lifelong Vancouverite who has spent more than 25 years working in and around municipal, provincial and federal governments, working on public policy, Indigenous relations, health care, transportation and infrastructure.

Kareem’s career has given him something that is extraordinarily rare among candidates for municipal office: an understanding of government not merely from the outside, but from inside the machinery of government itself.

Kareem Allam did not enter Vancouver’s 2026 Mayoral race as a political novice. Far from it. Kareem has worked for elected politicians, inside government, in public institutions, on political campaigns and, critically, inside Vancouver’s Mayor’s office itself.

There is no other Mayoral candidate in 2026 who can match his breadth of experience.

Over his 25-year professional life, Kareem Allam has worked in government relations and public affairs, holding positions involving consequential policy areas facing British Columbia: energy, health care, transportation, infrastructure and Indigenous relations.

Kareem Allam worked with the Fraser Health Authority. He served on public and advisory boards. He became Director of Public Policy at the Vancouver Board of Trade. He developed extensive relationships with First Nations and worked on Indigenous economic-development issues.

Vancouver Magazine placed Kareem Allam among British Columbia’s 50 most powerful people, recognizing him as one of the province’s most sought-after political minds.

A Mayor must understand municipal bureaucracy, the Vancouver Charter, budgeting, procurement, zoning, permitting, capital budgets, collective agreements, infrastructure financing, development approvals, labour relations, intergovernmental negotiations, civic infrastructure, regional government, provincial jurisdiction and the relationship between elected officials and the professional bureaucracy.

Kareem Allam has spent his entire professional career learning precisely those systems.

Indeed, it is difficult to identify another 2026 Mayoral candidate who has worked so extensively across the federal, provincial and municipal spheres while also gaining experience inside Vancouver’s own Mayoral office. His career has included government-relations positions, senior policy work, public boards and direct municipal executive experience. He has served on the TransLink screening panel, and other public and advisory bodies. He currently serves on advisory bodies associated with the University of Victoria and Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

The Mayor of the City of Vancouver has to interact with Metro Vancouver.

With TransLink.

With the provincial government.

With Ottawa.

With developers.

With unions.

With neighbourhoods.

With First Nations.

With a bureaucracy employing thousands of people.

And then the Mayor has to get 10 Councillors to agree on what should actually happen.

This is not theory. It is governing.

And Kareem Allam has spent decades learning how to do it.

Kareem Allam’s political career is unusual because he has worked across ideological and partisan boundaries. Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats, civic politicians, business leaders, public servants and Indigenous governments have all been part of his professional world.


In the 2024 British Columbia election, Kareem Allam inspired the NDP campaign for office.

It means Kareem Allam understands that government is not about finding people who agree with you.

It is about finding a way to get things done among people who don’t.

Former B.C. NDP cabinet minister Michelle Mungall joined the campaign back in September as an honourary co-chair, while Arminder Randhawa, a former B.C. NDP executive member and former Vancouver Board of Variance member, has described Kareem Allam as a thoughtful and pragmatic leader who brings people together.

Those are precisely the qualities Vancouver should be looking for.

Vancouver doesn’t need a Mayor who believes governing means announcing initiatives.

Vancouver needs a Mayor who understands implementation.

Consider housing.

Kareem Allam’s approach is revealing. Rather than simply promising to build more housing, he has focused on the regulatory machinery that determines whether housing actually gets built — including municipal permitting, building codes and bureaucratic duplication.

Not to mention which, a core focus of the Vancouver Liberals campaign for office revolves around renewing Vancouver’s commitment to the construction of housing co-operatives across our city, on City-owned land or provincial and federal Crown land, working with the President of the Co-operative Housing Federation of BC — who also happens to be the CEO of the Community Land Trust (CLT) — Thom Armstrong, towards expanding the  already existing, and wildly successful, Community Land Trust programme, while building thousands more of co-operative housing units across our city.

Do you know how much the construction of co-operative housing will cost taxpaypers? Nada, nothing, zero, zilch. Because those groups making application to construct a  housing co-operative will secure funding through a lending institution, the loan backed by the federal government through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

That is the language of someone who understands government.

The problem isn’t always that government doesn’t know what Vancouver needs.

The problem is that government often makes it extraordinarily difficult to deliver it.

Kareem Allam knows where the levers are.

He knows which government controls which lever.

He knows who has to be at the table.

And, having spent years dealing with senior governments, he knows how to pick up the telephone and get the right people on the other end.

Imagine a Mayor walking into City Hall on the first day of his administration already familiar with the bureaucracy, already understanding municipal government, already possessing relationships with provincial and federal officials, already knowing the political terrain and already having spent time inside the Mayor’s office.

That is a fundamentally different proposition from electing someone who will spend the first year learning the job.

The choice facing Vancouver voters is larger than a choice between political parties.

It is a choice between experience and apprenticeship.

Between knowing what government should do and knowing how to get things done.

Between another four years of political theatre and the possibility of a Mayor who can walk into the Mayor’s office on Day One and immediately begin governing.

Vancouver voters can rest assured that Kareem Allam understands the machinery required to turn an idea into policy, policy into a decision, and a decision into something residents can actually see, touch and use.

After the experience of the past four years, that distinction should matter enormously.

Kareem Allam may not be the loudest candidate in the 2026 Vancouver Mayoral race.

He may not be the candidate with the largest political organization.

But he may very well be the best-informed.

And when the doors of City Hall open on the morning after October 17, Vancouver doesn’t need another Mayor learning how to govern.

We need someone who already knows how.

An Affordability Agenda That Actually Reaches People’s Daily Lives

Of all the Mayoral campaigns seeking Vancouver’s vote, Kareem Allam and the Vancouver Liberals have put forward one of the most comprehensive affordability agendas.

Consider something as mundane — and as revealing — as parking.

The Vancouver Liberals would remove parking meters in front of beaches and community centres throughout Vancouver within their first year in office.

That may sound like a small issue.

It isn’t.

For a senior taking a child to a community centre, a parent bringing children to a neighbourhood programme, a family visiting the beach, or someone using a recreation facility because they cannot afford a private gym, another municipal fee can be the difference between participating and staying home.

Public spaces should actually feel public.

Vancouver’s parks and beaches are, for hundreds of thousands of residents, the closest thing they have to a backyard. They are playgrounds, fitness centres, meeting places, swimming areas, outdoor classrooms and places of refuge.

They should not be treated as revenue opportunities.

That philosophy runs through the Vancouver Liberals agenda.

Kareem Allam and the Vancouver Liberals are proposing an historic $1.35 billion investment in parks, recreation, pools and community infrastructure, accompanied by 400 new unionized frontline workers. The party explicitly argues that investing in parks, libraries and community spaces is part of creating safer neighbourhoods.

This is an important departure from the simplistic notion that public safety begins and ends with policing.

Of course Vancouver needs police.

But a child who has a safe place to play, a teenager who has somewhere to go after school, a senior who has an affordable fitness programme, a family with a functioning community and recreation centre nearby, and a neighbourhood with a well-maintained park with facilities in the park are all components of a safer city.

Community infrastructure is crime prevention infrastructure.

Fix The Community Centres — And Stop Governing Through Neglect

The Auditor General has already identified a serious problem.

A 2025 audit by Vancouver’s auditor general, Mike Macdonnell, found that Vancouver’s 24 recreation facilities face an infrastructure funding deficit of approximately $33 million a year, with many building systems already extended beyond their intended useful life.

That is not an abstract accounting problem.

It is what happens when a city delays maintenance until maintenance becomes reconstruction.

Kareem Allam understands this.

The Vancouver Liberals are proposing major investment in community centres, pools and parks rather than allowing these facilities to continue deteriorating. Kareem Allam has argued that failing to invest in capital infrastructure actually drives up operating costs because aging buildings become more expensive to maintain.

That is precisely the kind of municipal economics Vancouver needs.

Spend money where it makes people’s lives better.

Repair what is broken.

Build what communities need.

And stop confusing expensive government with effective government.

Vancouver Needs Community Pools In Every Neighbourhood

Perhaps nowhere is the difference between the Vancouver Liberals vision and the ABC vision more obvious than swimming pools.

The Vancouver Liberals have committed to a 50-metre pool, rather than accepting a 25-metre replacement for the Vancouver Aquatic Centre. Their platform argues that Vancouver already has among the lowest levels of public swimming-pool provision per capita in Canada.

Why should Vancouver settle for less?

A city of more than 600,000 people should be building recreation infrastructure for the next generation, not shrinking its ambitions to fit yesterday’s budget.

Kareem Allam’s agenda also envisions additional neighbourhood pools and water parks, including a long-overdue community pool in Mount Pleasant.

This is what a programme for the people actually looks like.

It looks like children learning to swim.

It looks like seniors exercising.

It looks like families having somewhere affordable to spend an afternoon.

It looks like hockey rinks, libraries, community centres and parks that are maintained, accessible and welcoming.

It looks remarkably like the kind of people-centred municipal agenda that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has brought to the international political conversation.

Save the Park Board, Restore the Park Board, Fund the Park Board

The Vancouver Liberals unapologetically defend Vancouver’s elected Park Board.

They argue that Vancouver needs a strong, independent and properly funded Park Board — not its elimination.

That is about more than institutional nostalgia.

The Park Board represents an important democratic principle: Vancouver’s parks belong to Vancouverites.

Restoring stable funding for parks and recreation means acknowledging that these services are not luxuries.

They are municipal necessities.

Did you know that prior to Vision Vancouver being elected to City Hall in 2008, that Vancouver spent 19.3% of the city budget on our parks and recreation system? In 2026, that figure has fallen to an unconscionable 7.9%. No wonder our parks look so neglected, and our community centres have been allowed to fall into a state of disrepair.

The $1.35-billion Vancouver Liberals commitment would give the city an opportunity to address the accumulated infrastructure deficit while creating better parks, pools, community centres and recreational opportunities across all 23 neighbourhoods.

Finish What Vancouver Civic Governments Have Already Promised

A re-imagined Marpole Community Centre approved in a 2008 Capital Expenditure referendum. Not complete more than 18 years later. Only the Vancouver Liberals will complete the project.

There is another essential principle here: if government makes a commitment to a neighbourhood, government should keep it.

The long-planned renewal of the Marpole Community Centre is finally under construction, with completion expected early to mid 2027. The project will provide a renewed centre, childcare, a field house and new outdoor amenities.

But Vancouver’s broader history is filled with promises that have taken far too long to become reality.

A Vancouver Liberals administration would adopt a rule:

No more indefinite delays.

Where projects have been approved, promised or negotiated — as they were when voters went to the polls to approve the proposed Capital Expenditure budget, in 2008, 2011, 2014, 2018 and 2022 — residents deserve a clear timetable, transparent financing and a government prepared to get the work done.

That includes ensuring that the community amenities associated with major developments actually materialize.

At Oakridge Park, QuadReal and Westbank are responsible for a major redevelopment that includes a community centre, library, performance area and childcare.

At River District, Wesgroup’s long-term plan includes a community centre as an important public amenity.

A government led by Kareem Allam would insist developers honour those commitments.

That is not anti-development.

It is pro-community development.

Food Security is Affordability, and Necessary in the City of Vancouver

Perhaps one of the most innovative elements of the Vancouver Liberals agenda is the proposed Food Hub Programme.

As VanRamblings has previously reported, Kareem Allam’s food-security vision draws inspiration from the University of British Columbia’s Community Food Hub, where the Food Hub Market operates as a not-for-profit community space offering affordable groceries and culturally diverse foods.

The concept is deceptively simple.

Use public resources and partnerships to make nutritious food more affordable.

Create neighbourhood-based food hubs.

Connect residents with community organizations.

Make food security part of a civic affordability policy rather than treating hunger exclusively as a charitable problem.

That matters because food insecurity is not confined to people without jobs.

It increasingly affects working families, students, seniors and people whose incomes simply cannot keep pace with Vancouver’s extraordinary cost of living.

Food security is affordability.

And affordability is the defining municipal issue of 2026.

A Vancouver Liberal Commitment: Taxes People Can Actually Afford 

Kareem Allam has committed to limiting annual property-tax increases to the rate of inflation, or less, per year.

That is an important commitment because Vancouver citizens deserve predictability.

Under Ken Sim’s ABC Vancouver, the Vancouver Liberals point out, property taxes have risen by 26%. Kareem Allam has argued that the city’s budget grew from approximately $1.7 billion when Sim inherited it to approximately $2.4 billion, without a corresponding improvement in frontline services.

The question Vancouver voters should be asking is simple:

If taxes keep rising, where is the improvement in our daily lives?

Kareem Allam’s answer is to redirect spending toward frontline workers and core services.

Four hundred new frontline employees.

Better garbage collection.

Better road maintenance.

Ban Bitcoin cryptocurrency ATMs on the DTES and take the fight to the drug dealers — not the street level drug dealers, but their suppliers;

Develop a methamphetamine — the leading cause of violent incidents that puts people at risk — strategy, just like Premier Wab Kinew has done in Manitoba (a plan that is working!);

Address homelessness in a humane and caring manner consistent with the values of the vast majority of us who call Vancouver home;

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);

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.

Better parks.

Better recreation facilities.

Better basic services.

No property taxes levied on medical centres.

Downsize a bloated middle management bureaucracy at Vancouver City Hall (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!);

That is not austerity.

It is prioritization.

A City Hall That Isn’t Afraid of But Actually Welcomes the Public

A progressive government must also be a transparent government.

The Vancouver Liberals have proposed cheaper public access to government records, a stronger Integrity Commissioner and greater accountability at City Hall.

That should include reducing or eliminating Freedom of Information fees for journalists and members of the public wherever possible.

Government records belong to the public.

Journalists should not have to fight City Hall to discover what City Hall is doing.

And citizens should not have to pay excessive fees to learn how their own government spends their money.

Transparency isn’t an administrative courtesy.

It is democracy.

Even The Rats Living in Our Neighbourhoods Are Telling us Something

And then there is the rat problem.

Yes, the rat problem.

The Vancouver Liberals have made tackling Vancouver’s growing rodent infestation a public-health priority, proposing a blue-ribbon panel of experts to develop a comprehensive strategy.

It might sound almost comical.

It isn’t.

A city that cannot keep its streets, parks and public spaces clean and safe cannot call itself well governed.

The rat problem is about sanitation, waste management, infrastructure, construction practices and public health.

Sometimes the most progressive thing government can do is simply do the basics properly.

The Remarkable Coalition Allam’s Vancouver Liberals Have Built

Perhaps the strongest argument for Kareem Allam is not simply his platform.

It is the coalition he has built.

The Vancouver Liberals are attempting something Vancouver civic politics has rarely seen: bringing together people from dramatically different political traditions around a shared municipal agenda.

Their candidates include people with labour and NDP backgrounds, progressive activists, businesspeople, academics, former BC Liberals and former Conservatives.

Jessica Walton, for example, brings years of feminist, environmental, labour and political activism to the campaign, along with experience as a BCGEU shop steward and frontline government worker. Mention should also be made that Jessica Walton was recently endorsed by Unite Here Local 40, one of Vancouver’s most progressive unions.

John Coupar brings 11 years of Park Board experience and a long record of advocacy for Vancouver’s parks and cultural institutions.

And the coalition continues to expand.

On August 27, former BC NDP cabinet minister Michelle Mungall and former BC NDP executive member Arminder Randhawa were announced as honorary co-chairs of the campaign. Ms. Mungall served as B.C.’s Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources under John Horgan, while Ms. Randhawa has extensive experience in municipal politics and advocacy concerning intimate-partner violence, policing and women’s and children’s safety.

Their presence says something important.

This isn’t simply another ideological faction fighting another ideological faction.

It is an attempt to build a unity government for Vancouver.

As Ms. Mungall put it, she was impressed by Kareem Allam’s emphasis on frontline workers and by the work ethic of the candidates.

Ms. Randhawa described Mr. Allam as a pragmatic leader who brings people together.

And that may be precisely what Vancouver needs.

A Municipal Government of Civic Reconciliation and Unity

Vancouver is an extraordinarily diverse city.

Vancouver Liberal Armor Valor of Filipino descent running for a seat on City Council

The 2021 Census counted 38,605 Filipino residents in the City of Vancouver alone, while Filipino Canadians represented the third-largest racialized group in the Vancouver census metropolitan area.

That diversity deserves political representation.

But reconciliation also means something larger than ethnicity.

It means reconciling competing political traditions.

Labour and business.

Progressives and conservatives.

Social democrats and Liberals.

Immigrants and people whose families have lived here for generations.

Young people and seniors.

Renters and homeowners.

Downtown residents and suburban neighbourhoods.

People who disagree profoundly about politics but agree that Vancouver should be affordable, safe, clean, vibrant and welcoming.

That is the Vancouver Liberals experiment.

And it is a worthwhile experiment.

Why Kareem Allam Needs a Majority at Vancouver City Hall

But there is a final point Vancouver voters need to understand.

Electing Kareem Allam as Mayor will not be enough.

If Vancouver wants the programme described above — the pools, community centres, parks, food hubs, frontline workers, public-space investments, tax discipline, transparency reforms and neighbourhood improvements — Kareem Allam needs Councillors and Park Board Commissioners who share that agenda.

A Mayor Kareem Allam cannot govern alone.

A Mayor Kareem Allam needs a Council capable of passing budgets.

A Mayor Kareem Allam needs Park Board Commissioners committed to rebuilding Vancouver’s recreation system.

A Mayor Kareem Allam needs School Board trustees who understand the needs of families and children.

And a Mayor Kareem Allam needs a political team capable of turning campaign promises into municipal policy.

That is why Vancouver needs to elect a majority Vancouver Liberal civic administration on October 17.

This is not about giving Kareem Allam a blank cheque.

Quite the opposite.

It is about giving Vancouver voters the opportunity to hold an entire governing team accountable for a coherent programme.

For too long, Vancouver has been governed through fragmented politics, institutional conflict and competing agendas.

Kareem Allam is offering something different.

A plan.

A team.

A coalition.

And, most importantly, a willingness to govern.

Vancouver’s Choice: Vote Kareem Allam and the Vancouver Liberals

The choice facing Vancouver on October 17 could hardly be clearer.

One path leads back to four more years of the politics and priorities of the past four years.

The other asks Vancouver to try something fundamentally different.

A city where parks are treated as public assets rather than revenue opportunities.

A city where libraries are strengthened rather than diminished.

A city where community centres are repaired before they become catastrophes.

A city where children have swimming pools.

A city where seniors have affordable recreation.

A city where seniors and persons with disabilities can traverse our crumbling and uneven sidewalks, as a Vancouver Liberals administration — working with all of the elected on Vancouver City Council — will embark on a programme to renew sidewalks across the city.

A city where families can buy groceries without being pushed to the edge.

A city where property taxes are predictable, at or below inflation.

A city where developers are required to deliver the amenities they promised.

A city where City Hall welcomes scrutiny rather than resists it.


Jettisoned by Ken Sim / ABC in 2022, Kareem Allam will renew the ‘Healthy City for All’ initiative

A city where public safety means police, yes — but also clean streets, functioning neighbourhoods, recreation, mental-health services, public spaces and communities in which people actually know one another.

A city where government works for the people who live here.

That is why Kareem Allam represents something larger than another Mayoral candidacy.

Kareem Allam represents the possibility of a progressive, pragmatic, people-first government that breaks with the politics of the past half-century.

The Vancouver Liberals are not perfect. No political party is.

But in 2026, they have something increasingly rare in municipal politics:

An Action Plan That Will Transform Vancouver Into a Livable City

And on October 17, Vancouver voters have an opportunity to put that plan into action.

If Vancouver wants the change we so desperately need, we cannot settle for changing the Mayor while leaving the political machinery of City Hall essentially unchanged.

Vancouver needs a government capable of delivering.

We need a government willing to invest in people.

We need a government willing to listen.

We need a government willing to cross partisan boundaries rather than deepen them.

We need a government that believes public spaces belong to the public.

We need a government that understands that affordability is not a slogan but something measured in grocery bills, parking fees, property taxes, recreation fees and whether a family can afford to stay in the city it calls home.

And above all, Vancouver needs a Mayor who understands that government exists to serve the public — not the other way around.

That Mayor of Vancouver, in 2026, should and must be Kareem Allam.

And the government he needs with him is a majority Vancouver Liberal administration.

October 17 is Vancouver’s opportunity to choose a different future.

Vote for Kareem Allam.

Vote Vancouver Liberal. And give Vancouver the government we have all been waiting for.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗩𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗼𝘂𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗟𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗘𝗧𝗧𝗘𝗥 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 2026 𝗩𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗼𝘂𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗮𝗹 𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 ONLY 𝗰𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗰 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘆 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝗮 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿, 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗱𝗱𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗳𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗩𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗼𝘂𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗮 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗹𝘂𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆.

#TogetherWeCan

#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

#VanElxn 2026, #VanPoli Civic Politics, Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Liberals, Vancouver Votes 2026, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.