Tag Archives: Palme d’Or

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

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Fjord

Fjord — A Moral Avalanche at the End of the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is something almost spiritual about the film, too.

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

This is cinema that refuses complacency.

It watches. It waits. It tightens the screws.

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

Fjord is not merely a Palme d’Or winner.

It is a moral earthquake.

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

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

Club Kid

Club Kid — Jordan Firstman Finds the Heart Beneath the Glitter

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

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

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

And somehow, it works.

Indeed, it works gloriously.

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

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

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

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

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

And then there is the film’s unabashed sweetness.

That may be Club Kid’s greatest surprise.

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

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

Club Kid wants us to believe people can change.

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

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

He has made us feel.

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

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

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

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

Nothing to do?

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

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

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

Enough of that.

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

The problem is deciding what you can possibly miss.

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

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

The Galas and Special Presentations

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

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

THE PALME D’OR COMES TO VANCOUVER

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

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

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

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

Thank God.

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

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

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

THEN THINGS GET DARK

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

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

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

This is a movie about betrayal.

But it is also about power.

And corruption.

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

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

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

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

PAWLIKOWSKI’S POSTWAR EUROPE

Then there’s Fatherland, from Paweł Pawlikowski.

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

Fatherland may be his most explicitly historical film.

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

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

The subject is Germany.

But the questions are universal:

What does it mean to return home?

What does it mean to be complicit?

Can a country reckon with its past without rewriting it?

And can a family?

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

Put this one on your calendar.

CANNES ALSO GAVE US CLUB KID

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

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

Cue chaos.

The premise sounds like the setup for a Hollywood comedy.

Firstman has something considerably stranger in mind.

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

Cannes embraced it.

VanRamblings suspects Vancouver will too.

And this is where the great pleasure of VIFF begins.

You come for the Palme d’Or winner.

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

MIKE LEIGH’S POSSIBLE FAREWELL

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

Tender Loving Care, from Mike Leigh.

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

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

Funny.

Sad.

Tender.

Sometimes all three at once.

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

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

VIFF is giving audiences several opportunities to see it.

HELLO, OSCARS

And now we arrive at the annual VIFF parlor game:

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

The answer, of course, is that nobody knows.

But that doesn’t stop us from having fun.

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

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

It sounds funny.

It also sounds increasingly unhinged.

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

VanRamblings is not predicting an Oscar nomination.

We’re just saying watch Julianne Moore.

There is a difference.

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

1986 Queens.

Two brothers.

A Russian criminal syndicate.

Family.

Loyalty.

Ambition.

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

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

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

Paper Tiger looks like classic Gray territory.

And that is very good news indeed.

DON’T IGNORE THE FILMS MADE HERE

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

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

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

This is precisely why VIFF matters to this city.

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

We are making movies that belong to the world.

Whatcha Want is one of them.

AND THEN THERE ARE ALL THE OTHER MOVIES

Here’s the thing.

We could keep going.

And going.

And going.

Because the Special Presentations are only one part of VIFF.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is Lukas Dhont’s Coward.

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

That is before we even leave the Gala section.

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

In other words:

Bring comfortable shoes.

DON’T FORGET THE SHORTS

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

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

These are not cinematic leftovers.

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

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

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

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

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

AND VIFF IS MORE THAN MOVIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It doesn’t.

Cinema is music.

Cinema is performance.

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

Cinema is culture.

HOW TO SURVIVE VIFF

Now for the boring but necessary part.

Tickets are on sale now.

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

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

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

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

That is important.

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

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

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

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

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

VanRamblings’ advice is even simpler:

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

Vancouver traffic has no respect for cinema.

WHERE TO GO

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

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

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

The geographic spread is actually part of the fun.

International Village means Chinatown is downstairs and around the corner.

The Rio puts you in the middle of Commercial Drive.

The Park gives you Cambie.

Granville Island gives you, well, Granville Island.

The Cinematheque puts you downtown.

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

And all of these neighbourhoods offer food.

Lots of it.

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

It is the festival.

Go for dim sum.

Grab coffee.

Have dinner.

Argue about whether the ending worked.

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

That’s the point.

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

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

THE REAL REASON TO GO

You can attend VIFF because Fjord won Cannes.

You can attend because Pawlikowski won Best Director.

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

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

You can attend because Mike Leigh may be saying goodbye.

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

But those aren’t really the reasons to go.

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

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

Netflix knows what it thinks you want.

YouTube knows what it thinks you want.

Spotify knows what it thinks you want.

VIFF doesn’t care.

VIFF says:

Here. Watch this.

And sometimes the movie is magnificent.

Sometimes it’s infuriating.

Sometimes it’s boring.

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

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

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

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

It becomes a meeting place.

A Romanian filmmaker meets a Vancouver audience.

A Japanese filmmaker meets a Canadian family.

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

A Russian film asks uncomfortable questions about power.

A Korean film makes us laugh.

A Norwegian story makes us reconsider tolerance.

A Vancouver filmmaker tells a Hong Kong story.

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

Someone cries.

Someone applauds.

Someone hates the movie.

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

And for those two hours, none of that matters.

The lights go down.

The world comes in.

We sit together in the dark.

Borders disappear.

Languages cease to be barriers.

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

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

And that is the real gift of VIFF.

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

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

So forget the rain.

Forget the traffic.

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

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

Take the SkyTrain.

Walk into a theatre.

Sit down beside a stranger.

And let the lights go down.

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

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

#VIFF2026 | Galas and Special Presentations. Pt. 1

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Each year in their programme, the Vancouver International Film Festival sets out in their programme feature presentations representing the best of world cinema, films that have garnered awards at the Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Tribeca and other prestigious films that will, in the months to come, enter the Oscar race and earn both critical acclaim across North America, and audience love upon arriving on our shores at VIFF 2026.

Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or–winning Fjord, a morally knotty drama about the limits of tolerance

Here’s what VIFF has to say: Representing the year’s most acclaimed and accomplished cinema, our Special Presentations offer a dizzying array of experiences.

Beyond Cristian Mungiu’s riveting Palme D’Or winner, this year’s Cannes imports are highlighted by the precision of Paweł Pawlikowski, the poetry of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, and two stirring wartime romances. Lee Chang-dong makes his long-awaited return with a characteristically complex investigation of Korean society, while Mike Leigh cements his legacy as one of the greatest humanist filmmakers with what is likely his swansong.

Enthralling performances abound throughout the selection, highlighted by the incomparable Sandra Hüller demonstrating her prowess with two stunning performances.

This year’s VIFF 45 Galas and Special Presentations programme, an integral element of the Festival programme, once again emerges as must-see cinema.

When Mona Friedman (Julianne Moore) is cast in a bit part at a small community theatre, she transforms from a shy, unassuming housewife into a zealous method actor willing to do anything to protect the artistic integrity of her marginal role — even if it means waging war against the show’s domineering director (Paul Giamatti).

Directed by Jesse Eiesenberg.

Opening Gala Film
The Debut

Thu Oct 01, 5:45 pm
Vancouver Playhouse
Book Tickets

Director Rodrigo Sorogoyen (The Beasts, VIFF 2022) took Cannes by storm this year with The Beloved, which tells the story of acclaimed film director Esteban Martínez (Javier Bardem), a legend both for his films and for his past marked by violence and excess. For his new project, he offers his daughter Emilia (Victoria Luengo) a role under the pretext of helping her with her stalled acting career. Living together on set will foster a closeness they haven’t shared for years, but it will also re-open old wounds that never healed.

The Beloved

Thu, Oct 01, 6:00 pm
The Rio Theatre
Standby tickets only

Mon., Oct 05, 6:00 pm
The Park Theatre
Standby tickets only

Sat, Oct 10, 9:30 pm
Vancouver Playhouse
Book Tickets

Amy is a devoted social service worker who puts her heart and soul into her job to care for those in need. At home, however, she finds herself confronting new challenges as her beloved father begins to show the early signs of dementia, and she and her mother must begin to make peace with their new reality.

Through it all, Amy finds comfort, perspective, and plenty of laughter through sips of wine with her lifelong friend Rosie, whose warmth and wit become a vital anchor as both women navigate the shifting rhythms of approaching middle age

Tender Loving Care

Thu, Oct 01, 6:30 pm
The Park Theatre
Standby tickets only

Sun, Oct 04, 11:00 am
Vancouver Playhouse

Sun, Oct 11, 6:00 pm
Vancouver Playhouse
Book Tickets

Harry Lehman (John Turturro) is an aging pickpocket who plies his trade with ever-diminishing returns in a drastically changed New York. Wallets stuffed with cash have been replaced by easily canceled credit cards, and Harry struggles to make ends meet as he cares for his disabled wife, Rosie. When he unwittingly purloins and fences a valuable USB stick, Harry finds himself in a race against time to return the loot or face the rage of a vengeful crime family. Oscar bound. John Turturro is a lock for a Best Actor Oscar nomination.

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York

Thu Oct 01, 9:30 pm
Vancouver Playhouse
Book now. Limited availability

Tues, Oct 06 5:45 pm
The Rio Theatre
Standby tickets only

Sat.,Oct 10, 11:00 am
Vancouver Playhouse
Book Tickets

Writer-director Cristian Mungiu has made a slow-burn provocation that knows exactly which buttons it is pressing — yet which also grapples with the thorny issues it raises, from the limits and contradictions of multiculturalism to public sector careerism, with an unflinching moral seriousness. The two-and-a-half-hour result is riveting, acted with careworn nuance down the line by an excellent ensemble, yawing this way and that in terms of narrative and emotional momentum, even as we sense early on that no clear, cathartic resolution will ever be forthcoming. A triumphant film that tugs at the spiritual and soulful in all of us, regardless of nation, creed, faith, or the rejection of all three.

Fjord

Fri Oct 02, 5:15 pm
Vancouver Playhouse

Wed, Oct 07, 9:00 pm
Vancouver Playhouse
Book Tickets

Mina Shum returns to feature filmmaking with Whatcha Want, a Vancouver-set drama that will screen at the 45th annual Vancouver International Film Festival. The film stars Isabella Wei (Bridgerton) as Yin Tse, a young woman transplanted from Hong Kong to Vancouver on a temporary visa.

Yin appears to have everything: a wealthy husband, a privileged lifestyle and all the material comforts money can buy. But her marriage has become a gilded cage. When she discovers her husband’s infidelity, Yin reconnects with something she had left behind — her love of dance. She meets Penny (Helen Dang), owner of a dance studio, who encourages her to train for an audition at an elite dance programme. When Yin’s husband returns from Hong Kong intent on reclaiming the life they had, she must decide whether to remain financially comfortable or pursue independence and self-expression.

The impressive ensemble includes Ming-Na Wen, Tzi Ma, Helen Dang, Russell Lee and Hugh Tran, with Wen and Ma bringing considerable screen experience to the production. Shum herself wrote the screenplay, as well as directing and producing the film.

Why did Shum choose Whatcha Want as her comeback film? The answer appears to lie in its themes. After Meditation Park in 2017, Shum’s first narrative feature in nearly a decade returns to the territory she knows best: Asian-Canadian identity, women seeking independence and the complicated experience of finding oneself between cultures. But Whatcha Want adds something new — hip-hop and dance as vehicles for liberation. Shum has described her filmmaking career through stories of Asian-Canadian women negotiating family, culture and identity; this time, she gives that struggle a physical language: movement.

Whatcha Want

Fri October 02, 6:30 pm
The Park Theatre

Wed., Oct 07, 9:00 pm
Fifth Avenue Cinema – 19+ only

Sun, Oct 11, 3:30 pm
The Rio Theatre
Book Tickets

Return next Friday for Part 2 of VanRamblings’ presentation of the Galas and Special Presentations films that represent a critical element of VIFF 45.

At the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, A New Cultural World Order Emerged

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The Boulevard De La Croisette at the Palais des Festivals, during the 79th annual Cannes Film Festival  

The Cannes Film Festival has never been the Oscars.

For most of its history, Cannes existed in a parallel cinematic universe: a place where auteurs were celebrated, formal experimentation rewarded, and films destined for repertory cinemas received standing ovations from critics long before mainstream audiences had even heard of them. Winning the Palme d’Or once meant prestige rather than popularity.

Yet the gap between Cannes and Hollywood continues to narrow.

The 79th Cannes Film Festival was, at first glance, a quieter edition than many in recent years. There were fewer major studio titles, fewer headline-grabbing celebrities, and a competition lineup that lacked the immediate excitement of some previous festivals. But beneath that apparent calm, Cannes once again demonstrated its ability to identify the artistic, cultural, and commercial currents that will shape cinema over the coming year.

Three themes emerged from the Croisette in 2026: the continued rise of LGBTQ+ storytelling, the growing strength of Japanese cinema, and the enduring vitality of Spanish-language filmmaking.

Queer cinema was unquestionably the dominant force at this year’s festival.

The most discussed films in competition centered on LGBTQ+ characters and experiences, reflecting an industry increasingly willing to place queer stories at the centre rather than the margins of contemporary filmmaking.

Among the standouts was Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love, starring Rami Malek as a gay performance artist navigating New York’s AIDS crisis during the 1980s. The film earned one of the festival’s most enthusiastic receptions and immediately positioned Malek as a potential awards-season contender. Rather than revisiting familiar tragedy, Sachs crafts an intimate story on love, creativity, desire, and mortality.

Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont continued his remarkable ascent with Coward, a World War I drama exploring forbidden love amid the horrors of trench warfare. Following the success of Girl and Close, Dhont delivered another emotionally devastating examination of identity and human connection.

Perhaps no film generated more passion than La Bola Negra from Spanish directing duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi. Spanning generations of queer men from the Spanish Civil War to the present day, the film received the festival’s longest standing ovation, emerging as one of the festival’s most acclaimed titles.

The prominence of these films suggests something larger than a passing trend. Queer stories are no longer being treated as niche programming. They have become central to contemporary cinema’s understanding of history, memory, identity, and social change.

Equally notable was the extraordinary presence of Japanese cinema.

Few national film industries are currently operating with the artistic confidence and commercial momentum found in Japan. The country’s box office revenues reached record levels in 2025, while production volume climbed to historic highs. That energy was clearly visible at Cannes.

Palme d’Or winner Hirokazu Kore-eda returned to competition with Sheep in the Box, another nuanced exploration of family relationships.

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, whose Drive My Car became a global phenomenon, presented All of a Sudden, a thoughtful examination of friendship and emotional intimacy.

Meanwhile, Koji Fukada competed with Nagi Notes, continuing his reputation as one of Japan’s most perceptive contemporary directors.

Although stylistically distinct, all three films explored themes of family, loneliness, companionship, and human connection. Their collective presence underscored Japan’s position as one of the most important creative centres in world cinema.

Three Films in Competition, a Thriving Box Office and the Envy of Europe: Spain Is Having Its Moment

Spanish cinema also enjoyed an exceptionally strong year.

From Almodóvar to a new generation of auteurs, Spain arrived at Cannes 2026 in historic fashion — and the industry behind it has never been in better shape: “Spanish cinema is in a very exceptional situation right now.”

Beyond the acclaim received by La Bola Negra, Spanish-language filmmaking demonstrated a remarkable ability to combine artistic ambition with emotional accessibility. The result was a slate of films that connected with critics while remaining accessible to broader audiences.

Director Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s new film, The Beloved (El Ser Querido), joined Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad) and Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s La Bola Negra in an unprecedented three-film representation of Spain in this year’s Official Competition at Cannes.

That balance increasingly defines the modern Cannes success story.

The Cannes Film Festival is no longer merely a launching pad for challenging art-house films. It has become a marketplace where prestige, commercial potential, and awards-season momentum intersect.

Several titles emerged from Cannes as serious Oscar contenders.

One of the festival’s biggest acquisitions came when independent distributor A24 purchased Club Kid for a reported $17 million. Directed by and starring Jordan Firstman, the film follows a gay nightclub promoter who unexpectedly discovers he has a son. What might have sounded like a modest independent comedy became one of the festival’s biggest crowd-pleasers, demonstrating once again that audiences remain hungry for character-driven storytelling.


Scenes from James Gray’s Paper Tiger, starring Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver and Miles Teller

Scarlett Johansson generated strong reviews for James Gray’s Paper Tiger, while Léa Seydoux enjoyed a particularly successful festival with appearances in both The Unknown and Gentle Monster. Each performance strengthened their standing as potential awards-season players.

Elsewhere, veteran auteurs returned with films that may finally bridge the gap between Cannes prestige and Academy recognition.


Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes last month. Certain to feature in the upcoming Oscar race.

Romanian director Cristian Mungiu captured the Palme d’Or with Fjord, a provocative examination of religious intolerance featuring acclaimed performances from Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve.

Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev earned the Grand Prix for Minotaur, while Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski returned with Fatherland, a postwar road movie featuring another standout performance from Sandra Hüller.

Together, these films reinforced Cannes’ unique role in the cinematic ecosystem. The festival remains a place where future Oscar nominees are discovered, where international auteurs launch their next projects, and where global film culture takes stock of itself.

As the lights dimmed along the Croisette and the crowds drifted away from the Palais, what lingered was not the memory of celebrity sightings or red-carpet spectacle. It was the sense of cinema looking outward once again — toward different cultures, different identities, different ways of seeing the world.

The strongest films at Cannes this year were united not by style or genre, but by curiosity. They crossed borders of language, history, sexuality, and geography in search of common human experience.

And perhaps that is the enduring lesson of Cannes.

Every May, the festival gathers stories from every corner of the world and projects them onto a single screen facing the Mediterranean Sea.

For a brief moment, cinema becomes a conversation between strangers. Japanese families, Spanish lovers, queer artists, wartime dreamers, and lonely souls all share the same flickering light. The waves continue to lap against the shoreline, the projectors fall silent, and the stars eventually depart.

But the stories remain, carried home across oceans and continents, waiting for audiences everywhere to discover them.