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#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.

#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. 2

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If the first instalment of VanRamblings’ look at the 45th Vancouver International Film Festival was about the sheer breadth of cinema arriving in Vancouver, Galas & Special Presentations is where the festival’s glamour, ambition and awards-season muscle really begin to show.

This is the section for the films that have already made noise somewhere else — at Cannes, Telluride, Venice — or at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals. It is where filmmakers with Oscars, Palme d’Ors, Golden Globes and cinematic credibility share the screen with first-time directors whose careers may be about to explode.

And there is an extraordinary amount of talent here.

Pedro Almodóvar returns with Bitter Christmas. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi follows his Oscar-winning Drive My Car with the three-hour All of a Sudden. Paweł Pawlikowski, whose Ida won the Oscar  for Best Foreign Language Film and whose Cold War earned three Oscar nominations, arrives with Fatherland. And Andrey Zvyagintsev — director of Leviathan and Loveless — returns after a lengthy absence with Minotaur, winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes 2026.

Then there is James Gray’s Paper Tiger, starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller; Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky, the true story behind the making of Rocky; and Bassam Tariq’s ferocious Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, starring two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali.

And finally there is Club Kid, the movie that arrived at Cannes unknown and promptly became one of the festival’s genuine discoveries. Jordan Firstman’s exuberant feature debut was embraced as a surprisingly tender story of redemption, parenthood and queer millennial life. VIFF itself calls it a “wondrous triumph at Cannes.”

What makes this year’s Galas and Special Presentations programme particularly exciting is the way Vancouver sits almost perfectly in the middle of the international festival calendar. Several of these films have already survived Cannes. Some have just passed through Telluride or Venice. Others are opening or playing at TIFF as you read this. Several will move on to New York later this month.

In other words, VIFF 45 isn’t merely showing movies.

It is showing us the movies that the rest of the world is already talking about.

Club Kid — Jordan Firstman

If there is one film in this section that feels tailor-made for the festival moment, it is Club Kid. Jordan Firstman writes, directs and stars as Peter, a washed-up New York party promoter whose hedonistic existence is abruptly interrupted when the 10-year-old son he never knew he had arrives in his life following the death of the boy’s mother. Cara Delevingne, Diego Calva and newcomer Reggie Absolom co-star.

Firstman arrives as a genuine cinematic wild card. A social-media phenomenon during the pandemic, he appeared in Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun and more recently in I Love LA. Club Kid is his feature directing début, shot on 35mm on a relatively tight budget.

Cannes responded enthusiastically, with Vogue calling it a rare bright spot in a notably serious competition and praising its emotional heft. It was nominated for the Caméra d’Or and Queer Palm, and subsequently played Telluride — hardly a bad place to begin an Oscar-season journey.

The film is also playing TIFF and will screen at the New York Film Festival in October. If there is a breakout indie here, this may be it.

Minotaur — Andrey Zvyagintsev

Few directors have returned to the international stage with quite the force of Andrey Zvyagintsev. Minotaur is his first film in a decade, his first made outside Russia, a politically charged drama about corruption, violence and moral collapse during wartime Russia.

The Cannes reaction was formidable: Minotaur won the Grand Prix, the festival’s second-highest prize. Zvyagintsev is hardly an unknown quantity. The Return won the Golden Lion at Venice; Leviathan won Cannes’ Best Screenplay and received an Oscar nomination; Loveless won Cannes’ Jury Prize and also received an Academy Award nomination.

This is serious awards-season territory. The film also appeared at Telluride and is part of the New York Film Festival’s 2026 Main Slate.

Fatherland — Paweł Pawlikowski

Pawlikowski’s Fatherland is another Cannes heavyweight. Sandra Hüller and Hanns Zischler portray Erika and Thomas Mann as father and daughter travelling across post-war Germany in 1949, confronting a divided country and an even more fractured family.

The film won Pawlikowski the Cannes Best Director prize, shared with another filmmaker, continuing a remarkable run that includes Ida and Cold War.

Hüller — Oscar-nominated for Anatomy of a Fall — gives the film another awards-season calling card. Fatherland screened at Telluride and will play New York’s festival.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother — Bassam Tariq

Mahershala Ali plays a devout hitman whose wife’s sudden death thrusts him into single parenthood while putting him on a collision course with a far-right religious leader, played by John Cho. Giancarlo Esposito also stars.

It is an audacious follow-up for Bassam Tariq, whose Mogul Mowgli won the International Critics Prize at Berlin and earned a BAFTA nomination. His documentary Ghosts of Sugar Land also won the Sundance Short Film Jury Prize.

The film is a TIFF Special Presentation, giving it an important early North American awards platform, and Tariq is receiving TIFF’s Rising Talent Award.

Ali already owns two Oscars, this is one of VIFF’s clearest potential acting-season titles.

I Play Rocky — Peter Farrelly

Peter Farrelly, the Oscar-winning director of Green Book, turns to the  true story of how an unknown Sylvester Stallone fought to write, star in and get Rocky made.

Anthony Ippolito plays Stallone, with Stephan James, AnnaSophia Robb and Matt Dillon among the supporting cast. Amazon MGM describes it as the story of Stallone fighting to bring his screenplay to the screen — and insisting that he play Rocky himself.

The film had its world première at TIFF, making Toronto its first major awards-season test. And with the Academy’s new casting category now part of the Oscar landscape, the casting alone gives I Play Rocky an intriguing awards hook. Early TIFF previews have already singled out Ippolito’s uncanny resemblance to the young Stallone.

Paper Tiger — James Gray

James Gray returns to the crime territory of Little Odessa and We Own the Night with Paper Tiger, a 1986-set New York thriller about two brothers who become entangled with the Russian mafia.

The brothers are played by Adam Driver and Miles Teller, with Scarlett Johansson as Hester Pearl.

Gray has returned to the Cannes competition five times, and Paper Tiger received its world premiere there before becoming the Opening Night film of the 64th New York Film Festival on September 25. Film at Lincoln Center calls it a “career-best achievement.”

That is an extraordinary endorsement. With Driver, Johansson and Teller in the cast, Paper Tiger deserves to be watched closely when Oscar nominations begin to take shape.

All of a Sudden — Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

At 196 minutes, All of a Sudden is not exactly a casual evening at the movies. But Hamaguchi has earned the right to ask audiences for patience.

The director of Drive My Car — which won the 2021 Cannes Screenplay prize and became an Oscar Best Picture nominee — turns here to a French care-home director and a Japanese theatre director battling cancer, exploring mortality, dignity, friendship and the possibility of humane care.

At Cannes, Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shared the Best Actress prize. Critics were largely enthusiastic, although some found the film overly meditative. It currently carries a remarkably strong critical profile.

The film is playing TIFF and will also screen in the New York Film Festival.

Bitter Christmas — Pedro Almodóvar

And then there is Pedro Almodóvar — which is almost enough said.

His latest film is an elaborate film-within-a-film meditation on grief, artistic betrayal, memory and the uneasy relationship between fiction and reality. Bárbara Lennie and Leonardo Sbaraglia lead the cast, with the story moving between an actress’s life and the filmmaker who is transforming that life into a screenplay.

At Cannes, Bitter Christmas won the Soundtrack Award. Critics were divided on its intricate, self-referential construction, although the film enjoyed a strong  reception.

The film is a TIFF Special Presentation and will receive its U.S. première in New York.

Whether it becomes an Oscar player is harder to predict. But with Almodóvar, Bárbara Lennie, Sbaraglia and five decades of cinematic history behind it, Bitter Christmas is precisely the sort of film that demands to be seen before the awards conversation is over.

C’mon back next Friday for the third installment of VIFF 45’s Galas and Special Presentations film programme.

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.