Vancouver International Film Festival 2026

The 2026 edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival felt bigger than previous years. Over its eleven-day run, the venue list changed and expanded; the festival screened over 250 films; Vancouverites and VIFF-goers I spoke with seemed more aware of more of the programming—especially the VIFF Live programming; and I accidentally attended a lot of screenings where cast and crew were present. To me, that all indicates that VIFF as an organization is healthy. (Not that one of the largest film festivals in North America would be close to its deathbed.)

This year, I didn’t stay through the end of the festival (October 11th), but I had a productive seven days: I saw 17 full-length films and 15 short films.¹ Through a hotel promotion, I attended as a VIFF passholder, which let me into pretty much all of the non-industry events and screenings without tickets.² I won’t write up every screening I went to (like I did for Victoria Film Festival 2026), but I want to highlight the best and most enjoyable screening experiences I had using a murky rating between one and four stars (i.e. ★★★★).

Before the write-ups, here’s an overview of everything I attended in chronological order:

• Fjord (Cristian Mungiu) ★★½
• Club Kid (Jordan Firstman) ★★★
• Everytime (Sandra Wollner) ★★★
• Fatherland (Paweł Pawlikowski) ★★★
• An Incomplete Calendar (Sanaz Sohrabi) ★★½
• VIFF Short Forum 3: Workers of the World ★★½
  • Pique-nique (Jérémy Gagnon)
  • The Lion Does Not Concern Himself (Zarrar Kahn)
  • Faux Bijoux (Jessy Moussallem)
  • Half a Decade of Projecting (Jana Rankov)
  • L’inconvénient (Julien G. Marcotte)
  • Sweet Captive (Paul Chotel, Ariane Falardeau St-Amour)
  • Shoot the Messenger (Pranay Noel)
  • CUL-DE-SAC ! (Clyde Gates, Gabriel Sanson)
• Last Movies (Stanley Schinter) ★½
• Light Pillar (Zao Xu) ★★★
• Clubfoot (Nathan Donovan) ★★★
• Rose (Markus Schleinzer) ★★★
• VIFF Short Forum 5: Somewhere Else ★★½

  • Invisible Harvests (Stephanie Dudley)
    (was late, missed this one)

  • Lippenstift (Elsa Diringer)
  • Going Home (Kamal Aljafari)
  • Materia (Alisi Telengut)
  • Acid City (Jack Wedge, Will Freudenheim)
  • Saint & the Sea (Abdullah Khan)
  • “Vaterland” or a Bule Named Yanto (Berthold Wahjudi)
• Relax, Open Your Eyes (David Ehrenreich) ★★★
• The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (Noah Segan) ★½
• Jaripeo (Rebecca Zweig, Efrain Mojica) ★★
• A Safe Distance (Gloria Mercer) ★★
• Nowhere to Lay My Eyes (Hong Sang-soo) ★★★★
• Tender Loving Care (Mike Leigh) ★★★★
• Elephants in the Fog (Abinash Bikram Shah) ★★
• I Plant My Hand in the Garden (Hoda Taheri, Boris Hadžija) ★★★½

Fjord

Cristian Mungiu, 2026, Romania; France; Denmark; Finland; Norway; Sweden

I didn’t love Fjord, but it was a great way to orient to the festival, and I’m glad it exists. Other VIFF-goers I spoke to in lines were even more negative about it than I have been. I wrote very neutrally about Fjord a couple of weeks ago. ★★½

Club Kid

Jordan Firstman, 2026, United States

I would have rated this more highly had the audio mix been good. The rest of the films I saw at the same venue, the Vancouver Playhouse, sounded fine. But the mids in Club Kid were, at some points, on the verge in inaudible. I trust that whatever technical issues there were, either with the print or the VIFF festival edit, or whatever, will be worked out. Because, yeah, this is a special movie, and a jawdropping directorial debut. Club Kid follows Peter, a professional party promoter, who must re-evaluate his drug-fueled life when he takes custody of a kid he didn’t know he had. Firstman stars alongside fourteen-year-old Reggie Absolom, who both figure in this unexpected family in the warmest way. And the large cast of characters that pop in effortlessly bolster Firstman’s and Absolom’s performances. ★★★

Everytime

Sandra Wollner, 2026, Austria; Germany

This one’s probably the (non-Canadian) film I’ve thought the most about since the festival ended. Despite my not loving all of the creative choices, Everytime made so many choices that were interesting and unexpected. The pure ambition of this movie—that I’ve seen so many times before: about grief, the coming of age, and hanging out while the weather’s good—was one of the great pleasures of VIFF. ★★★

Clubfoot

Nathan Donovan, 2026, Canada

Shot in rural Alberta, Clubfoot centres on two adolescents who no longer live with their biological families. From the text, it’s ambiguous whether one or both of them were wrung through the foster system, and their familial pasts are unwritten. While kids coming into the foster system are often coming in due to familial maltreatment, Canada’s foster system itself fails many at-risk children. The film concerns itself with how the happy path of adolescent adoption is a fiction, and how the venn-diagram of a teen’s family life and social life are overwhelmingly disconnected. The principal performers are both non-actors, and they’re both the director’s adoptive brothers. In the Q&A with the director and cinematographer after the film, they discussed how the script was finalized as a collaborative process between the performers and the director. The result is a film that feels uncomfortably intimate. ★★★

Rose

Markus Schleinzer, 2026, Austria; Germany

The third film from longtime casting director and actor, Markus Schleinzer. I’ll speculate that his industry-connectedness is one of the reasons why the costuming, period set design, and naturalistic lighting seem flawless. It seems to me that his optimistic disposition would make anyone want to do their best work for him. (I stayed for the Q&A with him after the screening.) Such carefulness was taken with the historic subject matter. It tells the story of Rose, who feigned the role of a man in a culture where women were not offered freedom as individuals. ★★★

Relax, Open Your Eyes

David Ehrenreich, 2026, Canada

For many years I have casually consumed doc-slop funded by streamers like Netflix. So, I worried—based on the subject matter, cryonics enthusiasts and investors—that this would somewhere on the doc-slop spectrum and that the screening would nullify me. When this film finishes the festival circuit and reaches streamers, it will be a valuable addition to the tech-documentary genre. The edit makes clear that years of research, thousands of hours of footage, and hundreds of hours of interviews were painstakingly chosen by the filmmakers, and that any funding they received to do this work was well spent. Some audiences may want a flatter, farcicle exposé of the wealthy futurists who want to live forever. Instead, they’re humanistically put under the microscope. The film won’t change your mind about wealthy futurists, but it will educate you about the current state of the global cryonics industry.³ ★★★

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York

Noah Segan, 2026, United States

Certainly the worst movie I saw at the festival. It commits heinous screenwriting sins to service its excellent cast and is just, unfortunately, a movie I’ve already seen, thousands of times, via other whatever genre movies. I loved the crowd and the Rio Theatre, though. ★½

Nowhere to Lay My Eyes

Hong Sang-soo, 2026, South Korea

The most anticipated film of the festival for me. In fact, I nearly went to see it twice. I did expect it to be something I would love, but I didn’t expect it to be a manifesto to make one’s own small films, and more generally a celebration of DIY and the personal arts. ★★★★

I Plant My Hand in the Garden

Hoda Taheri; Boris Hadžija, 2026, Germany; Serbia; United States

I went to this on a whim. Like Everytime, this film was brimming with confidence and makes all kinds of ambitious creative choices I didn’t expect it to make. I expected, from the poster or the synopsis, something irreverant and quietly funny in a twee way. I instead discovered an immigrant tale unlike all the other relevant-to-the-now immigrant tales I’ve watched recently; fresh and naturalistic dialogue across three languages; a gentle and funny supporting cast; and a really refined version of a personal drama-comedy story about “fake” marriage. ★★★½