VIFF 2026 | 10 Most Anticipated Films (You Should See)

"VIFF is quickly becoming the archetype of the modern film festival."

Image | Zak Design Studio

VIFF 2026—(August 26, 2026) Fall film festival season is on the horizon. Rejoice, as our city's eleven-day arthouse filmmaking showcase, the 45th edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival, is just around the corner, next month. Plan accordingly for VIFF's yearly output of mixed-media entertainment programming, anchored by hundreds of Canadian and global films from around the world, screened across the city in celebration of contemporary cinema.

WEEKENDER | Brewery and the Beast 2026 x False Creek

"Bringing together the best food and drink has always been at the heart of Brewery and the Beast."

pork tacos (with xnipec salsa and corn tortillas) from La Taqueria

False Creek—(August 30, 2026) Back for some late summer, "all-you-can-savour" barbecued meat festivities, the 13th annual Brewery and the Beast Vancouver drew hundreds of hungry diners to Concord Pacific Place for another edition of Western Canada's premier outdoor food and craft beer festival on a refreshingly overcast Sunday mid-afternoon.

GATHER | Web Summit Vancouver 2026 x Global Tech Conference

"We meet at a critical moment in the history of technology."

Physician/author Dr. Gabor Maté and Twitch political streamer Hasan Piker

Waterfront—(May 11 to 14, 2026) For the second year, Web Summit Vancouver's annual multi-day global conference, known as the "Olympics of Tech," gathered 20,235 attendees (up from 15,727 in 2025) spread across three levels of the Vancouver Convention Centre, once again hosted by the titular Dublin-based technology events company.

REEL | Gus Van Sant Takes 'Dead Man's Wire' Hostage x TIFF 2025

"I'm a man that's fighting for everything he owns, sir."

Toronto International Film Festival

Dead Man's Wire, directed by veteran filmmaker Gus Van Sant, depicts the actual 1977 kidnapping by an otherwise mild-mannered Indianapolis man, Tony Kiritsis, played convincingly by a haggard Bill Skarsgård, of his bank mortgage officer (Dacre Montgomery). What follows is a gritty but detailed dramatization of the 63-hour hostage crisis standoff and subsequent media circus that would later echo through modern American media and culture.

SCREEN | Smuggling 'Little Lorraine' x WFF 2025

"I think what they miss the most is showering together."

Whistler Film Festival

Based on crimes committed in 1986, Little Lorraine dramatizes the real-life international offshore cocaine smuggling operation that engulfed the titular Cape Breton seaside fishing village in Nova Scotia. Singer-songwriter (and co-screenwriter) Adam Baldwin previously wrote about the true-crime story in his 2022 single "Lighthouse in Little Lorraine," with its music video successfully serving as a proof-of-concept for the subsequent film.

VIFF 2025 | 10 Most Anticipated Films (You Should See)

"This is a festival built on passion, and it shows."

Image | Zak Design Studio

VIFF 2025—(August 27, 2025) Fall movie season is just around the corner. This means the city's eleven-day arthouse cinematic showcase, the 44th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, is almost upon us when it returns in a new timeslot at the beginning of next month. Make a plan for VIFF's yearly buffet of multimedia entertainment programming, featuring hundreds of local, national, and international films from across the globe, screened in celebration of contemporary filmmaking.

WEEKENDER | PNE Fair 2025 x Hastings Park x East Van

Hastings–Sunrise—(August 14 and 20, 2025) For its 115th year, the 2025 PNE Fair is still trying to make everyone happy. This past weekend, East Vancouver's annual late summer tradition on the Pacific National Exhibition's festival fairgrounds in Hastings Park opened up once again for two weeks of hot summer fun for the whole family.

GATHER | Web Summit Vancouver 2025 x Global Tech Conference

"Vancouver is one of the world's most beautiful cities, with a flourishing tech community."

NBA champions Metta World Peace and JaVale McGee

Waterfront—(May 30, 2025) It sure felt like almost everyone was at the inaugural Web Summit Vancouver multi-day global conference, replacing Collision Conference's five-year run in Toronto. Long considered the "Olympics of Tech" and hosted by the Dublin-based technology events company, the gathering took over three levels of the Vancouver Convention Centre for as many days at the tail end of May.

SCREEN | Catching the Real 'Predators' x DOXA 2025

"I see To Catch a Predator as trying to make a public service entertaining."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

Director David Osit, a survivor of child sexual abuse by an adult himself, investigates the lasting impact of the hit 2004-07 Dateline NBC news magazine program To Catch a Predator, famously hosted by journalist Chris Hansen. His documentary, aptly named Predators, revisits the television phenomenon that turned true-crime into popular entertainment as it lured otherwise mild-mannered potential sex offenders with no previous criminal records into a trap where they were confronted and arrested on camera.

SCENE | A Historic Royal Visit – Arts Club Cares for 'Casey and Diana'

"This is like the homosexual version of the Make-A-Wish Foundation!"

Casey House / October 25, 1991

South Granville—Arts Club Theatre Company stages North Vancouver playwright Nick Green's acclaimed, fictionized AIDS crisis dramedy, Casey and Diana, inspired by the late Princess Diana's historic 1991 Toronto visit to Casey House, Canada's first freestanding hospice caring for people (primarily gay men at the time) dying from the HIV/AIDS virus. A real tearjerker of a stage play that premiered at the 2023 Stratford Festival, it's a powerful tale that lives up to the actual impact the event had, destigmatizing the epidemic and humanizing those afflicted.

GATHER | Baiting Ziwe x 'What It Means to Be American' x UBC

"I rarely get asked to do [racism] p*rn."

Photo credit | Si Ming Zheng

UBC—(March 13, 2025) Talented mononymous Nigerian-American late night comedian/interviewer and Black Friend author Ziwe (Fumudoh) brought her stylishly hilarious insights to the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts as part of the 2025 Phil Lind Initiative's accidentally hyper topical ongoing speaker series on the politics of What It Means to Be "American": Navigating Identity in a Changing Nation.

GATHER | Ramy Youssef x 'What It Means to Be American' x UBC

"I wasn't gonna mention the whole fifty-first state thing."

Photo credit | Si Ming Zheng

UBC—(February 27, 2025) Award-winning Egyptian-American stand-up comedian, actor, screenwriter, and director Ramy Youssef casually captivated a full audience inside the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts as part of the 2025 Phil Lind Initiative's second-year speaker series, discussing the topic of What It Means to Be "American": Navigating Identity in a Changing Nation.

SCREEN | Diving Under the North Sea – Taking the 'Last Breath'

"I'm just not ready for the scrap heap yet."

Focus Features / Elevation Pictures

Last Breath co-director Alex Parkinson remakes his 2019 documentary of the same name as a dramatized narrative deep-sea survivalist film based on the harrowing real-life saturation diving accident in 2012 that left Scottish diver Chris Lemons (Finn Cole) stranded a hundred metres under the North Sea without any heat or light and only a limited oxygen supply.

REEL | 'September 5' Relives the Munich Massacre x WFF 2024

"They're all gone."

Whistler Film Festival

September 5 dramatizes the horrific 1972 Munich massacre hostage crisis at the 1972 Summer Olympics in West Germany from the perspective of the ABC Sports newsroom's real-time live coverage. Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum tries to set aside political history in order to relive the real-life events raw in the moment from an outside viewpoint.

VIFF 2024 | Artistic Trespassing – How to Build A 'Secret Mall Apartment'

"We need to develop this underutilized space."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2024—Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker Jeremy Workman chronicles artist Michael Townsend's hilarious early-2000s experiment taking control of an unknown space in the Providence Place Mall in Rhode Island. As its title straightforwardly implies, Secret Mall Apartment provides all the side-splitting details about how eight friends (all working artists) dared to build a makeshift home in a four-year-long act of trespassing.

VIFF 2024 | 10 Most Anticipated Films (You Should See)

"VIFF is an overflowing, multidimensional, full-tilt celebration of film and film culture."

Image | Zak Design Studio

VIFF 2024—(August 28, 2024) Embrace the movies for the city's eleven-day arthouse cinematic celebration when the 43rd annual Vancouver International Film Festival starts at the end of the month. Plan ahead for VIFF's smörgåsbord of multimedia entertainment offerings as hundreds of films from across the continent and world are screened in recognition of contemporary cinema.

WEEKENDER | Brewery and the Beast 2024 x False Creek

False Creek—(June 2, 2024) Inauspiciously moved up a month from its usual midsummer date, the 11th annual Brewery and the Beast Vancouver, one of Canada's ultimate all-you-can-eat-and-drink outdoor meat and craft beer festivals, packed another hungry hoard of rainjacket-clad barbecue lovers at Concord Pacific Place on a very wet and rainy weekend.

CABLE | L.A.'s Sterling NBA Franchise – How the Rich Got 'Clipped'

"He says a lot of things he shouldn't."

FX Productions

Clipped, FX's sports drama miniseries based on ESPN's 30 for 30 podcast series The Sterling Affairs by sports reporter Ramona Shelburne (also an executive producer), dramatizes the wild ownership scandal that rocked the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team during the NBA's tumultuous 2023-24 season when controversial longtime owner Donald Sterling (Ed O'Neill) sparked a player revolt after his extremely racist remarks were leaked by his notorious media-obsessed, visor-wearing mistress V. Stiviano (Cleopatra Coleman).

SPOTLIGHT | Jia Tolentino x "Who's Afraid of Eating the Rich?" x UBC

"Capitalism is a machine for capturing descent."

Photo credit | Justin Man

UBC—(January 25, 2024) Toronto-born, Brooklyn-based culture critic and The New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino paid a visit to the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts as part of The Phil Lind Initiative's speaker series discussing political life through pop culture. Her half-hour talk, "Who's Afraid of Eating the Rich?" dissected our cultural obsession with the trend of popular entertainment dramatizing the sad depravity of being ultra-rich (think Succession and the like).

VIFF 2023 | Repaving 'Union Street' – Vancouver's Black History

"African essence is brighter than any diamond."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2023—Kenyan-Canadian actress/screenwriter Jamila Pomeroy directs the joyful new Telus documentary Union Street (her feature-length debut) about Vancouver's forgotten (or more accurately, erased) legacy of its historical Black residents displaced from the area known as Hogan's Alley in the Chinatown and Strathcona neighbourhoods.