Vancouver Film Festival Announces Audience Award Winners

Peter Farrelly's movie "I Play Rocky" took home the top Audience Award in the Galas and Special Presentations section at the 2026 Vancouver International Film Festival. The film shows the true underdog tale of how Sylvester Stallone fought to make and star in the famous movie "Rocky." Banchi Hanuse won in the Showcase category for her documentary "Ceremony," which previously won the juried Tides Award. The film looks at the disappearance of a culturally important fish and the Nuxalk Nation's fight to figure out why its numbers are dropping. Louis Clichy, a former Pixar animator, won the Panorama prize for "Iron Boy," a project dealing with disability and changes in farming. Fernanda Salgado won the Vanguard award for "Ana, En Passant," an animated drama about a young Black woman visiting her late grandmother's hometown in Brazil. Cody Lightning earned the Northern Lights award for his hockey film "Smudge the Blades," which centers on a team of Indigenous youth in Northern Alberta. Other category winners include Faraz Shariat for "Prosecution," Asmahan Bkerat for "Concrete Land," Otilia Portillo Padua for "Daughters of the Forest," Rebecca Tansley for "Tenor: My Name Is Parti," and Marco Nguyen alongside Nicolas Athané for "Jim Queen."

Context

The Vancouver International Film Festival is a major annual film event that showcases hundreds of movies from dozens of countries across multiple days. Audience awards are decided by festival-goers who vote on their favorite screenings across different categories. This year's event featured a large lineup of feature films and short projects from around the world.