Peter Farrelly’s “I Play Rocky” has won the Audience Award in the Galas & Special Presentations category at the 2026 Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF). The film, which tells the underdog story behind Sylvester Stallone’s journey to make and star in “Rocky,” was among 10 titles selected by audiences as favorites across the festival’s programming sections — including international cinema, emerging filmmakers and Canadian features. Banchi Hanuse’s documentary “Ceremony,” which hadpreviously took home the the juried Tides Award, won in the Showcase category.
It follows the disappearance of the ooligan, a culturally significant fish in Bella Coola, and the Nuxalk Nation’s efforts to understand its decline. Former Pixar animator Louis Clichy’s “Iron Boy,” which explores themes of disability and agricultural modernization, took the Panorama prize. The Vanguard award went to Fernanda Salgado’s “Ana, En Passant,” an animated drama about a young Black woman returning to her late grandmother’s native town in Brazil.
Cody Lightning’s hockey drama “Smudge the Blades,” following a team of Indigenous youth in Northern Alberta, earned the Northern Lights award. Other category winners include Faraz Shariat’s “Prosecution” (Focus on New German Cinema: Extreme Tension), Asmahan Bkerat’s “Concrete Land” (Insights), Otilia Portillo Padua’s “Daughters of the Forest” (Spectrum), Rebecca Tansley’s “Tenor: My Name Is Parti” (Portraits), and Marco Nguyen and Nicolas Athané’s “Jim Queen” (Altered States). The 45th Vancouver International Film Festival ran Oct. 1-11 and included 162 features and 91 short films, representing 76 countries.
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