The 2026 Victoria Film Festival is ready to roll from February 6 to 15. For its 32nd year, this local event continues to celebrate bold, quirky storytelling from Vancouver Island, across Canada, and around the world. This year’s lineup features 91 feature films and 39 short films screening across nine venues, alongside live music, visual art installations, pop-up screenings, and special guest appearances.
Highlights include onstage conversations with Canadian screen icons Mary Walsh and Sheila McCarthy, a post-screening Q&A with world-renowned artist Robert Bateman, retro-inspired immersive art experiences, and new partnerships that take the festival beyond traditional cinema spaces. Additional surprises and program changes may emerge as the event approaches. Full details and tickets are available at victoriafilmfestival.com.
Beyond the screenings, this year’s festival leans into atmosphere and community. Returning venues sit alongside new spaces, signalling a program that continues to reshape how audiences encounter film, through intimate conversations, retro-tinged art experiments, and neighbourhood-scale micro-cinema events. While genre offerings appear lighter this year, we’ll be sharing our own picks once the guide goes live.
Not every recent film will hit the mark in what winter frost means when it comes to survival horror. It’s merely decoration with Ghostbuster: Frozen Empire, but with Frankenstein, as revealed in part one, it’s about the heart and how to deal. In part two of our Winter Cinema Survival Guide, just how people deal comes to the fore with the most well known marking the end. No 
The frozen planet in Nolan’s cosmic odyssey is anything but serene. Its calm surface hides betrayal beneath the ice. Dust coats not just the land, but the truth itself. Sometimes the coldest places provide perfect cover for the warmest lies, and in the silence of space, that absence of warmth becomes deafening. Just how anyone can survive depends on matters of the heart, and surviving entering a black hole!
With winter in full swing and some cities either buried under snow or still digging out, in cinema, things can often become far worse. No, this isn’t about the usual wave of disaster movies where the weather goes feral. Those dominate lists easily enough. Instead, this Winter Cinema Survival Guide focuses on films where the environment itself becomes a player, a tool, or a symbol wielded by heroes and villains alike. Snow and ice aren’t just scenery here, they’re characters in their own right.
Antarctica as a gladiatorial cage? Absolutely. A hidden pyramid buried beneath centuries of ice becomes the battleground where two apex hunters collide, with humans reduced to witnesses rather than participants. The cold isn’t mute here, it’s a referee. You’re either prepared for it, or you freeze in place.
Passion Pictures
The global animation scene in 2025 has delivered a spectrum of visually striking and narratively bold films, yet many of these treasures remain unseen in North America. Whether sidelined by limited festival runs, language barriers, or distribution hurdles, some of the year’s animated films from afar are not being screened in North America.
🇫🇷 France / 🇧🇪 Belgium
🇩🇪 Germany / 🇬🇧 United Kingdom
🇨🇳 China
🇮🇹 Italy / 🇩🇪 Germany
Although the 
Saturday, December 6 3:15pm