Vancouver Latin American Film Festival.

09/05/2026

What does it mean to honour our decisions, and what must we leave behind to move forward?

Meet the filmmakers of the Shorts in Competition Program 2! In this program, we encounter characters who confront the darkness of their desires and contradictions, situations that push them to their limits and challenge their lives as they know them. Through animation, horror, video essay, and docufiction, the body becomes a contested territory, and what we keep silent emerges through each story. The silhouette of the “right” choice blurs in a world shaped by injustice and inequality.

Featured in this dialogue:

CHILAPA GIRL (Dir. Juana Lotero López)
FOREIGNER (Dir. Sara J. Quintana)
BAIXADA: IN CUBATÃO’S WATERS (Dir. Renato Martin de Castro)
IN BETWEEN STORMS (Dir. Fran Zayas)
THE VEIL (Dir. Gabriel Motta)
THE TRIBUTE (Dir. Josué Sánchez Reyes)
FINAL SCENE (Dir. Diego Kompel)

Curated by Ana Tonso & Dani Rodríguez Chevalier.

🎬 Catch WHAT LURKS UNDER THE VEIL - Shorts in Competition Program 2 at the 24th VLAFF:

📅 Thursday, September 17 · 4:00 PM
📍 Cineworks · 1131 Howe St, alley entrance
🎟️ Tickets: goelevent.com/VLAFF/e/WhatLurksUnderTheVeil

09/05/2026

So excited to see Mayra Hermosillo in the spotlight at VLAFF24 ✨🎬

Stir Vancouver spoke with Mayra about Vainilla, Newborn, collaboration, and the intimacy that shaped her work on screen and behind the camera.

Catch both films at VLAFF this September 10–20, and read the full interview below 💛

Mexican actor and first-time feature director reflects on the powers of film to find the universal in the local and reveal new sides of an artist’s personality

09/05/2026

🎸 ¡ASÍ SUENA! is coming back for VLAFF24… and the lineup drops VERY soon 👀🔥

A little throwback to Las Satyas performing at our June Emerging Latine Creators Showcase, curated by VLAFF’s Emerging Latin/e/x Programmers 💘

¡Así Suena! Music Nights bring free live music to The Cinematheque courtyard, creating a space to gather, listen, dance, and celebrate local Latin American music and community together 💃🏽🌙

And we’re almost ready to reveal who’s joining us this year…

📅 VLAFF24 · September 10-20
🥁 ¡Así Suena! lineup coming VERY soon

Watch Las Satyas full performance on YouTube at VLAFFTV 📺

📹: João Santana

09/04/2026

🚬🔥 ONE WEEK FROM TODAY: THE DEVIL SMOKES 🔥🚬

🏆 Winner of the Best First Feature Award at the 2025 Berlinale and now nominated for 8 Ariel Awards, THE DEVIL SMOKES (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the Same Box) is one of the year’s most celebrated Mexican debuts.

Set in mid-90s Mexico City, the film follows five siblings left in the care of their grandmother after the disappearance of their parents. As the children’s fears begin to mingle with those of their grandmother, the boundaries between reality and imagination gradually start to dissolve.

Directed by Ernesto Martínez Bucio, the film has travelled internationally since its Berlinale premiere, earning recognition for its bold and unsettling portrait of childhood, family, fear, and the worlds we create to survive. Screening at VLAFF as part of the New Directors Competition!

🎬 THE DEVIL SMOKES
Dir. Ernesto Martínez Bucio | Mexico, 2025
⏱️ 97 min

🏆 Best First Feature - Berlinale 2025
✨ 8 Ariel Award nominations
🎬 VLAFF New Directors Competition

📅 Friday, September 11 | 6:15 PM
📍 The Cinematheque
🎟️ Tickets here: goelevent.com/VLAFF/e/TheDevilSmokes

09/03/2026

Join actor Sergio Prina star of VLAFF24’s Opening Night film A LOOSE END, for a conversation with VLAFF's Programming Director about the making of the film, his character Santiago, and working with director Daniel Hendler.

An Argentine police officer on the run crosses into Uruguay with little more than his uniform, his wit, and the help of the people he meets along the way. As he drifts further from the life he left behind, the possibility of beginning again slowly comes into view.

Through humour, tenderness, and unexpected encounters, the film explores borders, belonging, reinvention, and the strange paths that can open when everything familiar falls away.

🎬 A LOOSE END
Dir. Daniel Hendler
🇺🇾🇦🇷🇪🇸 Uruguay / Argentina / Spain · 2025

🌟 VLAFF24 OPENING NIGHT
📅 September 10 | 7:00 PM
📍 SFU Woodward’s

🎟️ Get your tickets here: https://www.goelevent.com/VLAFF/e/ALooseEnd

09/03/2026

🎞️ ★ REVISITING A CLASSIC: MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT ★ 🎞️

More than fifty years after its release, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment remains one of the defining works of Cuban and Latin American cinema.

Set during the early years of the Cuban Revolution, the film follows Sergio, a young intellectual who chooses to remain in Havana as his parents and wife leave for Miami. Wandering through a country in transformation, Sergio observes the world around him from a place of alienation, contradiction, and uncertainty.

Through his eyes, Gutiérrez Alea explores revolution, class, identity, memory, and the contradictions of a society in transition. Decades later, the film’s questions around underdevelopment and change remain remarkably unsettling and relevant.

🎬 MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT
Dir. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea | Cuba, 1968

📅 Friday, September 18 | 4:00 PM
📍 Cineworks
🎟️ Read more: vlaff.org/revisiting-memories-of-underdevelopment-a-landmark-of-cuban-cinema/

09/03/2026

Join filmmaker Fabien Pisani and VLAFF's Programming Director for a conversation about PARA VIVIR: THE IMPLACABLE TIMES OF PABLO MILANÉS, his deeply personal portrait of Cuban music icon Pablo Milanés during the final years of his life.

Directed by Milanés’s adopted son, the film brings together intimate moments with the legendary singer-songwriter and conversations with artists including Joan Manuel Serrat, Chico Buarque, Harry Belafonte, and Fito Páez.

A co-founder of Cuba’s Nueva Trova movement alongside Silvio Rodríguez, Milanés was one of the defining voices of the country’s revolutionary cultural movement. Looking back from self-imposed exile, however, memories of artistic and political idealism sit alongside growing questions about the Revolution and its legacy.

Through music, memory, family, and reflection, Para Vivir offers an intimate portrait not only of an extraordinary artist, but of a generation that once believed deeply in the possibility of a Cuban utopia.

🎬 PARA VIVIR: THE IMPLACABLE TIMES OF PABLO MILANÉS
Dir. Fabien Pisani
🇨🇺🇲🇽 Cuba / Mexico · 2025

📅 September 16 at the 24th VLAFF
🎟️ Tickets here: goelevent.com/VLAFF/e/ParaVivirPabloMilanes

09/02/2026

🦩✨ WINNER OF THE 2025 UN CERTAIN REGARD PRIZE AT CANNES: THE MYSTERIOUS GAZE OF THE FLAMINGO ✨🦩

In a desert mining town in northern Chile in 1982, eleven-year-old Lidia lives with her beloved q***r family as an unknown and deadly disease begins to spread. A rumour takes hold: the illness can be transmitted between two men through a simple glance when they fall in love. As fear turns against her family, Lidia sets out to discover whether the myth is true.

The striking feature debut from Chilean filmmaker Diego Céspedes, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo won the top prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section and is now nominated for Best Ibero-American Film at the Ariel Awards.

🎬 THE MYSTERIOUS GAZE OF THE FLAMINGO
Dir. Diego Céspedes
🇨🇱 Chile · 2025

📅 Friday, September 11 | 4:00 PM
📍 The Cinematheque
🎟️ Tickets at goelevent.com/VLAFF/e/TheMysteriousGazeOfTheFlamingo

Watch the trailer and discover one of the most celebrated Latin American debuts of the year 🦩🎬

***rCinema

09/02/2026

Vancouver Latin American Film Festival. is almost here! The 24th edition takes place in theatres from September 10 to 20 across Vancouver.

Presenting more than 70 films, from 24 countries in 9 languages, always with English subtitles.

A Loose End, opens the festival, directed by the incredible Uruguayan actor and director, Daniel Hendler. Vainilla closes the fest, by the renowned Mexican actress, as her directorial feature debut.

Explore the full lineup and book your festival passes at: vlaff.org

09/02/2026

🌎✦ SHORTS PROGRAM: FOLLOWING THE VOICES OF OUR ANCESTORS TO THE FUTURE ✦🌱

Our stories do not end when the apocalypsis and destruction arrives. That is just one part of our history, there is a future when the Earth is alive and healthy again, when we can live on it, when we come back following the voice of our ancestors. This does not happen magically, it happens because of the effort and work of generations, when all the stories matter.

Indigenous futurisms is possible because it is made up of stories of peoples who are finding love, having to leave their family, coming back to their Indigenous language, fighting against ceremonial extractivism, and connecting historical resistance to the present through archival material. Part of Films from Turtle Island & Beyond, Following the Voices of Our Ancestors to the Future brings together five short films that look beyond narratives of apocalypse toward futures where Indigenous peoples continue to love, return, resist, remember, and imagine.

Featuring:
DUETO CHARANDA (Dir. Fred Cayetano)
TECHIQ (Dir. Missael Sánchez Arce)
SUKKAILLUTIT UQARUK (Dir. Ashley Qilavaq-Savard)
WASKA: THE FOREST IS MY FAMILY (Dir. Nina Gualinga)
EARTH (Dir. Itandehui Jansen)

Curated by akira & Masa'n 🌙

📅 September 11 | 2:00 PM
📍 The Cinematheque
🎟️ Free admission - reserve your ticket at vlaff.org / link in bio 🔗

Swipe through to discover the films and filmmakers in this program 🎬🌱