'I Play Rocky' Takes Top Audience Prize at Vancouver Festival

Peter Farrelly's 'I Play Rocky' has won the Galas & Special Presentations Audience Award at the 2026 Vancouver International Film Festival, Variety reported.

The prize was the headline choice among 10 audience favourites named across the festival's programming sections. The 45th edition of the festival ran Oct. 1-11 in Vancouver.

'I Play Rocky' follows Sylvester Stallone's drive to make and star in 'Rocky', according to Variety. The film runs 127 minutes, according to festival listings, and held its world premiere in the Special Presentations programme at Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre, Variety reported. An audience award means the winner is picked by votes from festivalgoers rather than a jury.

Vancouver named nine other audience favourites alongside Farrelly's film. Banchi Hanuse's documentary 'Ceremony' took the Showcase award, Louis Clichy's 'Iron Boy' won Panorama, Fernanda Salgado's 'Ana, En Passant' won Vanguard and Cody Lightning's 'Smudge the Blades' won Northern Lights, Variety reported.

The remaining winners stretched across the festival's specialist strands. Faraz Shariat's 'Prosecution' won in Focus on New German Cinema: Extreme Tension, Asmahan Bkerat's 'Concrete Land' won in Insights and Otilia Portillo Padua's 'Daughters of the Forest' won in Spectrum. Rebecca Tansley's 'Tenor: My Name Is Parti' won in Portraits, while Marco Nguyen and Nicolas Athane's 'Jim Queen' won in Altered States.

The scale was large. This year's festival presented 162 features and 91 short films from 76 countries, Variety reported.

What makes this stand out is the spread. Votes came in from across galas, documentaries, animation and new cinema, giving distributors and cinema programmers an early read on which titles connected with a public audience.