Top 5 Films to Watch at CUFF.Docs 2026
Explore five films to watch at CUFF.Docs 2026 in Calgary, from Turtle Island Rap and Dernsie to Matthew Rankin's opening-night documentary.
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Explore five films to watch at CUFF.Docs 2026 in Calgary, from Turtle Island Rap and Dernsie to Matthew Rankin's opening-night documentary.
Before La Bola Negra has properly introduced any of its three stories, its opening credits are already doing something interesting with history. Black-and-white photographs are covered, partially and sometimes aggressively, with bright pink paint. The older images do not disappear completely, but they are never presented as untouched archival objects.
The Calgary International Film Festival returns from September 24 to October 4, 2026, with more than 200 films, and there is a tremendous amount of overlap between this list and the festivals I have been covering all year.
Written and directed by Sandra Wollner, Everytime doesn’t take much time to move into a devastatingly emotional sequence in its first act, forcing the characters to settle into its aftermath. That is difficult territory for any movie.
Fight Kid made its world premiere on September 12 at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival, screening as part of the Short Cuts programme. For director Michael Del Monte (Art of Documentary), who has spent roughly fourteen years working in documentary, getting there meant learning a new form of filmmaking.
After counting down the top 26 films to watch at TIFF 2026, I wanted to spend some more time specifically on the Canadian side of this year's lineup.
The Toronto International Film Festival returns from September 10th to 20th, 2026, for its 51st edition, bringing 293 titles to Toronto across one of the broadest festival programmes in the world. And, because it is 2026, 26 films also felt like an appropriately unnecessary number to count down.
Buddy is hitting theatres on August 28, after a festival run that started at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and has since included SXSW, the Cleveland International Film Festival, Overlook, and, most recently, Fantasia in Montreal. Somewhere along the way, it also forced me to accept that mascot horror is officially its own subgenre.
I caught No Rest for the Wicked as part of the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival, where it made its world premiere and became one of my favourites of the festival. Fantasia’s Cheval Noir jury shared that response. Kasper Kalle received the award for Best Director, while Pilou Asbæk earned an Outstanding Performance Award for his work as Helge.
It has been 14 years since Casey Walker last brought a film to Fantasia. His horror-comedy A Little Bit Zombie played the Montreal festival in 2012, and he has remained connected to Canadian genre filmmaking since then, including as a producer on The Void and In a Violent Nature.