#FIRSTLOOK: REEL ASIAN ANOUNCE 2026 AWARD WINNERS

The Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival (Reel Asian), Canada’s largest pan-Asian film festival, is pleased to announce the winners of its 2026 Festival Awards. An Incomplete Calendar, directed by Sanaz Sohrabi, has won the RBC Best Canadian Film Award, while Sunburn, directed by Serville Poblete, received an Honourable Mention.

The Reel Asian Awards will be celebrated with a special brunch on Sunday, November 15, bringing together filmmakers, jury members, and industry partners to recognise this year’s achievements in filmmaking. Now celebrating its 30th year, the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival continues through to November 21, with online screenings available for select features and all short films from November 16 to 29. For the full festival programme, visit reelasian.com.

“As Reel Asian marks 30 years of championing Asian, Asian diasporic, and Asian Canadian artists and storytellers. We are thrilled to see the breadth of talent and creativity represented in this year’s submissions,” said Deanna Wong, Executive Director of Reel Asian. “The quality and diversity of these films speak to the importance of creating platforms for these stories. Congratulations to all of our award recipients. We look forward to celebrating their work with our festival community.”

The 2026 Features Jury includes Vinh Nguyen, a writer and educator whose speculative memoir, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language non-fiction, and the Toronto Book Awards; Kerri Sakamoto, an award-winning writer whose internationally published novels explore the Asian-diasporic experience; and Andrea Bang, a Vancouver-based actor, writer and director best known for her role as Janet on CBC’s award-winning show Kim’s Convenience.

The 2026 Shorts Jury includes Dhvani Ramanujam, a curator, writer, and PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at York University; tammy ko Robinson, an artist-researcher and educator based in Seoul whose work focuses on emergent media; and Betty Xie, a writer and director whose films have screened at festivals internationally and appeared on CBC Gem and CBC ShortDocs.

The 30th Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival concludes its in-person programming and events with the annual Pitch! Live Finale, hosted by actor and comedian Andrew Phung (Kim’s Convenience, Run the Burbs). Five emerging filmmaking teams will take the stage to pitch their short film concepts to a distinguished jury, competing for a prize package designed to help bring their project to life. The event celebrates the innovative and creative stories that define the future of Asian Canadian cinema.

Full list of Reel Asian award winners for the 30th edition:

RBC Best Canadian Feature Film Award
An Incomplete Calendar by Sanaz Sohrabi
Honorable Mention: Sunburn by Serville Poblete

An Incomplete Calendar is a fascinating and absorbing chronicle of the collective movement among impoverished oil-bearing countries to wrest power and profits from Western corporations that led to OPEC’s formation in 1960. Through inventive and poetic means, the film documents a process of rapid decolonization and modernization as reflected in the cultural production of the era, and conveys a sense of the ideals and ambitions for sovereignty that gave rise to profound economic and geopolitical change.

The jury would like to include an Honourable Mention for the whimsical and soulful Sunburn, which captures a hot summer’s day in the life of an urban neighbourhood whose young inhabitants ruminate on the pleasure of melting popsicles, the preciousness of friendship, love’s disappointments, and surviving tragedy. With the film’s light touch, assured tone and authentic aura, the mystery of what lies ahead for each of its winsome characters lingers meaningfully.

Dipchand LLP Best Feature Film Award
Hearing by Bảo Lê

Bảo Lê creates a mysterious, ethereal, and slow-moving world with his slice-of-life film Hearing. Aptly titled, it follows the life of a decibel meter installer. With beautifully crafted visual and sound design, his story unfolds like artwork for the senses while exploring themes of unexpressed emotions and familial estrangement.

Reel Asian – DOC Institute Best Documentary Award
Pinball by Naveen Chaubal

Pinball is a searing portrait of a life trying to break out of the parameters historical circumstance has set. With psychological depth and emotional resonance, Naveen Chaubal has crafted a gripping coming-of-age that reveals the lived contradictions of migrant settlement and the pursuit of the American “good life.” An unforgettable film filled with melancholic tension and poignant striving.

Directors Guild of Canada (DGC) – Ontario & Women in Film and Television – Toronto (WIFT+ Toronto) Film Award
Landlines by Miru Yogarajah and Jay Aramboo

We are pleased to grant the Directors Guild of Canada Ontario & WIFT+ Toronto Film Award to filmmakers Miru Yogarajah and Jay Aramboo. Their brilliant collaborative work Landlines is a timely film that uncovers the exploitative labour conditions that migrant truck drivers across the GTA must complexly contend with. At a political moment where anti-South Asian vitriol continues to spread insidiously, Landlines braids together both animation and footage of workers to offer tender portraits of these subjects, as they negotiate their desires and constraints on a brutal, late-capitalist terrain. With deep care and craft, Yogarajah and Aramboo’s film opens a portal for the crisis of these marginalized workers’ frustrations and hopes to be caught, felt, and urgently responded to.

Seneca Polytechnic Best Short Film Award:
Unbound Zine: Xiaomei Going Overseas by Oyester

This film finds inventive new ways to engage with notions of counter-archival practice on-screen, through a strange, unfolding relationship between drag performance and queer, underground zine-making. The film illuminates the fleshier qualities of zines, the weird, punky ways in which Asian queer histories circulate outside the fold of the mainstream, and the talismanic power these resistant objects take on when we share them with each other. We proudly present the Seneca Polytechnic Best Short Film Award to director Oyester’s film, Unbound Zine: Xiaomei Going Overseas (不可装订：小美要出海)

Air Canada Short Film or Video Award:
Don’t Bail by Nick Patel
Portrait by Farzam Tabibi
Letter to Celestial by Wawa Li and Sinéad O’Halloran
Tamashi by Ashima Shiraishi and Jess X. Snow
Foreign Bodies by Lysander Wong

A corporate worker reconnecting with his soul through a newfound hobby; a seemingly uneventful portrait session that unpacks Iranian gender and power dynamics; a letter and tribute to Chinese sex workers in Montreal; an intergenerational dialogue between a prodigy climber and her dancer father; and a Kafkaesque animated meditation on what happens when we can’t locate an unwelcome visitor in our body. This year’s Air Canada Short Film or Video Award honours a collection of shorts that demonstrate extraordinary craft and imagination while celebrating the human spirit across cultures, sociopolitical contexts, and generations. The jury is especially impressed by how these films use their chosen cinematic forms—drama, documentary, animation, archival work, and experimental filmmaking—to amplify their underlying themes.

Michael Fukushima AnimAsian Award
Nanu! by Ansh Sirohi

Ansh Sirohi artfully combines together palimpsest animation techniques and kinetic typography into a sweet remembrance of her grandparents. We’re pleased to invite generations of audiences to share in the laughter, and to present Sirohi with the Michael Fukushima AnimAsian Award.

Armstrong Acting Studios Outstanding Performer in a Canadian Short Film
Cai (June) Wu of One Last Walk

The jury is pleased to present the Armstrong Acting Studios Outstanding Performer in a Canadian Short Film to Cai June Wu for her portrayal of Mei in One Last Walk. In a film about two grandmothers who forge an endearing friendship while each speaking their own language, Wu brings a beguiling naturalness to her performance. At times, we forget we are watching a dramatic film and find ourselves simply captivated by the tenderness and realism she conveys. Beneath the seemingly ordinary conversations lie palpable loneliness and profound kindness about her character that Wu so subtly delivers.

SAMANSA Short Film Award
One Last Walk by Andrea Bang and Diana Bang

This year’s SAMANSA Short Film Award recognizes One Last Walk (dirs. Diana Bang, Andrea Bang) as the winner for its warm yet wistful portrait of loneliness in later life; the simple premise of two Asian grandmothers sharing a neighborhood walk, with no common language between them, yet sustaining a lighthearted relationship, is a moving testament to how connection needs no words to bridge culture and distance.

Canadian Society of Cinematographers Best Cinematography Award
Rachel Chen of One Last Walk

Awarded by Canadian Society of Cinematographers (CSC) | Jurors:

Zoe Dirse csc, President of the CSC (Full member, CSC)

Jessica De Los Santos, Cinematographer (Associate Member, CSC)

Carolyn Wong, Instagram co-ordinator/curator, CSC (Associate Member, CSC)

The jury is pleased to present Rachel Chen of One Last Walk with the Best Cinematography Award. The decisions made in lenses, colours, and textures shows great attention to detail and caused for a beautiful visual rhythm, in cohesion with the story and film as a whole. Although the characters were lost in translation, its juxtaposition with the carefully thought out and precise compositions of this film was a perfect guide for our engagement with their emotions.

Honourable mention: Andrew Lee of The Children Trap
The jury would like to extend an honourable mention to Andrew Lee for his cinematography on the short film The Children Trap, which seamlessly supported the narrative through lighting and framing perspective, deeply drawing the viewer into this emotionally touching story.