A Sad and Beautiful World, Jazz Infernal Take Top Audience Honours at IFFO

A Sad and Beautiful World (dir. Cyril Aris) and Jazz Infernal (dir. Will Niava) have won the CF Rideau Centre People’s Choice Award at the International Film Festival of Ottawa (IFFO). The audience-voted honour caps IFFO’s March 11 to 22 run, which featured films from Canada and around the globe.

Set in Beirut, A Sad and Beautiful World traces the intertwined lives of Nino and Yasmina, childhood friends whose youthful affection is interrupted by circumstance and time. Decades later, an unexpected reunion reignites their bond, compelling them to confront questions of love, belonging, and the inescapable ties to their homeland. Elegantly crafted and imbued with humanity, Aris’s debut feature offers a nuanced portrait of modern Lebanon while affirming cinema’s enduring power to illuminate both personal and collective resilience.

A semi-autobiographical story set in Montreal, Jazz Infernal explores themes of immigration, grief, and family legacy through the lens of the city's jazz scene. The film premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, where it was named to Canada's Top Ten for 2025. In January 2026, it won the Short Film Jury Award: International Fiction at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Honourable mentions for the features include Italy’s Primavera (dir. Damiano Michieletto) and The Track (dir. Ryan Sidhoo). A Canadian documentary about Olympic luge hopefuls training on a crumbling outdoor track in a post war Bosnia, The Track was recently nominated for two Canadian Screen Awards. 

Honourable mentions for the shorts include Sol vivant (Living Ground) (dir. Emile Lavoie) and Nancy (dir. Lynda Hall). A personal documentary, Nancy follows Hall’s trip to Thunder Bay, Ont., as she seeks a connection to the city that might have been hers. Her mother had been sent to Ottawa as a pregnant teenager and forced to give her up for adoption.

CF Rideau Centre People’s Choice Award winners are selected by audiences through an online voting system. After each screening, attendees receive a virtual ballot to rate the feature and short film on a scale from one to five. Only IFFO’s Official Selections are eligible for the award.

CF Rideau Centre People’s Choice Award Winners

Honourable Mentions

The International Film Festival of Ottawa (IFFO) brings the world’s best cinema to Canada’s Capital for its sixth edition.

This year’s Festival provides cinephiles with an eclectic mix of films that have won awards and made waves in the international film circuit over the past year. In IFFO’s Official Selection, programmers curated 22 Canadian and international feature films and select a new Canadian short film to accompany each feature screening. Other film programs in the Festival include the established CFI series Canadian Masters, getting in-depth discussions with some of Canada’s greatest and most prolific filmmakers, and IFFO series The Gaze, which brings the audience into the discussion about diverse representation on screen. IFFO’s industry conferences address emerging and mid-level film professionals at Screen Summit and examine issues of preservation, restoration, distribution, and exhibition at SAVE AS.

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