AHH FQ: VIFF Edition
AI Happy Hour at FriendsQuarters
BC + AI Ecosystem Association
Hosted by Kris Krüg + Kevin Friel + Dean Lariviere
Thursday, October 8, 2026 | 4:00-7:00 PM (Vancouver / PDT)
FriendsQuarters | #200-116 W Hastings St, Vancouver
CA$10. Includes one drink. Registration required. Capacity: 60.
VIFF is in town. The screens are lit, the conversations are spilling out of the cinemas, and BC's creative community has plenty to talk about.
A chunk of that community lives in the BC + AI Film Club — 250+ filmmakers, artists, and tinkerers who've turned a monthly meetup into one of the most active AI film scenes anywhere. We screen each other's work, run prompt challenges, break tools, swap what's working, and build the thing we wished existed. We're laser focused on the balance between AI-assistance with human grounded creativity and execution. This happy hour is us spilling out of the usual room and into the middle of festival season.
AI Happy Hour at FriendsQuarters is a gathering for filmmakers, artists, indie tool-builders, VFX wizards, researchers, and curious first-timers to trade sketches, stories, workflows, and half-baked questions without gatekeepers.
Come compare notes on film, art, AI, and whatever weirdness is landing in our city. Titles stay at the door.
And this time, the Film Club is bringing the films.
Every entry from the first 8 months of the BC + AI Film Club prompt challenges will be running on a loop all evening. Same starting prompt, wildly different films — wander over, watch a few, and see what your neighbours made. Each one shows the prompt it grew from and the name of the human behind it. Made one? Come stand next to your own work and eavesdrop on the reactions. Never touched an AI tool in your life? Even better — watch a few, then go ask someone how the hell they did that.
There's an audience pick, too. Scan, vote, and we'll crown a favourite around 6:30.
Show up when you can / Drift out when you need.
No slide decks. No polite applause breaks. Just a room of actual humans swapping ideas and finding the people they didn't know they needed to meet.
Bring a friend who's normally outside the AI bubble. Bring a question you haven't figured out how to ask yet. You don't need a polished demo or a festival pass to belong in the conversation.
Why bother?
A festival can be a firehose. This is a place to slow down, make room for unexpected connections, and keep the local creative ecosystem talking.... with hopefully a good few new national and international friends!
Community-first. Open-source heart-on-sleeve. Zero tolerance for hype-driven extraction.
Getting here
FriendsQuarters, #200-116 W Hastings St, Vancouver. Buzz #200 and head up one flight of stairs. The venue has no elevator and is not wheelchair accessible.
Definitely not official VIFF anything
This is an independent BC + AI community gathering, not an official Vancouver International Film Festival event. The mirrored cover is a playful remix, not a claim of affiliation.
If you accidentally learn something, make a friend, or start a revolution, that's on you.
About BC + AI Ecosystem Association
BC + AI is a community-driven, nonprofit industry association building public-interest infrastructure for AI in British Columbia. A commons where meetups turn into working groups, prototypes turn into shared tools, and community values turn into governance.