Vancouver Moving Theatre in association with the Carnegie Community Centre
& the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians presents

The 22nd Annual
Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival
October 31 to November 8, 2025

Over 100 events throughout the Downtown Eastside and online

We are thrilled to announce the 22nd Annual Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival!

For twenty-two years, the Heart of the City Festival has been grounded in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and focused on listening and learning from the community's cultural practices. The Festival works with, for, and about the Downtown Eastside community to carry forward our community’s stories, ancestral memory, cultural traditions, lived experiences, and artistic processes to illuminate pathways of resilience.

This year’s Festival invites artists, neighbours, and audiences to reflect on what it means to live with dignity - on unceded land and with each other. Dignity in Community honours the everyday and extraordinary ways people care for each other, resist displacement, and make space to belong. We celebrate the strength and creativity found in our connections and imagine what is possible when dignity is a shared foundation for us all.

The 2025 Festival features over 100 events at over 40 local venues, including music, stories, poetry, theatre, ceremony, films, dance, readings, forums, workshops, discussions, gallery exhibits, art talks, history walks, and more!

A couple of highlights in the upcoming 2025 Festival: 

Spirit Encounters, Gerardo Avila’s latest theatrical performance features shadow puppetry, storytelling, comedy, dance, and music that celebrates the living by honouring the dead. Presented during the time of the Day of the Dead where the veil between the living and dead is lifted, historical personages from Mexican and other cultures are recreated with shadow and masked characters, accompanied by the encounter of flamenco and Mexican dance and music.

SHELTER, a new, original community-engaged art show that features high-impact and striking visual reflections on housing and homelessness by thirty marginalized, culturally and socially diverse Downtown Eastside artists. The exhibit includes city-wide transit shelter ads featuring large-scale individually-created artworks. The project is led by Gunargie Ga'axstasalas O’Sullivan, and produced by Radix Theatre in partnership with the Heart of the City Festival.

Other exciting Festival highlights include: Indigenous Cultural Exhibition hosted by Two-Spirit Grass Dancer Larissa Healey and Powwow Dancer Pavel Desjarlais; How I Met My Mother, Jonathan Paterson’s award-winning comedy about love, family and the power of redemption; Winter Jasmine, Good Spring, a fan dance performance with Chinese seniors from the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre; Mayor of Oz, a community-engaged grassroots play developed with the Carnegie Learning Centre volunteers; and a new folk opera work-in-progress Finding My Own Voice: Snake Sviy Holos' Opera by Beverly Dobrinsky.

The mandate of the Heart of the City Festival is to promote, present, and facilitate artists, art forms, cultural traditions, history, activism, and great stories about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The Festival involves professional, community, and emerging artists, and lovers of the arts.