📍 Mary Irwin Theatre: Rotary Centre for the Arts:
421 Cawston Ave, Kelowna, BC
Eight screenings, one special landscape.
In movies, this region has played Ice Age Europe, suburban America, the Texas panhandle and the mountains of Central Italy. Sometimes it’s even played itself!
For over a century, filmmakers have looked at the Okanagan and seen somewhere else. This fall, we bring home nine movies - indie, Canadian, and big-budget Hollywood - to celebrate the landscape hiding in plain sight behind every place it’s ever played.
With introductions from movie-makers and UBC scholars, this festival will change the way you look at the place where we live.
Presented by Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, UBC Okanagan. Supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Film Schedule:
Tue 15 Sept: My American Cousin (1985, PG)
A dull 1959 summer on a Penticton cherry farm explodes into teenage rapture when 12-year-old Sandy's American cousin roars into the orchard in a red Cadillac.
Mon 21 Sept: Fido (2006, R)
In a candy-colored 1950s suburb where the dead work as household servants, a lonely boy's bond with the family zombie puts a deranged spin on Norman Rockwell.
Mon 28 Sept: NFB Night (Unrated)
An evening of National Film Board shorts turns the projector on the valley itself. Decades of Okanagan life shot by the country's own documentary filmmakers.
Tue 6 Oct: Recon (2020, 14A)
Four American soldiers push deeper into WWII Italy (AKA Enderby), led by an old Italian man they've been ordered to execute.
Tue 13 Oct: Tomato Red: Blood Money (2017, Unrated)
A drifter fresh out of prison breaks into the wrong house and falls hard for the scheming, magnetic siblings inside, while the BC Interior quietly plays the Missouri Ozarks.
Tue 3 Nov: Light of My Life (2019, R)
Casey Affleck disguises his young daughter as a boy on a trek through a post-apocalyptic wilderness where being female can be lethal.
Mon 9 Nov: Gunless (2010, PG)
A hardened American gunslinger stumbles into a tiny Canadian town so relentlessly, maddeningly polite it slowly disarms him — literally.
Thu 19 Nov: Bones of Crows (2022, 14A)
A sweeping multigenerational saga follows a Cree family from the residential school era into the present, turning survival itself into an act of defiance.
