Western Rattlesnake’ image courtesy, Andrew DuBois. CCBY-NC2.0 license
Kelownafornia Movie Festival continues Monday with four National Film Board shorts and a live Q&A with local filmmaker Teresa Marshall
KELOWNA, BC, September 24, 2026: After weeks of watching the Okanagan disguise itself as everywhere from wartime Italy to suburban America, Kelownafornia: Moviescapes of the BC Interior pauses the costume party for a night. On Monday, September 28 at 7:30 PM, the series presents NFB Nite at the Rotary Centre for the Arts (421 Cawston Avenue): four National Film Board documentaries, spanning nearly sixty years, that turn the camera on the valley as itself.
About the program
The evening brings together:
- The Home Town Paper (dir. Morten Parker, 1948, 23 min.): a day in the life of a small-town weekly newspaper editor, gathering the local news that will run tomorrow.
- Pocket Desert: Confessions of a Snake Killer (dir. Teresa Marshall & Craig Berggold, 1999, 24 min.): a personal documentary about growing up on a South Okanagan ranch battling rattlesnakes, and a meditation on how settlement has erased the region’s rare “pocket desert” ecosystem.
- Okanagan Dreams (dir. Annie O’Donoghue, 2001, 46 min.): young Quebecers travel west to pick fruit in the Okanagan Valley, discovering as much about themselves as about the harvest.
- Spirit Doctors (dir. Marie Burke, 2005, 40 min.): a journey into traditional Syilx (Okanagan Nation) medicine through spiritual healers Mary and Ed Louie.
Filmmaker Teresa Marshall, co-director of Pocket Desert, will join the audience for a live Q&A. Marshall’s film — a deeply personal account of her own ranch childhood — was later featured in the NFB’s national Canada 150 showcase on environmental activism.
Organizer Greg Garrard says, “The 1948 title turns the newspaper editor into the lynchpin of postwar social cohesion, while the Québecois fruit-pickers in ‘Okanagan Dreams’ learn that, maybe, Anglophones are not so bad. ‘Spirit Doctors’ and ‘Pocket Desert’ explore the differences between Indigenous and settler ways of living in the Valley, including a live discussion with co-director Teresa Marshall.’
About Kelownafornia
For over a century, filmmakers have looked at the Okanagan and seen somewhere else. This fall, Kelownafornia: Moviescapes of the BC Interior brings home eight films — indie, Canadian, and big-budget Hollywood — to celebrate the landscape hiding in plain sight behind every place it’s ever played. NFB Nite is something of an exception within the series: instead of the valley in disguise, four filmmakers looking at it plainly, across four very different decades.
The series is presented by UBC Okanagan’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, with support from a SSHRC Insight Grant.
Tickets and details
- When: Monday, September 28, 2026, 7:30 PM
- Where: Mary Irwin Theatre, Rotary Centre for the Arts, 421 Cawston Avenue, Kelowna
- Rating: Unrated
- Tickets: $20 regular / $10 student & senior — available online