Echo Creators - Damon Gregory on What OKIFF Could Mean for the Okanagan

Damon Gregory once left the Okanagan wondering whether there would ever be enough of a film industry here for him to come back to. Nearly two decades later, he did.

“And it happened,” he says. “Here we are.”

The strange part is that plenty of people living here still don’t know it happened.

Film and new media is now Kelowna’s largest creative subsector, generating an estimated $188.6 million in GDP and $227.5 million in economic output. Productions including Tracker, Stick and Until Branches Bend have filmed in the region, alongside a growing network of actors, technicians, production companies and businesses supporting the work.

Yet Gregory, a Kelowna-based actor and Director of the Okanagan International Film Festival, still encounters young people who have little idea there might be a place for them in it.

“Kids don’t even know this industry exists”

That gap - between the industry growing around the Okanagan and how much of the community actually sees it, is part of what Gregory hopes to address with the return of the Okanagan International Film Festival (OKIFF) this October.

His proposed solution is ambitious. Put the industry, the community and filmmakers from around the world in the same place and see what happens.

Before OKIFF, Gregory and fellow actor Dalias Blake had already tested a smaller version of that idea. In 2022, they began bringing people together through the Okanagan TV & Film Industry Forum. The formula was simple: invite people from different corners of the industry, give them 10 or 15 minutes to explain how they got there, then open the room for questions.

Gregory was particularly interested in the careers that didn’t follow obvious paths - people who found film after decades doing something entirely different, actors who also work on crews, background performers who arrive on set and discover they are more interested in what is happening behind the camera.

“We’re trying to show them this is possible for anybody,” he says.

About 60 people attended the first Forum, according to Gregory. In the following week, he says roughly five attendees found work through connections they had made there. That was the part that caught his attention.

“The front door to this industry is wide open.” “You can’t walk into a set in Toronto, you can’t walk into a set in New York or L.A. or anywhere else,” he says. “But you can here.”

“You’ve got to be nice to everybody on set,” he says, “because that PA could be directing the film in a year from now. You just don’t know.”

The Forum suggested something to Gregory and Blake: sometimes the barrier is not that an opportunity doesn’t exist.

It is that people don’t know where to find it.

Gregory later joined an industry advisory group looking at what was keeping the Okanagan film sector from growing further. Three issues stood out, he says: crew capacity, the cost and availability of accommodation and marketing.

Marketing was the one Gregory thought he could affect.

“I can do something about marketing,” he remembers telling Blake. “I’d start an international film festival.”

Blake’s answer was immediate. “Let’s do it.”

It sounds like a very large response to a marketing problem.

But Gregory had been thinking about film festivals for almost 30 years.

In 1997, while living in Vancouver, he volunteered 32 hours at the Vancouver International Film Festival so he could earn a full festival pass. He returned the following year as a theatre manager and stayed for five years. Somewhere in those years, he began imagining what it might look like to have an international festival in Kelowna.

Gregory began acting professionally in the mid-1990s but stepped away around 2003, worn down by the instability of the work alongside family responsibilities and knee surgery.

For the next 17 years, he built luxury homes, doors and windows in California.

Then, in 2019, a customer walked into his showroom and told Gregory he seemed more like a creative person than someone meant for the “nuts-and-bolts” work in front of him.

“If you could wake up tomorrow and do whatever you want to do, what would it be?” “I’d go back to my acting career,” Gregory answered.

There was a long silence.

“So what are you doing sitting here talking to me?”

Since 2020, Gregory says he has rebuilt his acting career here.

The place he imagined had started to materialize.

Now the question was how to make more people aware of what had been built.

OKIFF returns from October 15 to 18, almost a decade after the previous festival ended. The revived festival will bring Canadian, international and Indigenous cinema to Kelowna, West Kelowna, Penticton and Vernon. By early August, organizers had received almost 150 submissions from 20 countries across six continents.

Gregory says the program will include feature films, full-length documentaries and blocks of short films, with shorter works grouped thematically where possible.

Friday’s Next Generation Day is intended to pull young people closer to an industry many may never have considered.

Gregory wants students to look beyond the handful of film careers everyone knows. “Watch the credits one day and see,” he says.

With REEL Canada involved, Gregory describes plans for screenings, career exploration and conversations with people working across the industry. The hope is to draw secondary and post-secondary students from across the Okanagan.

Not necessarily to convince them to work in film, simply to show them that they can.

“There’s a place for anybody and everybody,” Gregory says. “It’s where you belong. It’s when you’re not fitting in that you can fit in.”

The festival’s first co-production market approaches the same problem from the opposite direction. Instead of only advertising the Okanagan to filmmakers elsewhere, Gregory wants some of them to come and experience it themselves.

The market is intended to bring filmmakers together around new projects, talent, financing, resources and distribution opportunities. Gregory says filmmakers from countries including India, Iran and Brazil have already indicated that, if selected, they would like to travel to the Okanagan.

“It’s a very ambitious thing we’re doing,” Gregory admits. “And it’s possibly a bit much to bite off. Even if we have one person that shows up in the co-production market, that’s one more than was here before."

And then there are the movies.

For someone with no interest in a career on set or a conversation about co-production, Gregory’s reason to attend is much simpler.

He wants to give audiences the feeling he had in Vancouver almost 30 years ago: sitting down in front of a film they may never otherwise have found.

“That trip around the world,” he calls it. “I hope they’re going to walk out going, ‘I never knew. I had no idea.’”

For Gregory, international cinema is not interesting simply because a story comes from somewhere else. It is interesting when the distance between “somewhere else” and here suddenly begins to disappear.

“People’s challenges are the same no matter what language, no matter what colour, no matter where they live, at whatever socioeconomic level,” he says. “The world is more similar than different.”

He wants people to recognize themselves in unexpected stories. He wants communities to see themselves represented. He wants people to leave knowing something they didn’t when they walked in.

Nearly 30 years after a film festival did that for Gregory, OKIFF gives him four days to try to create the same possibility here. Only this time, what someone discovers may not be limited to what is happening on the screen.

They may discover the people making films around them. A career they didn’t know existed. A collaborator they had never met. Or simply a story they would never otherwise have seen.

Eventually, Gregory knows, all the planning around those possibilities has to stop.

The audience sits down. The room gets dark.

“Once the lights go down and the movie comes up,” he says, “that takes over.”

OKIFF 2026

The Okanagan International Film Festival runs October 15–18, 2026, with screenings at Landmark Cinemas in Kelowna, West Kelowna and Penticton, and Galaxy Cinemas in Vernon. The festival will feature Canadian, international and Indigenous cinema alongside industry and community programming, including its first co-production market.

The festival is also seeking volunteers, with the final film lineup, speakers, partnerships and additional programming being announced as plans are confirmed.