We Are Marshall (2017)

Sure can!

It stems back to the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) regularly hosting film screenings throughout the country during the Second World War. It was mostly news films back then, but it led to the creation of Film Councils throughout the country, including one here in Yorkton.

The NFB Film Agent out here was a man named James Lysyshyn, and he brought forward an idea for a film festival to the Yorkton Film Council. It took a bit of doing, and convincing, but he got the council on board by pitching it as an international documentary festival. The festival has changed quite a bit since then; we've switched from international films to purely Canadian films, but we owe our existence to the Yorkton Film Council, the NFB, and James Lysyshyn.

We do indeed have an entry fee; we do our best to help filmmakers who have financial considerations prior to submitting to a festival, but we generally can't completely waive the fee.

That being said, we start submissions in October and run until the end of January; with benchmarks for fees slowly increasing the longer you wait to submit. So, if you submit early, it's easier on your wallet.

It really depends on the length of films submitted for that screening year. As a short film festival, all of our films are under 60 minutes in length; but a lot of our documentary submissions come close to that 60 minute mark.

When we have a lot of long-form films to screen, it decreases the amount of films we can screen during the festival weekend. When we have more shorts, in increases. On average, I'd say we screen between 40 - 60 films during the festival weekend in our 2 main screening rooms.

We balance this through our mini-cinema screening room; where we have individual stations with televisions and computers that contain digital copies of all the films submitted to that year's festival. As such, people are free to come in, sit down at a station, and watch any film that interests them. If we include the mini-cinema as film screenings, then we jump into the hundreds.

Historically, it's definitely made drawing an audience a challenge.

When the festival first started out, I believe it was in 1954 or 1956 festival, there was a turn out for screenings of 4,000 people. At the time, Yorkton and the surrounding area had a population of around 8,000; so it was an incredible turn out.

Of course, with the advent of television and established theatres/cinemas in our communities, it was clear to see that that had an impact on attendance. Prior to that, hosting an event like film screenings was a really unique thing in smaller communities.

As such, there's definitely a focus on identifying films that "play" in our community; as I imagine a lot of festivals consider. When a lot of people can get content with the press of a button, you need to offer something worth leaving the house for...Or for driving the next town over for.

And that's something we certainly keep in mind when it comes to crafting our screening schedule; in that we want to highlight our nominees, but we also want to offer content that you couldn't get on Netflix or through another streaming website.

It's certainly put a lot of emphasis on audience building; and that's something we work on year round, as we do regular film screenings outside of the festival weekend, and partner with various groups across Canada to do film screenings in a lot of communities.

Not on our books. We don't actually get very many hockey films; we do tend to get at least one film about the CFL (Canadian Football League) or CFL-adjacent (film about a specific player) for the past few years though.

That's a good question!

I suppose it ultimately comes down to a matter of preference; cause tastes do vary and all that. I mean, you have the classic early "horror" works by David Cronenberg (things like The Fly, Scanners, Videodrome) that are certainly well known and talked about (or meme'd about) online to this day; but if you're not much of a horror fan, you might not be into those. Same goes for a film like "Cube"; it's not one of my personal favourites, but there are quite a few people who quite enjoy it.

And then there's the comedies. Things like Strange Brew, or Porky's, and Brain Candy (Kids in the Hall) certainly are worth mentioning and checking out.

I'd be more inclined to recommend a good drama; like The Red Violin, The Sweet Hereafter, or (the underrated in my mind) Lilies as an example of great Canadian film.

And that's just for feature films! There's a ton of great shorts that are produced, both animated and live action, that certainly enjoy a certain aspect of "great Canadian film". Things that we all grew up watching like The Cat Came Back, or Log Driver's Waltz. But there certainly is a lot of great Canadian content to choose from!

In terms of "I know that guy/gal!" names...Probably not as many as you'd expect.

We're certainly more on the producer/director/technical aspect in terms of attendance at the festival; so we get more crew-based attendance than we do say actors/actresses who may be a household name.

There's some good filmmaker subreddits; places like:

/r/Filmmakers, /r/film, or /r/shortfilm where you can certainly get involved with people who seem to be more interested in discussing some of the more technical sides of filmmaking, or even interpretation of films and such. Outside of that, I'm afraid I can't be of more help.

That varies quite drastically, I suppose.

We don't ask filmmakers to disclose their budget, it's not something we really need to know; but I can make a few educated guesses here and there.

We get films from student filmmakers, emerging filmmakers, and established filmmakers. As such, we've seen films that were maybe produced on a budget of only a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. On the flip side, since we have a category for Lifestyle & Reality (which generally gets TV entries), we're also getting films that have budgets into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.

Most films we receive would fall probably in the middle between these two extremes.

A full category listing can be found here. We present awards in 18 categories, 3 accompanying categories, 3 craft awards, and 2 special awards.

Every once in awhile, there's some mumbling/grumbling about the idea. I think, if I remember my history correctly, the last serious time it was brought up was during the mid-80s, early 90s, when the festival wasn't on the soundest of footing and most ideas on righting the ship were considered.

Needless to say, the thought was that part of what's kept us going for 70 years is the community; moving it severs that and changes the history, and at that point, it's not really "us" anymore...Just some new festival in Regina or Saskatoon. As such, I think we're here in Yorkton for the long haul (at least another 70 years!)

Thankfully, for our filmmakers, we do have a volunteer based shuttle service to bring people from Regina to Yorkton.