Our Vision: Awakening Culture, Uniting Communities

Our Mission: Bridge the gap of knowledge, understanding and acceptance through film

 

Snakebite Beginnings:

In 2016 Carl Meadows moved from downtown Vancouver to Penticton and believed that his new town needed a vibrant Film Festival scene. Carl and his husband Les were a big part of the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. Penticton on the other hand had an existing film circuit called “The Kitchen Stove Film Series”.

In 2017 Carl aligned the film festival dream with the Arts Rising Festival in Penticton, led by the Penticton Arts Council. This was the launch of Snakebite Film Festival with the tag line “If you don’t recoil, you are probably dead”. The collaboration set the stage to host the first film event called the 48 Hour Film relay. The vision was to feature films that would bridge the community dialogue on issues of diversity, acceptance and inclusion.

In 2018, Snakebite Film Festival opened with the Feature Film by local filmmaker Maddy Tebbutt called “The Darlings”. The festival was a huge success, and the momentum kept growing. Following this, a group of Film lovers, producers, artists and creators came together to create the Vision of the Film Festival. “Awakening Culture, Uniting Communities. 

 In 2024, Snakebite joined forces with the Okanagan Society for Independent Filmmaking (OSIF) which includes a Filmmaking Bursary for young filmmakers and a collaboration with OSIF to produce short films for the Snakebite Film Festival.

The Snakebite Film Festival has become one of the largest winter festivals and saw attendees as far away as New Mexico and Texas with over 1200 seats filled over 4 days.

The rest is history~--