Our Story~In 2016 Carl Meadows and his husband Les Dick, moved from downtownVancouver to Penticton and believed that their new town needed a vibrantFilm Festival. In 2017, he aligned the film festival dream with an ‘Arts Rising’Festival in Penticton, led by the Penticton Arts Council (PAC), called the 48Hour Film relay. This was the launch of the future Snakebite Film Festival withthe tag line “If you don’t recoil, you are probably dead”.In 2018, Snakebite Film Festival opened with the Feature Film by localfilmmaker Maddy Tebbutt called “The Darlings”. The festival was a hugesuccess, and the momentum kept growing. Following this, a group of filmlovers, producers, artists and creators came together to create the Vision ofthe Film Festival. ‘Awakening Culture, Uniting Communities’. The mission is tofeature films that would ‘bridge the gap of knowledge, understanding andacceptance through film’.In 2024, Snakebite joined forces with the Okanagan Society forIndependent Filmmaking (OSIF) and co-created the wildly successful 5-dayfilm challenge that is part of the annual festival.In October 2025, Snakebite Film Festival Society became a registeredcharity with a purpose to advance the public's appreciation of the arts byproviding and exhibiting high quality films focusing on diversity, inclusion andstorytelling.

The rest is history~