Orillia Gears Up For First Annual Film Festival

Visit the O.F.F. website for more details.

ORILLIA, Ontario - Local ophthalmologist Tim Hillson not only has an eye for film, he knows a good opportunity when he sees one. Why else would he take upon himself the mammoth task of orchestrating the famous town's first annual film festival?

"I've always loved film," says Hillson. "Watching my kids and others enjoy making their own movies, I started to see how much more accessible film-making is with the explosion of new and affordable technology that allows the user to share their creativity in a really appealing way. And I thought it would be a great thing to have something that puts that creativity on show in our city."

Hillson's plan looked fairly straight-forward on paper: Make a national call for short film entries, show the selections over the course of an evening, and hand out prizes to the best ones. Sounds easy if you say it fast enough. But anyone who has worked TIFF, VIFF, or any of Canada's other notable annual festivals knows that running an event like this is anything but easy, never mind starting one from scratch.

"You know it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be," says Hillson, no stranger to building a business from the ground up.  "I looked at some other communities doing something similar and how they were doing it. I shamelessly cut and paste good language from other websites when I found it.  I reserved the website name, created a non-profit corporation, then broke the tasks down. Getting sponsors, getting volunteers, getting submissions, getting an audience. After that, it was really just grunt work."

Grunt work that included sending letters to film schools across the country. Soliciting volunteer workers from local high schools. Tapping the synergistic advertising might of Facebook, Twitter, and Withoutabox. Blanketing the area with posters and post cards. And perhaps most significantly, securing Orillia's gorgeous Opera House as the festival's venue.

"We wanted to say right off the bat, 'this is going to be great' to our potential audience," Hillson continues. "I think if we had picked a budget venue it would have cut the interest significantly. Once I put the deposit down, I knew it was going to actually happen!"

Orillia, made famous in Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (under the fictional town moniker "Mariposa"), attracts tens of thousands of tourists each year, due largely to its breathtaking waterfront views, groovy arts milieu, and annual Mariposa Folk Festival which has hosted greats like Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, The Proclaimers, Blue Rodeo, Barenaked Ladies, and of course hometown boy and legendary songsmith, Gordon Lightfoot.

Culturally vibrant and scenically nestled between Lake Couchiching and Lake Simcoe, this town is, in other words, the perfect place to hold a film festival.

"I think Orillia is ready for this," says Hillson proudly. "We already have a strong arts community and a long history of artistic leanings. Orillia as a city has an open mind to new things and I think this could really take off."

So far, the community response has been overwhelmingly positive.

"Finding sponsors for the festival has been remarkably easy.  I took the old 'ask a thousand people and ten will say yes' approach but the ratio has been much better than that.  The medical community has stepped up, as has the city and a number of businesses.  We even have some big software company sponsors which has been great!"

In the hands of Hillson and team, and with strong local support, things are sizing up nicely for one heck of an evening. But the good doctor's vision extends well beyond October 4.

"In the years to come, I'd love to see the Orillia Film Festival as a multi-day festival with shorts and full length films and maybe a 48 hour film challenge component that takes over Orillia for a few days.  We also have a partnership with Lakehead University that I would really like to see developed into a summer film camp or maybe even a film school.  Orillia is a great place to shoot a film. The sky's the limit, really."

For more information, visit the official Orillia Film Festival website.