Recap: CIFF, Chilliwack

The Chilliwack Independent Film Festival had to do something difficult in 2025: lose its home. Cottonwood 4 Cinemas, the festival's longtime venue, was demolished earlier in the year. Festival director Taras Groves had been planning to host a single screening at Galaxy Cinemas anyway, and ended up moving the entire festival there. The pivot turned into an expansion. The ninth edition of CIFF ran October 22 to 26, stretched from three days to five, and screened 118 independent films from Canada and around the world. The festival lost a building and gained a city.

The screenings stayed at Galaxy Cinemas, but the rest of the festival spread out. Industry mixers ran at Cowork Chilliwack. Opening night and the closing gala were held at The Grand Hall in District 1881. Additional events took place at the Chilliwack Museum. It was a noticeably more ambitious footprint than the festival had operated at before, and a bet, by Taras and his team, that the local audience would follow the festival into a more distributed form. They did.

A member of our team represented Buddy Check for Jesse at the festival's screening, with the resource sheet circulated to the festival's attending public. What stayed with us, from the festival's own documentation of its review process, is the way one of the screening committee members described the film. Buddy Check for Jesse, the programmer wrote, is "a well made documentary that mixes impressive technical filmmaking with a powerful story of exploration of grief and legacy." That framing matters to us. The film is meant to be a film first, a piece of cinema that earns its audience through craft, and the story is what carries the rest of the way. To have a programmer's review committee land on that exact framing, before the film had even reached an audience in their region, was a confirmation of what the work is trying to do.

How we got there

The pathway into CIFF is worth recording, because it speaks to how regional festival ecosystems pass films along. As we understand the chain, Buddy Check for Jesse came to CIFF's attention through its earlier screening at the Abbotsford International Film Festival, a short drive from Chilliwack and home to a programming community that pays attention to what the Fraser Valley's neighbouring festivals are doing. Festivals talk. Programmers visit each other's screenings. A film that lands in one Fraser Valley room can find a second invitation through that informal network, and that is part of how independent regional festivals build their slates from year to year.

On regional reach

CIFF reported more than 2,500 attendees across the five‑day festival. Substantial reach for the Fraser Valley, where the festival sits as the region's most established independent film event. The festival is a non‑profit, run on a small budget by Taras and a tight team. It currently sits in the top 100 best‑reviewed festivals on FilmFreeway out of more than 14,000 festivals on the platform, and Moviemaker magazine named it one of the top 50 festivals worth the entry fee. Past industry guests have included Osgood Perkins (Longlegs) and Patrick Brice (Creep), the kind of visiting programming you might expect at a much larger urban festival, and one of the reasons emerging filmmakers continue to submit there.

For Buddy Check for Jesse specifically, screening at CIFF placed the film in front of a Fraser Valley audience that includes substantial youth sport participation, school district networks across Chilliwack, Abbotsford, and the broader Valley, and a community of parents and coaches the program has every reason to want to be in conversation with. The audience was the right one. The festival was the right kind of festival to put us in front of them. CIFF demonstrated, for Buddy Check, what a regional festival run lean and with care can do.