Recap: DRIFF, Oshawa

The Biltmore Theatre opened on King Street East in 1948 as one of five Biltmores the Okum Brothers built across Ontario. It spent its first few decades as a movie house, closed and reopened as an Odeon, and after that closed too, lived a series of other lives. Bingo hall. Nightclub. Music venue. It came back under new ownership in 2020 and bills itself today as Oshawa's premier live music room. On December 2, 2022, MODO‑LIVE, the Biltmore, and Indie 88 sold the place out for The Rural Alberta Advantage and Sister Ray. Buddy Check for Jesse was not, on the night we screened, going to compete with that for stage volume. The building had the slightly mismatched warmth of a room that has lived several lives, and on Saturday October 25, 2025, it was a film festival.

I missed Durham for a happy reason: a baby boy who arrived just before the festival. The Buddy Check for Jesse team and close family friends of Stu Gershman's represented the film at the Q&A in my place. DRIFF's Director of Programming Jessica Smith, festival Chair Karen Burwell, and Eileen Kennedy on the festival's marketing side were generous and gracious about the late change, and the festival went forward as scheduled.

The Durham Region International Film Festival turns ten next year, and the team behind it is clearly already thinking about the milestone. In 2025 the festival ran three days across three towns (Whitby, Ajax, and Oshawa), and Buddy Check for Jesse was programmed into the Homegrown Shorts on the closing afternoon, a 3:00 PM block of six Canadian shorts at the Biltmore. We screened alongside On a Sunday at Eleven (Alicia K. Harris), Butterflies (Zav Jenabian), Going Dutch (Jack Copland), I Never Promised You a Jasmine Garden (Teyama Alkamli), and Little Goodbyes (Justine Martin). The Q&A on the panel afterward included Zav Jenabian, Jack Copland, and Teyama Alkamli. Watching the films in a row, the room recalibrated its emotional setting from one to the next. By the time Buddy Check arrived in the rotation, the audience had already been somewhere with these other filmmakers, and they brought the same attention to ours.

The day around our screening

The matinee block we were part of was bracketed by other events worth noting if you ever get a chance to attend DRIFF. Earlier in the afternoon, the festival opened with a free SPFX makeup demonstration by the CMU College of Makeup Art and Design. Later that evening the closing feature was Yan England's Racewalkers, with an Ontario Green Screen presentation in between, an awards ceremony at 8:30 PM, and an after‑party with the local rock band The Nighthowlers. The Day 1 opening at the Centennial Building in Whitby had been Nika & Madison (dir. Eva Thomas, fresh off a TIFF premiere); Day 2 in Ajax was anchored by Alireza Khatami's The Things You Kill. DRIFF is a real festival, supported by Film Durham (Durham Region Film Commission), and a programming range like that one was part of why our film sat well inside it.

The Homegrown Shorts programme exists, in part, because Durham wants to see Durham‑adjacent work made by people from across the country. Buddy Check is a BC film, but the loss it documents and the conversation it has started are national. Programming us inside that block was the right call, and the audience treated it as one.

There is one observation worth making about why DRIFF specifically was a programming win for this film. Durham Region carries some of the most active youth hockey, basketball, soccer, and minor sport infrastructure in Ontario, with school district networks across Whitby, Ajax, Oshawa, and the broader region that put the program's likely audience in front of the screen. Buddy Check for Jesse has every reason to want to be in that room. We are grateful DRIFF brought us into it, and we hope to be back.