Festival Journal · Recap
Recap: SIFF, Saskatoon
On the weight an audience carries. Buddy Check for Jesse at the Broadway Theatre, November 8, 2025.
Buddy Check for Jesse screened at the Saskatchewan International Film Festival on November 8, 2025, at The Broadway Theatre on Broadway Avenue in Saskatoon, where the film won the festival's Best Cinematography award. A member of our team represented the film at the Q&A.
On the cinematography award
Buddy Check for Jesse won the festival's Best Cinematography award at SIFF 2025. That recognition was the first the film has received specifically for craft, after Best Documentary wins at the Lenses Vancouver Independent Film Festival earlier in the year and at the Stratford Winter Film Festival in early 2026. The award was the festival's, not ours; we accepted it on behalf of a small production team that worked very hard to make the images carry the weight the story asks of them. A film about loss and youth sport can earn its audience through visual work as much as through subject. That is the conviction the production team made the film with, and SIFF is the festival that named it.
On the room
The Broadway Theatre is the room. Of all six venues Buddy Check for Jesse played on the fall tour, the Broadway sits in a category of its own.
The theatre opened in 1946 on Broadway Avenue in Saskatoon's Nutana neighbourhood and has run continuously as a cinema and performance space for the better part of eighty years. It is, and we mean this literally, Canada's only community‑owned non‑profit repertory cinema. The room is funded, sustained, and quite often rescued by the Saskatoon community itself. A hundred‑plus volunteer membership keeps the doors open. The programming runs from first‑run independent cinema to Cronenberg retrospectives to fundraisers for the Schizophrenia Society of Saskatchewan. The seats fill from the neighbourhood out.
There is something specific about screening a film about a community‑driven youth‑mental‑health program in a cinema that is, itself, a community‑owned institution. The Broadway has been kept alive on the Saskatoon community's own terms for nearly eighty years. The Buddy Check for Jesse program has been kept alive on Stu Gershman's family and community's own terms for more than a decade. Different scales of community work, doing different things; both grounded in the same conviction that the work is worth keeping going. The audience that came out for our screening understood both projects without any need to have them explained.
The festival
The Saskatchewan International Film Festival is a multi‑city festival that programmes across Saskatchewan, including Humboldt and Saskatoon. Its mandate is explicitly international, "to break cultural boundaries by cultivating and promoting the art and science of filmmaking," and its category structure reflects that: Short Film, Full‑Length Feature, Documentary Short, Documentary Full‑Length, Indigenous, Student/New Media, Animation, and Best SK Film. The festival's juries include Saskatchewan filmmakers and educators. Head juror Shayne Ehman is an alumnus of the National Screen Institute, the same institute that has provided mentorship to Buddy Check for Jesse throughout the production and tour. A coincidence we noticed and appreciated when the festival's structure was published.
The film was selected into the festival's documentary‑short category. To screen at the Broadway as part of a juried festival selection placed our film in front of an audience that had paid for a curated programme and was expecting one. They got cinema. It was a strong programme to be juried into.
A weight Saskatchewan brings to the room
There is a particular weight any film about youth, hockey, and grief carries when it screens in Saskatchewan. The Humboldt Broncos bus crash of April 2018, sixteen people killed and thirteen injured, most of them young hockey players on their way to a playoff game, is recent enough to remain present in this province in a way that the rest of the country, including our home in BC, does not carry quite as closely. We do not want to claim a relationship our film does not have to that loss. Buddy Check for Jesse is about a different family, a different game, a different kind of loss. In Saskatchewan, an audience walks into a film like ours with something already in their chest, and that is worth acknowledging here. The festival took care with the lead‑up, and the audience showed up the way they did.
What the Broadway gave us
What stayed with us about the Saskatoon room is that audience composition matters, and the audience composition at the Broadway is a particular kind. People who buy tickets to a community‑owned repertory cinema tend to know what they are doing in a cinema. They are paying attention. They stay for credits. They show up for Q&As. Buddy Check for Jesse needed an audience like that, and the Broadway delivered one.
The film travels well in regions where youth sport, and especially hockey, is part of how communities raise their kids. Saskatchewan is one of those regions. So is Northern Ontario. So is New Westminster's Lower Mainland. The film is a BC film, and Stu Gershman's program started in Victoria, but the conversations the film opens are conversations every hockey‑heavy region in this country is already having quietly. Sometimes loudly. The festival's Saskatchewan audience was already in the middle of those conversations when our film arrived. For the length of a screening, we were part of it.