A scene from the short film "The Valley" nominated for an Okanagan Screen Award.

Image Credit: YOUTUBE

A filmmaker from Penticton was just nominated for an Okanagan Screen Award for his film that portrays the beauty and nostalgia of growing up in Penticton.

Cam MacArthur has been making films for seven years now and his latest short film The Valley is an ode to Penticton and the Okanagan, the place where he was raised and the place that has inspired a lot of his work.

"The Okanagan is such a unique landscape of just having this dessert in the middle of Canada and it's so weird, but it's beautiful and showing the nature and the beauty of it all is a lot of what my work is," MacArthur says.

"I'm attracted to the environment and landscapes that people grew up in and I find that to be the backbone of most of my projects, even if I don't mean it to be. People are also important, but I always tend to notice the environment first."

MacArthur first got into filmmaking when he was 16 years old and bought his first camera. He fell in love with the art of filmmaking which he has been doing continuously since.

"It sparked this thing in me. I love the process of editing the videos afterward. So, I started doing it as a hobby with my friends, we'd go into the hills and film videos just for fun," he says.

The filmmaker then went on to pursue his passion at BCIT and immediately landed a job at Sytka, now known as Ecologyst, as their in-house film director.

MacArthur worked there for four years before becoming a freelance director and cinematographer. After the COVID-19 pandemic, circumstances allowed him to move back to Penticton which inspired him.

"Moving back (to Penticton) brought up all these crazy, nostalgic feelings for me. There's just so much free space, lakes everywhere and rivers and mountains, and you can just have the best childhood there so all these scene ideas came up in my head," he says.

I decided to make a passion project out of it, which just ended up being a love letter to Penticton."

MacArthur got his costumes for the film from a local women's clothing store and his partner Hannah Sterpin for help writing the script.

"She's a very talented writer. She writes a lot of spoken poetry-type prose so I asked her to help out and I gave her this very vague prompt of 'write something that feels like it's a dream and it's nostalgic about this place you grew up in' and it was great for how the video came together," he says.

While Penticton isn't typically viewed as a hotspot for the film industry, he says with passion and motivation anyone can succeed, they just have to get started.

"If you're not in Vancouver or near Vancouver, you can make it work anywhere that you are even in Penticton where there's not much happening in the film industry, but there are people there that want to make it work. It's all about finding the right people and hustling just a little bit to start and you can make it work anywhere," MacArthur says.

To find out more about MacArthur's film work, visit his website here or find him on social media.

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