The South Western International Film Festival is an annual film festival in

Sarnia Sarnia is a city in Lambton County, Ontario, Canada. It had a 2021 population of 72,047, and is the largest city on Lake Huron. Sarnia is located on the eastern bank of the junction between the Upper and Lower Great Lakes where Lake Huron fl ...

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...

. Launched in 2015, the festival programs a lineup of Canadian and international films in November each year, at the city's Imperial Theatre and Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery. The inaugural festival was opened with a gala screening of ''

Into the Forest ''Into the Forest'' is a 2015 Canadian apocalyptic independent drama film, written and directed by Patricia Rozema, based on the 1996 Jean Hegland book and starring Elliot Page and Evan Rachel Wood as orphaned survivalist sisters in a forest wi ...

'', a film by Sarnia native

Patricia Rozema Patricia Rozema (born 20 August 1958) is a Canadian film director, writer and producer. She was part of a loosely-affiliated group of filmmakers to emerge in 1980s from Toronto known as the Toronto New Wave. Early life Rozema was born in King ...

. Due to the

COVID-19 pandemic in Canada The COVID-19 pandemic in Canada is part of the ongoing worldwide pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (). It is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (). Most cases over the course of the pandemic have been in Ontario, Que ...

, the 2020 festival was staged online. The 2020 festival included a retrospective program of the work of

Sami Khan Mansoor Aslam Khan Niazi, known professionally as Sami Khan, is a Pakistani actor and model who appears in films and television dramas. He started his career with film ''Salakhain'' and then moved to television. Early life He was born on July ...

, a filmmaker from Sarnia whose short documentary film '' St. Louis Superman'' was an

Academy Award The Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international film industry. The awards are regarded by many as the most prestigious, significant awards in the entertainment ind ...

nominee for Best Documentary (Short Subject) at the

92nd Academy Awards The 92nd Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honored films released in 2019 and took place on February 9, 2020, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles, beginning at 5:00 ...

. The festival's longtime executive director was Ravi Srinivasan,Paul Morden, "Sarnia film festival supporters step up". ''

Sarnia Observer The ''Observer'' has been serving Sarnia-Lambton since 1853 and publishes five times per week, Tuesday through Saturday. The offices of the ''Observer'' are in Sarnia. The paper is printed in London, Ontario, on presses owned by Postmedia, which ...

'', September 23, 2020. until his death in January 2023.Barry Hertz
"Ravi Srinivasan, TIFF programmer and ‘champion’ of Canadian film community, dies at 37"
''

The Globe and Mail ''The Globe and Mail'' is a Canadian newspaper printed in five cities in western and central Canada. With a weekly readership of approximately 2 million in 2015, it is Canada's most widely read newspaper on weekdays and Saturdays, although it ...

'', January 16, 2023. He was also an associate programmer with the

Toronto International Film Festival The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF, often stylized as tiff) is one of the largest publicly attended film festivals in the world, attracting over 480,000 people annually. Since its founding in 1976, TIFF has grown to become a permane ...

, specializing in South Asian and Philippine films.

References

External links

* Film festivals in Ontario Film festivals established in 2015 Sarnia {{Canada-film-festival-stub