The Calgary International Film Festival (CIFF) is happy to announce a new face in the role of executive director, but she’s not a new face to CIFF.
Katherine Penhale has worked with CIFF since 2016, starting as a venue co-ordinator and working her way up. On her journey to the top role, she has worked as operations manager, operations director and chief of staff. Roles she says helped her learn all the working parts of the festival, from venue management and booking to working with volunteers.
She says her favourite part of working with CIFF is being the back of a cinema and hearing a whole crowd laugh or gasp together, and how much sharing that space matters.
During the 2023 festival, the outgoing executive director Steve Schroeder asked if she was interested in learning the role.
It was a meeting she recalls as a pleasant surprise; “As I’ve got my radio on, I’ve got my fanny pack full of my festival gear, and I’ve literally just come down from the cinema to have this chat.”
Schroeder held that role for 12 years. He is credited with bringing revenue and audience levels to new levels and introducing larger scale events to the festival, growing its reach and variety of offerings.
Before being officially offered the position, Penhale spent this past season — the 25th anniversary of the festival — in the role of acting executive director, where she worked to develop and present the festival’s strategic plan; a plan she credits with making things a little easier moving forward.
In a release, the board of CIFF says although the position was opened to applications nation-wide, it was clear Penhale’s experience and passion were a perfect match for the future of CIFF.
And, the future looks bright; in September the provincial government pledged a $90,000 grant for CIFF, along with other investments, into the development of film and television in Calgary.
Penhale says support from the government and telefilms are helping CIFF remain sustainable, and the challenge moving forward is to develop new donors for the long term, and helping to quantify, specifically how those donors make a difference.
“Donations are going down and costs are rising, that is an eternal fight we are going to work through. We’re lucky, we are sustainable, efficient, we are small and we are able to make that work. But we have to be planning ahead,” she said.
CIFF is still quantifying it’s final audience numbers for the 2024 25th anniversary season, those numbers are expected to come out next week.