Festival du court-métrage de Yorkton !

This festival is a Saskatchewan institution. It began in 1947 as the Yorkton Film Council. Its mandate was to act as a distribution agency for the National Film Board (NFB). Jim Lysyshyn, a field man at the NFB, suggested a film festival. When the city council rejected his proposal, he came up with a bolder idea: an international festival. The council accepted the new idea and organized the first festival in the fall of 1950. Throughout the 1950s, the festival was a huge success, drawing as many as 4,000 people to screenings, at a time when Yorkton's population was only 8,000. The festival has undergone many changes over its history, but can still claim to be the oldest continuously running film festival in North America.