The Keepers at the 2026 BC Leo Awards

We were nominated, and we represented.

The Keepers was nominated at the 2026 BC Leo Awards for Best Visual Effects in a Short Drama and Best Youth Performance. We did not win either category, but that does not make the trip small.

James Alton and Kelowna Film Studios helped bring the movie together from the production side: crew, space, gear, actor coordination, writing support and the infrastructure around the shoot. Milton Muller led the official direction and VFX path, and getting that shared work into a provincial awards room still matters.

The night was also a people reminder.

One of the best parts of the evening was the overlap between projects. We happened to sit beside Jessica To from The Knitting Diaries, another Okanagan-connected project that has its own recognition story. We also saw Teddy Hillary and Ginny Becker, familiar faces from the local film and storytelling circle.

Teddy's post from the night sits alongside Teddy's IMDb profile. Ginny's connection goes back to Ginny's Story, the 2019 Child Advocacy Centre film on James Alton Films.

That is a real part of why these events are worth attending. The awards are the headline, but the room is also how relationships stay warm, how people find each other again, and how a regional production company keeps showing up outside its home market.

We will take the lesson forward.

Overall, we are proud of the team. Two Leo nominations for The Keepers is a serious piece of project recognition, especially for a short that had to hold performance, genre tone and visual effects together on a contained local production footprint.

We fell short of winning this year. We are still glad we went, glad we represented the project and the Okanagan, and clear about the next step: keep building the work until the room has to notice again.