About - Bay of Blood (BOB)
The Bay of Blood Film Festival (BOB) is a showcase of exceptional cinema, be it artistic, scary or horrific. BOB strives towards supporting and exhibiting independent media artists while working from our base of operations in North Bay, Ontario. BOB brings together audiences, media coverage, community partnerships and the film making industry to exhibit and celebrate Canadian genre films. As North Bay’s only horror festival we are dedicated to supporting local and international filmmakers alongside each other.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The Bay of Blood Film Festival gathers on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, specifically the Nipissing and Dokis First Nations, within lands protected by the Robinson Huron Treaty of 1850. We acknowledge them and any other Nations who care or cared for the land (acknowledged and unacknowledged, recorded and unrecorded) as the past, present, and future caretakers of our home region. We are honoured to welcome artists and guests on these storied and sacred lands that have been stewarded by Indigenous peoples since time immemorial.
FESTIVAL CODE OF CONDUCT
The Bay of Blood Film Festival is a space where volunteers, audiences, and filmmakers safely explore boundaries, have fun, and watch amazing cinema. While we encourage free-speech, we will not tolerate harassment, violence, abusive, or aggressive behaviour of any kind. We reserve the right to revoke festival passes and privileges without notice to any offending party. We strive towards treating everyone at our festival with the utmost respect and encourage those who report issues to do so knowing they are safe and their rights are paramount to our festival. Bay of Blood makes every effort to comply with accessibility requirements for our attendees and will continue to make an effort to continue to find ways of removing barriers for everyone involved. If an issue arises please contact any volunteer or staff member and ask to speak to guest services. For immediate emergencies, please call 911. Please keep our festival venues safe for our staff, volunteers, festival guests, and filmmakers. Know your rights. Consult the Ontario Human Rights Code for more information.
Bay of Blood Team
Seb Godin
Having grown up on a steady diet of Hammer horror, Universal Monsters, 50's B-movies and tokusatsu, Seb Godin is as avid a genre lover as you'll find. Having written for magazines like DELIRIUM and directing their own micro budget creatures-features like LYCANIMATOR and BLOOD RITES OF THE VAMPYR, Seb is extremely proud to contribute to Bay of Blood.
Cindy Hinds
Cindy began her film career in 1974 working in the industry for over a decade before she step back and moved onto the hospitality and real estate industries where she realized great success over the last 25 years. You will recognize Cindy from being splashed across movie and television screens in the 70’s and 80’s having starred in David Cronenberg’s The Brood as well as other horror features and many TV shows like Littlest Hobo, King of Kensington, and many more. In 2013 Cindy was sought out due to The Brood’s 35th anniversary as well as the Blu-Ray release and induction into the Criterion Collection. In 2016, Cindy began working with the Blood In The Snow Film Festival (BITS) in Toronto and in 2024 joined the Bay of Blood International Film Festival (BOBI). Cindy has been a lifelong supporter of the entertainment industry with time spent over the last 7 years on many sets as well as attending film and stage festivals as both a guest and volunteer at many events and conventions.
Stevie Lyons
A passionate performance and cinema artist, Stevie Lyons has worked on over fifty theatrical productions and almost a hundred film projects in the last ten years. During that time, she directed twenty stage plays, ten short films, and two feature films, Lavenders Blue (2019) and The Beauty of Blood and Shadow (2024). Stevie served as Artistic Director for Paradox Repertory Company for ten years and on the board for Students on Stage for seven years. In 2014 she was a programmer for the Northern Images Film Festival and is currently an instructor in Canadore College’s Digital Cinematography program. This is her second year working with Bay of Blood and can’t wait to share some bloody good films with the public!
Clayton Windatt
Clayton Windatt is a curator, multi-arts performer and filmmaker living and working in Ontario. As the former Executive Director of the White Water Gallery, the Indigenous Curatorial Collective and current Executive Director of the Artist-Run Centres and Collectives Conference, Clayton has an extensive history working in Artist-Run Culture and Community Arts. Clayton maintains contracts with various governments, colleges and non-government organizations as a writer, consultant and knowledge broker negotiating between peoples, places, and communities. Clayton works in/with community, design, communications, curation, performance, theatre, technology, and consulting, and is a very active artist.
Tara Windatt
An artist and arts administrator from the North Bay area, Tara Windatt has always had a soft spot for the spooky and macabre, especially when it’s a little bit campy too! It probably has something to do with her reading too many Goosebumps books and watching Tales From the Cryptkeeper as a kid. Although not a filmmaker herself (yet), she loves to watch and critique films from the comfort of her living room. She’ll also critique them in the movie theatre, which sometimes gets her in trouble.
Who is Bob the Bigfoot?
Bob (aka Bobi) is the Bay of Blood Film Festival’s furry friend that ventures out of the forest each spring to check out our festival. Bob is a “Samsquanch”, more commonly known as Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, or “Ape-person” and is the star of various legends, fairy tales, and myths from around the world. We are delighted that Bob has decided to call our festival home, and have made them our official mascot. Despite the rumours, Bob is not named after Robert "Bob" Gimlin, the notorious filmmaker who with Roger Patterson co-created the 1967 “Patterson–Gimlin film,” the first publicly shared footage of a bigfoot caught on film. Bob denies any involvement in the 1967 project, but if that is Bob, it would make our mascot over 70 years old. There is no way of knowing Bob’s gender identity or even their true appearance as our big-footed friend always wears some form of mask or accessory on their head or face when in public. There has been a great amount of speculation regarding the reasons for this, especially if Bob is indeed the world famous bigfoot. Maybe Bob is shy, or just wants to keep their true identity a secret. We may never know, but for now Bob remains content watching scary films with other horror fans and posing for pictures at our festival each year.