There are music festivals, and there are music communities. The Canmore Folk Festival, which has been running every August long weekend since 1978, has always been the latter – and a new feature-length documentary is making the case that the rest of us should probably know more about it.
Canmore: Its Folk. Its Festival, produced by Jimmy Stevens of Rocky Mountain Live, premieres this Sunday, April 26 at the Canmore Brewing Company. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., with the film running from 7 to 9 p.m.
The Canmore Folk Festival Documentary Started as a Loose Idea
Stevens filmed the documentary during the 2025 festival, collecting interviews with volunteers, musicians, staff and longtime attendees. What began as a vague plan for a video feature kept growing the more people he spoke to.
“A lot of people can see Canmore as a tourism town and not really understand that there is a hugely active community that absolutely loves music here,” Stevens said. That community, it turns out, had a lot to say.
One of the more striking stories comes from local musician Mike Petroff, who recalls waking up one morning to find Stan Rogers and his friends sitting outside, passing around a guitar and a bottle through the night. It was the last time Petroff heard Rogers play – the Canadian folk legend died in a plane crash the following year. The festival's main stage now bears his name.
Traditions That Have Outlasted Nearly Everything Else
The film traces a line from co-founder Judy Vincent through to the current executive director, Jenna Klein-Waller, and finds the same thread running through all of it: a deliberate effort to pass the festival's traditions to the next generation without losing what made them worth keeping.
Chief among those traditions is the tarp run – a daily ritual where bagpipers lead festivalgoers into Centennial Park to claim their spots for the weekend. It sounds slightly chaotic, because it is, and that appears to be the point.
“You line up so early to get that favourite spot that you've been in for years,” Klein-Waller said. With the festival approaching its 50th anniversary, she describes the documentary as “a lovely love letter to the community that built the festival.”
Sunday Night at Canmore Brewing
The premiere includes live performances from local musicians featured in the film – Mike Petroff, Caroline Whyte, The Three Sisters, and Timmy Mann of The Ducks. Ticket proceeds go back into Rocky Mountain Live to support ongoing coverage of the local music scene.
After Sunday, the documentary will be available to watch for free on YouTube.
Forty-eight years in, the Canmore Folk Festival still runs on volunteer hours and institutional memory – and now, at least, there's a film to prove it.