The complicated story of an Okanagan terrorist is told in one of the movies to be shown during a month-long film festival in Kelowna.听
‘Eddy’s Kingdom’ chronicles Eddy Haymour’s ill-fated attempt to build an amusement park named ‘Morrocan Shadu’ on one of the only two islands in Okanagan Lake.
From that desire came a cascading series of events that saw Haymour charged with threatening the premier, locked away in a mental asylum, and seizing the Canadian embassy in Lebanon in 1976.
“An entrepreneur’s obsessive dream of developing an Okanagan Lake island into a Middle Eastern-themed amusement park leads to a spiralling path of legal turmoil,” reads a summary of ‘Eddy’s Kingdom’, one of four films to be shown during Reel Okanagan.
A different, locally-made film will be shown at 7 p.m. each Wednesday evening in August at the Rotary Centre for the Arts in downtown Kelowna. Each film consists of “bold, heartfelt, storytelling”, per a release.
“It’s about celebrating our creative community, uplifting local filmmakers, and bringing our stories to the big screen in a meaningful way,” says Colleen Fitzpatrick, the RCA’s executive director.
‘Eddy’s Kingdom’ kicks off the festival on Aug. 6. Other films are Wild Goat Surf, The Casorsos: La Prima Famiglia; and B.C. is Burning.
Tickets for each film are $14. For more information, see
Bonus feature/spoiler: Haymour’s many layered story has something of a happy ending. No one was killed when he and his relatives stormed the Canadian embassy in Lebanon, and he was eventually awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for his ill-treatment by the B.C. government.
He used the compensation money to build a lavish bed-and-breakfast in Peachland, and placed a giant statue of himself alongside Highway 97 pointing at Rattlesnake Island.
But he never got the island back, and it is now part of Okanagan Mountain provincial park. Haymour is 95, and lives in Edmonton.
He is also unapologetic about threatening to kill 35 people at the Canadian embassy in Lebanon: “Any method to obtain justice is justice in itself,” Haymour says in ‘Eddy’s Kingdom’.