B.C. filmmakers Hayley Gray and Kaayla Whachell bring Send the Rain to VIFF
A scene from Send the Rain, Hayley Gray and Kaayla Whachell’s feature about an Okinawan-Canadian family facing an approaching wildfire in the B.C. Interior.
Photo credit: Courtesy of VIFF
A project Hayley Gray began developing during British Columbia’s 2018 wildfire season will have its world premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival this fall as a 94-minute feature.
Send the Rain, co-written and directed by Gray and Kaayla Whachell, premieres Oct. 2 as part of VIFF’s Northern Lights program and BC Spotlight. Erika Prevost stars as Erika, a young Okinawan-Canadian animator living in Vancouver who travels to rural B.C. when her grandmother, Oba, refuses to evacuate the family farm as wildfires close in. Sachiko Tsujimoto and Dylan Playfair also star.
VIFF describes a story unfolding entirely in the B.C. Interior, moving between the threat to the farm and memories from the family’s past. Those memories include Oba’s departure from Okinawa during the war, Erika’s mother as a child and strawberry picking. As Erika tries to persuade her grandmother to leave, calls from her sister Hanna add to the pressure to evacuate.
The feature began with a much smaller film. Gray wrote and directed the original Send the Rain, about an artist and homesteader named Alice facing decisions after B.C. wildfires destroy her family home. Whachell was the cinematographer, Laara Sadiq and Veena Sood starred, and Vancouver production company BOLDLY produced the film.
Gray had been working on the idea for years by the time the short reached CBC in August 2022. Women In the Director’s Chair records show that she developed Send the Rain with story editor Linda Coffey as a finalist in the 2018 WIDC Short Work Award: Kamloops edition. At that stage, the short was being developed as a proof of concept for a feature project called Dry Year. Gray later continued developing Dry Year through WIDC’s Story & Leadership program.
Gray has said the short grew out of what she was seeing in B.C. during the 2018 wildfire season. The provincial record gives that background some scale: BC Wildfire Service recorded 2,117 fires and 1,354,284 hectares burned that year, then the largest area burned in a single B.C. fire season on record. Sixty-six evacuation orders affected 2,211 properties. The area-burned record was later surpassed during the 2023 season.
The short went on to win the Golden Egg at Reykjavík International Film Festival, a Golden Sheaf at Yorkton Film Festival and a Directors Guild of Canada short-film award. Whachell also won a cinematography award for the short at the 2023 festival now known as GEMS. Gray’s own biography records the CBC premiere in August 2022, while VIFF includes the major awards in its biography for her.
By 2023, the project had become something different from the short and from the earlier Dry Year development material. Producer Mike Johnston told Hollywood North Magazine that Gray and Whachell had developed a first feature draft independently before approaching him in early 2023. Studio 104 Entertainment then joined the project, and Johnston said the filmmakers developed the feature as a loose adaptation of Gray’s short while bringing Whachell’s family history and Okinawan culture into the screenplay.
That development put an Okinawan-Canadian family at the centre of the feature while retaining the B.C. wildfire setting. Whachell identifies herself as being of Okinawan, Red River Métis and Czech descent and is a member of both Métis Nation British Columbia and the Vancouver Okinawa-ken Yuaikai. She co-wrote and co-directed Send the Rain and also served as cinematographer.
Whachell came to the feature after years working as a cinematographer in B.C. Her first feature as director of photography, Trevor Mack’s Portraits from a Fire, earned her the 2022 Leo Award for cinematography. Her credits also include the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary I’m Just Here for the Riot and Gray and Elad Tzadok’s NFB documentary Unarchived.
Gray is a Vancouver-based writer and director who studied at Dalhousie University and Vancouver Film School. Her earlier work includes Hayashi Studio, which examined B.C. history through the Japanese Canadian photography studio of Senjiro Hayashi, and Unarchived, the 2022 NFB feature documentary she co-directed with Tzadok about community archives across British Columbia and histories missing from institutional records. Whachell was director of photography on Unarchived, extending a collaboration between the two filmmakers that predates the feature version of Send the Rain.
The feature was already attracting public financing by 2023. Telefilm Canada included Send the Rain among the B.C. projects receiving production funding that year, listing 1375849 B.C. Ltd. as the production entity. WIDC also announced in June 2023 that Gray had received Telefilm regional feature-film funding for the project, which was then scheduled to be co-directed with Whachell.
Johnston has said Telefilm development financing arrived earlier in 2023, followed by production financing later that year. In his current premiere announcement, he identifies Studio 104 Entertainment as producer and says the completed film was made with participation from Telefilm Canada and the Canada Media Fund, in association with Bell Media and Crave. VIFF credits Johnston as producer, with Prevost and Jake Labow as executive producers.
The location record is less complete than the film’s clearly defined Interior setting. UBCP/ACTRA listed Send the Rain as a B.C. feature in production from Aug. 5 to 29, 2025, with a Vancouver production office and Gray and Whachell directing. A crew photograph posted on the final listed production date identifies Send the Rain cast and crew in Chilliwack, establishing that at least part of the production took place there. Publicly available first-party production material does not provide a complete list of filming locations, so the film’s B.C. Interior setting should not be treated as evidence that it was photographed in the Interior.
Prevost also serves as an executive producer on the film. VIFF lists her alongside Tsujimoto and Playfair in the principal cast, while Playfair brings another B.C. connection to the production: he was born in Fort St. James and pursued acting after playing junior hockey in the province.
For Gray, Send the Rain has travelled from a short developed through WIDC in Kamloops, through its CBC premiere and festival run, into a feature made with Whachell as co-writer and co-director. The finished film now arrives at VIFF with the wildfire story expanded around an Okinawan-Canadian family and its relationship to a rural B.C. farm.
Send the Rain has its world premiere Friday, Oct. 2 at 6 p.m. at International Village 10 in Vancouver. A second VIFF screening is scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 8 at 3:15 p.m. at Fifth Avenue Cinema.
