Regular readers of FITI — or listeners to my column, The Knox Office, on CBC Information Morning in Halifax — will be well aware that I’m the artistic director and senior programmer at Carbon Arc Cinema. We bring the best of indie, international, Canadian, and documentary film to screen for our loyal audience in Halifax, offering something of an alternative to what you might find at the multiplex.
This week we’re doing something a little different.
To launch our winter season of screenings, my fellow Carbon Arcers and I are starting a new film festival, the NOVA SCOTIA RETRO FILM FESTO! This is the product of a lot of conversation in recent months with fellow cineastes about how difficult it is to see homegrown films in the years following their release.
Nova Scotian indie movies may get a healthy festival run, they may even get a week or two in theatres across Canada. After that you might be flying somewhere on Air Canada and see them listed as part of the onboard entertainment package, or they may arrive on a streaming service or CBC Gem. After that, they tend to vanish into the ether.
At Carbon Arc decided we were in a position to do something about that, to help celebrate a few older pictures that haven’t been seen on the big screen in years. We came up with a few titles, and I reached out to the filmmakers and got a lot of positive feedback for this idea. Then Alice Body and Kenny Lewis — administrator and projectionist/tech wizard, respectively, at Carbon Arc — started the search for the screening rights to the films, and to find a digital copy of a quality that we could feasibly screen for people.
Released in 1999, New Waterford Girl is a genuine homegrown classic, and it was really the only movie we could choose to open our festival. Over the years its lost none of its power to charm, the story of a young woman (played in star-making form by Liane Balaban) yearning to leave her small town in rural Cape Breton in the 1970s who hatches a foolproof plan with the help of a new American friend. It also stars Tara Spencer-Nairn, Mary Walsh, Nicholas Campbell, Cathy Moriarty, and Andrew McCarthy.
Touch & Go is a 2003 comedy directed by Scott Simpson and scripted by Michael Melski, starring Jeff Douglas and a teenaged Elliot Page. Douglas is Darcy, a Halifax tour-guide in his late 20s whose two best friends are about to move away, forcing him to come to terms with how his lack of commitment — to a lot of things — has him stuck and unhappy. It boasts a series of exterior scenes in downtown Halifax that reveals how much the city has changed in 22 years.
Toronto filmmaker Clement Virgo directed Poor Boy’s Game, a Halifax boxing drama about a white convict and boxer, Donnie Rose, who’s just out of prison. He was in for 10 years for violence he perpetrated against a young Black man years before. Now free, a Black boxer wants revenge, but the father of the kid who was badly beaten, he says he’ll coach Donnie. This is a surprising and courageous movie trying to tackle some of the baked in racism in this town in a way we don’t often see. It stars Danny Glover, Rossif Sutherland, Flex Alexander, Greg Bryk, Laura Regan, Tonya Williams, Stephen McHattie, Corey Bowles, Hugh Thompson, and Wes Williams.
Love That Boy is Halifax animator and filmmaker Andrea Dorfman’s second feature, a sweet coming of age move set in suburban Halifax about a chaste love affair between a 20-year-old woman and 15-year-old boy — it’s totally awkward and adorable. It also stars a very young Elliot Page amongst a charming cast.
The festival starts on Thursday. Click on the film titles for information about the screenings and to purchase tickets from the Carbon Arc Cinema website. Some of the screenings are already sold out! We’re thrilled at the response we’ve received so far.
In the weeks following the inaugural NSRFF, Carbon Arc will return to the usual fare of excellent and unusual film, and this season we’re screening films four days a week, from Thursday through Sunday. Check back at the cinema website for the February program announcement coming soon!
