What a year it’s been at Carbon Arc Cinema. This independent, Halifax art house, bringing to the big screen the best in international, independent, Canadian, and documentary film, has seen a huge increase in the number of people through its doors since 2024.

That’s largely due to the hard work of staffers Kenny Lewis and Alice Body and a great group of volunteers. If I may blow my own horn a little as artistic director — our excellent team of programmers consistently bring challenging and compelling film to our growing audience, a mix of new movies, classic, auteur-driven cinema, and occasional second-run and repertory movies, with a number of community partnerships helping foster a network of movie lovers.

The cinema goes dark for the holidays and most of January, before coming back with the Nova Scotia Retro Film Festo and our winter season — you’ll find my thoughts below on a number of the films we showed in the past six months or so. I didn’t love all of them, but I appreciate certain films will often find an audience even if they’re not for me.

Little, Big and Far

A thoughtful, gentle, and beautiful documentary about the place where science and philosophy meet, hypnotic in the best way. A film for academics, astronomers, thinkers, and sensitive souls.

Secret Mall Apartment

This is a fantastic story about a group of Rhode Island School of Design students who, kicking back against the gentrification of their city, Providence, took over an unused corner of the local megamall for four years and furnished the space as a residence. The film brings into focus a lot of issues around the changing face of urban living, the importance of public and disruptive art in the unforgiving retail landscape, as well as offering up a number of interesting characters. This is hugely relatable living in a small city with a prominent art school and ill-advised concrete monstrosities devoted to shopping.

Super Happy Forever

This is about a bereft man visiting the same beach town resort where he first met his partner years before, as the movie flashes back to the earlier time with the present day a bleached echo of that earlier joy. The narrative is set in these two world, pre-pandemic and post-pandemic, but the theme of appreciating life in all its fleeting glory applies in both time periods. Despite the melancholy tale and tone exploring grief and time, this is a stealthy, dry comedy.  Strange and beautiful, sad and funny.

Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos

There’s a lot to admire in this film, especially as a message movie based on actual events. I was wowed by the cinematography and the central performance. Some of the narrative is clunky in places and the inexperience of some members of the supporting cast is clear, but the film remains a potent window into life in an urban Nigerian community and as a look at how the needs of impoverished people are ignored or even demonized when it’s politically expedient.

The Encampments

This doc offers in plain language and imagery what happened when students in the United States demanded their schools divest from their country’s industrial war machine and US support for Israel’s war in Gaza, and how the government and others on campus framed it as antisemitism. A documentary that digs down into some of the deeper fissures in American society right now.

The Hobby: Tales From The Tabletop

Here’s the quintessential nerdy passion documentary, it’s a warm and welcoming look at people who love boardgames, those who create boardgames, and the broad and diverse community that surrounds them. Did it make me want to play more board games? No. Maybe that’s a flaw in the doc, or maybe that’s just me. I still enjoyed it.

Pavements

I’ve long thought Pavement a wildly overrated rock act, but I really tried to come to this film with an open mind. I figured a mock musical biopic/documentary about Pavement might puncture all the irony that exists around the band and finally make me appreciate their music. Unfortunately, I found I had the opposite reaction. This project feels like a celebration of the band’s boring smugness and their inchoate allergy to anything sincere that I’ve always hated about them. Now I’m even more perplexed by their cult and resistant to their musical appeal. It then occurred to me — maybe this is so in-the-pocket that it’s only made for the true believers.  The film’s impressive success with audiences at Carbon Arc has driven home this hard-to-accept point: I’ll never be able to understand their particular (so-called) genius.

To A Land Unknown

This is a solidly impressive migration drama about two very different Palestinian friends looking for sanctuary in Germany but stuck in Athens while still in touch with family who are back in refugee camps in the Middle East. The docudrama grit in the mise en scene delivers, as do the suspense and thriller elements.

Souleymane’s Story

Interesting that we’d get another migrant story in this list, this one of a Paris food courier who’s on the verge of his asylum meeting with the French government, his personal story juiced by a broker to make it seem more affecting and help land him the change in his status he so desperately needs. As the single character at its centre. Abou Sangare gives a fantastic performance.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley

This is a devastating look at the abbreviated life of wildly talented singer and songwriter Jeff Buckley through the people who were close to him. Some of Amy Berg’s documentary techniques are a bit predictable, but the overall impact of the archival footage and the present day interviews deliver all the emotion. You can’t help but feel that we’re all diminished by the tragic loss, all the music we never got to hear over the past almost 30 years.

Fairy Creek

This has parallels to a documentary we showed last summer, Yintah. That project was a 10-year effort with a focus on indigenous people versus the machines of government, resource extraction, and the legal system, which I think brought more weight as an activist documentary. Here also get voices from a few in the industry, which provides moments of balance. Fairy Creek is part document of efforts to protect old growth forest, and part portrait of a group of literal tree huggers— it’s been a long while since I’ve seen this many white people with dreads. This kind of dedication to the protection of our natural world is inspiring.

Eephus

This portrait of the last day of a league on a beloved baseball field has an elegiac quality — it’s the end of an era. It’s a drama and comedy, simply and literally about a group of middle aged and older men who play baseball on a diamond (about to be redeveloped) on lazy day, the passing of a pastime. I found myself ambivalent about it — I’m not sure if it had a lot of appeal beyond baseball fans, but I do appreciate how unusual it is in humour, pacing, and focus.

Riefenstahl

A straightforward but chilling documentary about the Nazi’s chief propagandist filmmaker, Leni Reifenstahl, who went to her grave claiming she never witnessed any of the regime’s atrocities, nor could she have known what they were capable of when she made a little picture called Triumph Of The Will. Is she delusional or an outright liar? The film’s archival material is incredible, as are her arguments from a lifetime of interviews, doomed efforts to rehabilitate her legacy.

Stranger Eyes

This feature is deeply indebted to Cache (Hidden) as well as Rear Window, but hey, may as well take from the classics. It’s also a deeply chilly examination of a tech-obsessed culture, while fitting in a crime drama. It demands patience with a glacial pace, but that’s not necessarily a criticism. As a Singaporean film it has things to say about life in a society where state surveillance is a big part of life.

My Sunshine

I found myself strangely hypnotized by the glazed cinematography in this sweet Japanese film about figure skating kids, closeted adults, and unrequited first loves, but I was never terribly engaged beyond the fascinating look it. I spent most of the time trying to figure out when it’s set. I was looking for conflict and engagement but not finding very much.

Happyend

From Neo Sora, the son of Ryuichi Sakamoto (who directed Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus), this is his first feature, and it combines subtle science fiction elements, social undertones, and a coming-of-age heart — about a teenaged friends in a near-future Tokyo coming to terms with their burgeoning political consciences.

Urchin

I wasn’t surprised by the grit in this one, but I was surprised by the wry humour. It’s the story of a homeless man who gets arrested and then, coming out of jail, gets a chance to rebuild his life, a place to live, but struggles to avoid his self-destructive tendencies. I was very much following along when the camera goes down a drain into a world of glowing cells and CGI creations. I’m not sure I understand what was going on there, or the recurring scene in a cave, but I really appreciated the central performance (from Frank Dillane) and the social concerns, so empathetically depicted by actor and first time feature director, Harris Dickinson, who also has a supporting role.

Peacock

This is an Austrian satire from Bernhard Wenger made with a hint of Ruben Ostland and a dash of Yorgos Lanthimos. It’s about a man who works for a company that hires him out, like an escort, in a variety of social situations. His job destroys his ability to have a relationship, and eventually his mental health, too. I’m not sure I understand what it’s saying about life in Vienna — is everything in upper middle-class society is a performance? And what’s up with all the weird animal interactions? The picture meanders a bit, but is otherwise a real pleasure.

Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk

This documentary is hard to watch for a number of reasons, starting with the first hand reporting from war-torn Gaza. Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi uses her phone to capture the video conversations with vivacious Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona. The aesthetic choice with the constant interruptions and jittery, moving image of a video filming another screen is all a part of this, delivering a scrappy uncertainty and constant anxiety. What it achieves in its mediated approach a moving portrait of an individual fighting to survive and finding ways to hang on to hope.

Thinking Beyond The Market

The host of the doc is also the director, a city planner named Brian Doucett. I’m not sure of Mr Doucett’s background as a filmmaker, but his picture looks like an industrial video awkwardly edited with poorly chosen music. That said, the message of the film can’t be said enough: The country is in a housing crisis, and there are workable solutions to this situation. As Doucett clearly and effectively explains, government funded social housing needs to be part of the plan.

A Second Life

I was wowed by this summery film’s cinematography, and the startling lead performance. At first it reminded me a lot of the tenor and spirit of Souleymane’s Story, the lead character’s desperation and anxiety around surviving in Paris, cut with a bit of Sound of Metal, particularly as she has a hearing impairment, but it has its own energy, too. The lead character, Elizabeth (Agathe Rousselle ), meets a delightful, pink-haired American guy (Alex Lawther), who effortlessly makes friends, and then the movie transforms into a Before Sunrise kind of tale, a lot of walking and talking. Early despair is spiked by unexpected and effervescent comedy.

The Librarians

This is a potent and affecting documentary about the censorship that is going on in the United States around conservative book bans in Texas and Florida.  Powerful, grim, with librarians becoming unlikely bulwarks to the deterioration of democracy in our southern neighbour. A stark warning that what’s happening there could happen here, just as Orwell and Atwood warned us.

Wrong Husband

At first this looks like it’s going to be a monster movie, with the threat of a troll to this small Inuit community, set sometime in the distant past. We also get spirit battles like we’re in an indigenous superhero movie, but I struggled to understand how it all knits together with the story of two women who are forced to join another camp when a fisherman chooses one of them to marry. I enjoyed the touches of humour, the landscape, and costumes from Zacharias Kunuk, a renowned Inuit filmmaker whose work has been consistently challenging going back to Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner in 2001.

Little Trouble Girls 

This is a gorgeously shot coming-of-age film about teenage girls spending a weekend on a choral retreat in Italy, from a first time Slovenian feature filmmaker, with Catholicism, transgression, and a whole lot of hormones in the mix.

Happy Holidays

A frequently compelling drama about a middle-class Israeli Arab family in Israel, exploring the familial dynamic where the stresses of relationships, of finances, and occasionally, of their lives overlapping with the Jewish population despite not having anything like the same rights. Told in chapters, where the film focuses on different characters, I appreciated the complexity in the storytelling. You have to feel for the women, the domineering matriarch who refuses to compromise on her social status, and the younger sister, Fifi, working as a kindergarten teacher at a school where Jewish kids are taught to celebrate the IDF, this while hiding her sexual history from her mother. There are places where beyond the vivid political reality the family drama feels like melodrama tilting into soap, but the film stayed with me for days.