How a new Halifax film fest is saving old indie films from extinction

If an intrepid fan of pivotal Halifax filmmaker Andrea Dorfman wanted to watch all the flicks in her oeuvre, there would be a ton of legwork involved. Dorfman herself would be the first person to point that out. 

"Because I've made my films starting in the '90s — and now it's … like, almost 30 years later — my films have traversed a whole range of forms," she says. "And my first [feature] film, Parsley Days, is only on VHS. Like, at Video Difference [the shuttered video-rental store that was a local landmark], you could get it. And at the library, I think you can still get it. But there aren't links to it." 

The widely held streaming-age assumption that everything is a quick Google search away can be dismissed in the same breath that blows dust off a VHS player. 

In fact, Dorfman sometimes gets emails from fans begging for physical copies of hard-to-track-down titles. "I can actually send them a DVD, which feels fun and retro," she says. "Sometimes they're like, 'Oh my gosh, I'll pay anything.' And I just love that they want the film."

Thankfully, her followers no longer have to go on an odyssey — just an outing. A vintage Dorfman flick is about to screen at Halifax's last independent cinema, Carbon Arc, as part of its inaugural Nova Scotia Retro Film Festo, on from Jan. 30-Feb. 2. 

Dorfman's movie isn't the only rare gem on deck.

"There is a film we're showing, Touch & Go, which is completely unavailable to be seen and has been for years," says Carsten Knox, one half of the duo behind the festival and a longtime Carbon Arc volunteer, programmer and artistic director. (Knox is also a columnist on CBC Information Morning in Nova Scotia.) He says Touch & Go, which exists only on the original film reels, was in director Scott Simpson's basement, "collecting dust." 

"We just felt like there's something we can do here to help celebrate some of the older films that we can get our hands on, that people may not have seen on the big screen — or at all — for years," Knox says. "And that was the impetus: to bring some of these [titles] back." 

The movies selected for the festival, a slate of four films from the turn of the millennium, are varied in style and theme (though Knox does note that two happen to star a young Elliot Page). The common ties in the collection are time and place: they're postcards from what could be called an indie boom period in the province's long history of filmmaking. 

Reviewed by Variety and the New York Times — and, in the case of New Waterford Girl, debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival — the films Knox and festival co-creator Alice Body, Carbon Arc's administrator, have lined up aren't small-potatoes pictures. (One, Poor Boy's Game, stars Danny Glover.)  But because they're indie productions created in the dusk of the analog era, wrangling with physical copies and outdated screening rights was a hurdle in making the fest a reality. 

"I don't think I've exhausted resources like I have in trying to find distributors and copies for these films. It was really, like, [going to] the Dalhousie archives to try to find a film and scouring the internet and contacting other independent cinemas across Canada and saying, 'Has anybody ever screened [these titles]?'" Body says. "We got there, but it was a lot of work. They were really, really hard to find." 

To put it in perspective, the usual process to screen a movie at Carbon Arc — say, for a typical new release — requires Body to email the film's distributor and secure a copy. Programmers at the theatre screen the film, and then schedule it for public viewing. 

"The first two films that we have up sold out in 48 hours — two weeks before we even have the festival," Body says, adding she's never seen tickets move so fast. Second screenings have been added for both New Waterford Girl and Touch & Go to meet audience demand. Turns out those fans emailing Dorfman aren't alone in their love of vintage Nova Scotian stories. 

"It's like, we have this history here," she says. "We're all on the continuum of history as filmmakers go. Everybody's a stepping stone to different eras of filmmaking. And all these films are a little bit of a snapshot of Halifax. So it just lets people who may have even heard, like, 'Oh yeah, there was this filmmaker, Andrea Dorfman, made these films in, like, the '90s and early 2000s.' And to be able to see it is just to be able to see a little slice of history."

Any outdated, preconceived notions of Nova Scotian film being all sea-swept tales should be long-dispelled by now. The focus of the industry these days tends to be on big business, like Robert Eggers's 2019 film, The Lighthouse — shot between the shores of Yarmouth and a sound stage in Dartmouth — or the Disney series Washington Black, which filmed in Halifax in 2022 and stars Sterling K. Brown. 

The movies at the Nova Scotia Retro Film Festo, meanwhile, add another facet to what film means in the province, highlighting the longstanding indie tradition and sensibility that's always been part of its moviemaking. 

"I think our experience suggests … that more could be done to help have these films available to the audience who would appreciate them and also, you know, to help the legacy of the artists who created them," Knox says. 

"This has just gone to show that things do disappear if you don't put some effort into making sure that they're going to survive," says Body. "It's been really interesting to see that these films that people love and know and are selling so, so quickly — they're almost not around anymore.

"A bit of an activist element came into it: let's save what feels like is getting lost."

The Nova Scotia Retro Film Festo runs Jan. 30 to Feb. 2 at the Carbon Arc Independent Cinema (1747 Summer St.) in Halifax.