- The Movie Man
- Directed by Matt Finlin
- Classification N/A; 89 minutes
Screens at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver May 2-12, and in Ottawa, Waterloo, Windsor, and Oakville, Ont., throughout the spring, including the Highlands Cinema in Kinmount, Ont., starting May 19
Movies about movie theatres have a spotty record. For every Cinema Paradiso and Matinee there is an Empire of Light or The Majestic – the line between exploring the magic of movie-going and lazily slobbering over it is as thin as the syrup-to-soda calibration on those Coke freestyle machines.
Yet with his charming and humble new documentary The Movie Man, Canadian director Matt Finlin delivers an ode to the theatrical experience that is genuine without slipping into easy sentimentality. While the sometimes thin, sometimes jumbled film won’t turn around an industry in very real peril, it should embolden already hardcore cinephiles to keep fighting the good fight. And it even might remind audiences who have abandoned the cinema for the easy comforts of streaming what they risk losing forever.
Following the ins and outs of Canada’s – if not perhaps the world’s – most unusual movie theatre, The Movie Man focuses on Keith Stata, owner and operator of the Highlands Cinema in the tiny Ontario village of Kinmount. Over four decades, Stata has turned a single-screen theatre situated in the woods – its neighbours are bears and deer, not Starbucks or Outback Steakhouses – into an idiosyncratically constructed five-screen monstrosity that is as much a labyrinthian DIY museum as it is a multiplex.
With an occupancy size several times greater than the entire population of Kinmount, Stata’s theatre stands as a testament to both the irresistible lure of the big screen, and the passions of a man who has devoted his life to a single-minded pursuit, to an obsessive degree.
Yet just as Stata’s life was thrown a curveball when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, so, too, is Finlin’s film once it shifts to documenting how the Highlands navigated industry chaos. What started off as a character portrait – production on the doc began in 2018 – now swerves into darker, more complex territory as Finlin follows Stata’s attempts to survive Ontario’s lockdown. There is an intense desperation in Stata’s plight that feels palpable, yet the film feels unsure as to how to approach and document it, nervously cutting up its timeline to mix the highs of the past, the anxiety of the pandemic and the uncertainty of the present.
And for all the attention paid to Stata’s life story, certain personal details remain elusive. Never married and with seemingly few friends other than one long-suffering employee and way too many cats – 50, at last count – Stata has all the hallmarks of “local eccentric” even if Finlin never truly gets underneath his skin.
Still, there is a contagious enthusiasm and dogged dedication to the movie-going experience coursing through the doc. If Stata and his business might be the last of their kind, then Finlin’s film proves that they won’t go down easy. Hopefully, the Highlands Cinema will be able to screen The Movie Man, and everything else, for years to come.
Barry Hertz