The People’s Theatre

This is the first installment of a series on local and web-based resources offering smart, life-changing films to the public for free. 

Libraries are amazing. They  are a vital resource for self-directed education. They have Internet access and comfy couches and they never have muzak playing. You can sit in a library all day and, unlike those rude, cigarette-pant-wearing baristas, nobody will ever ask you to leave. Best of all, libraries are free.

This makes libraries an ideal place to pick up movies. Downloading is ‘free’ too, of course, but if you decide to forgo a home internet connection for financial reasons, piracy becomes less accessible. Borrowing material from the library is only going to cost a few pennies toward the electricity running your laptop or television.

Halifax Public Libraries has 14 branches across the city and lends most videos for seven day periods. If you don’t already have a card, you can register for one by providing a legitimate mailing address and two pieces of I.D. at the branch nearest to you. For the mildly agoraphobic or champions of sloth, online registration is available here.

There is a wide selection of classics, foreign films, blockbusters, local indies, documentaries and box sets which you can place on hold or browse through at random.

Library Picks:

Judy Berlin (1999):

A visually beguiling indie tale directed by some guy who worked in Woody Allen’s costume departments. Centred around the sleepy town of Babylon, New York, Judy Berlin offers up  relationships of small town life: an Edna Krabappel and Principle Skinner style scandal, a repressed filmmaker, his sunshiny high school crush, (Edie Falco) and the slurred world of a coked-out housewife (Madeleine Khan). The high-contrast black and white renders this bleak suburban world in darkest blacks and blown-out whites.

Kontroll (2003):

Ticket inspectors investigate a series of mysterious murders on the Budapest subway system in this Hungarian thriller. A crowd-pleasing existential-noir-folktale digging down into the furthest depths of the underground — kind of like your one hyper-intelligent, secretly depressed friend who only says witty and hilarious things when they bother to speak.

The Beaches of Agnes (2008):

This inspiring autobiographical documentary by French New Wave director Agnes Varda (Vagrant)  chronicles the unique life and work of a 20^th century treasure, who proves that getting old certainly doesn’t mean getting boring. Part retrospection, part introspection, Varda innovates and presents material in surprising, sweet and inventive ways.