When audiences settle into their seats for the 46th Atlantic International Film Festival, they will see the finished product: actors on screen, carefully composed images, music and stories unfolding before them.
But behind every film is a network of people doing very different jobs to bring those stories to life.
This year’s festival, running Sept 16 to 23 in Halifax, features 113 feature and short films from Atlantic Canada, across Canada and around the world. The eight-day festival includes screenings, Q&As, receptions, panels and industry events, and continues its focus on both emerging and established filmmakers.
Among the Atlantic productions featured this year are Glen Gould’s Jeffrey’s Turn, Seth A. Smith’s Permanent Damage, Ree Wright and Meaghan Wright’s The Last Days of April and Jenna MacMillan’s The Snake. Each film offers a different story, but the people working behind the scenes have something in common: their work shapes how those stories ultimately reach an audience.
Jeffrey’s Turn
For Gould, Jeffrey’s Turn marks a particularly significant moment. The Cape Breton-born Mi’kmaq actor, director, writer and producer is making his directorial debut with the film, which will have its world premiere at AIFF.
Gould says the project took roughly a decade to reach the screen. He and his collaborators went through multiple rounds of script development, working with story editors and securing development funding before eventually moving into production.
The film was originally intended to be shot in Northern Ontario, but Gould’s move back to Cape Breton led the production to Nova Scotia.
Filming took place in Halifax and Dartmouth in May and June 2025.
At the centre of Jeffrey’s Turn is a road trip inspired in part by a journey Gould took with his late uncle, Donald Marshall Jr., when Gould was 17.
The fictional story follows a 17-year-old named Jeffrey Jr., who travels to Maine with his uncle Artie, a recently released prisoner. Along the way, Jeffrey tries to learn more about his late father and comes to terms with the circumstances surrounding his death.
Gould says the film combines fictional elements with events inspired by real life, including his uncle’s experience of being wrongfully convicted and imprisoned.
For Gould, filmmaking is also connected to something much deeper than the mechanics of making a movie.
“As a First Nations filmmaker and storyteller,” he says, he believes it is important to tell Indigenous stories “with our own voice, through our own eyes.”
He compared his role as a filmmaker to the role a storyteller might have held in a Mi’kmaq community generations ago.
“I think this is where the creator brought me and this is where I was meant to be,” Gould says.
The Last Days of April
While Gould’s focus is on directing and storytelling, Melani Wood approaches filmmaking from a different position.
Wood is a Halifax-based filmmaker who produces independent feature films, documentaries and television series. She served as a producer on The Last Days of April, directed by Ree Wright and Meaghan Wright.
For Wood, the producer is often the person who stays with a project from its earliest stages through to its final delivery. She describes the job as overseeing financing, building the production team and ensuring the project maintains its integrity from beginning to end.
“You build the team, you find the money, and hopefully make a good project out of it,” Wood says.
The Last Days of April follows April Hubbard, a disability advocate, artist and accessibility consultant whose story centres on her experience with disability and her decision to pursue medical assistance in dying.
The documentary also explores the broader debate around MAID and disability through conversations with advocates and professionals. The film previously premiered at Hot Docs.
Wood says she was initially drawn to the project because of the filmmakers. She wanted to work with Ree and Meaghan for some time and said their approach to storytelling aligned with how she wanted to work.
Her role on the documentary was largely behind the scenes, including financing, tax credits, consulting and watching cuts of the film.
That was intentional.
Because Wright had already developed a close relationship with Hubbard, Wood said there was no need for her to insert herself into the filming process.
The experience also reinforced for Wood how important independent film funding is to Nova Scotia’s filmmaking community. She says cuts to arts funding have made independent filmmaking more challenging, but have also motivated artists to continue telling stories.
“We’ve got an incredibly resilient and creative community of people that are making art here in Nova Scotia,” Wood says.
The Snake
Another Atlantic production at this year’s festival takes a different approach to storytelling: through music.
Aaron Comeau is a musician, producer and composer who worked as both music supervisor and score composer on The Snake, Jenna MacMillan’s debut feature, written by and starring Susan Kent.
The film, which had its world premiere at SXSW, where it became the first film from PEI to premiere at the festival, will receive its Canadian premiere as AIFF’s Atlantic Gala on Sept. 19.
Comeau’s approach to the score began with improvisation.
“The Snake has this very punk aesthetic,” Comeau says.
Instead, they looked toward a more classical sound.
Comeau experimented with different instruments and eventually found a software instrument created by a Nova Scotia company that sampled a glass xylophone. That sound became a central element of the film’s score.
He also brought in collaborators to improvise music to specific scenes before editing those recordings digitally, much like a filmmaker edits images.
The music was created after the film reached a “locked cut”, meaning the timing of the images was no longer expected to change, allowing Comeau to place musical elements with precision.
But his work on The Snake extended beyond composing. As music supervisor, Comeau also helped select the film’s licensed music.
Kent had provided a playlist of songs that inspired the film. Comeau and his team then searched for independent Canadian musicians whose work captured similar qualities.
The goal was to use exclusively Canadian and independent music. Comeau says that approach allowed the production to support regional musicians while working within the financial realities of Canadian filmmaking.
“You can phone up an independent band and offer them a thousand dollars, and it can make a real difference in their career,” he says.
The result is a soundtrack that Comeau hopes will do more than accompany the film. He hopes audiences might leave having discovered a new favourite band.
That same idea of discovery runs through the festival itself.
Permanent Damage
For Permanent Damage, writer and director Seth A. Smith returns to AIFF with a new feature co-written with Darcy Spindle. But for Smith, the experience of making the film was about more than bringing a story to the screen, it was also about the relationships built along the way.
Smith describes reuniting with people he has worked with before as feeling like a family reunion. Working alongside Spindle, a longtime friend who has become like a brother, made the experience particularly meaningful, the kind of creative relationship and shared experience that stays with you for life.
The pair are also looking forward to seeing how audiences respond to the film. For Smith, one of the most fascinating parts of releasing a film is knowing that no two people necessarily see the same story.
Every viewer brings their own experiences, upbringing and understanding to what they watch, creating a different interpretation of the same film. That unpredictability is something Smith finds beautiful and one of the reasons he is always eager to hear what audiences take away after the film is released.
Across these films, the roles may be different—director, producer, writer and composer—but the underlying work is connected.
Gould spent years developing a story rooted in family, memory and Indigenous storytelling.
Wood helped build the financial and production structure needed to tell a deeply personal documentary story. Comeau used improvisation, regional musicians and an unconventional musical palette to create the emotional language of a film. And Smith and Spindle are bringing their own approach to writing and constructing a new cinematic world.
For audiences, those contributions can be easy to overlook once the lights go down.
But the films screening at AIFF are not only the work of the people whose names appear above the title.
They are the result of dozens of creative decisions, collaborations and perspectives — each one shaping what audiences eventually see and hear on screen.
The 46th Atlantic International Film Festival runs Sept. 16 to 23 at Cineplex Cinemas Park Lane in Halifax. The 2026 program includes 113 films, with five world premieres among the lineup.
