The Carbon Arc Cinema will be hosting the first theatrical screening of Sweet Angel Baby, a queer-centred story of rural politics and storytelling in the digital age.
The film screening is planned for 6pm on Saturday, Aug. 16 and will feature a Q&A section with director Melanie Oates, who won the Atlantic International Film Festival’s Michael Weir Award for Best Atlantic Screenwriter for the film.
Sweet Angel Baby stars Michaela Kurimsky as Eliza, a woman from a fishing town who is heavily involved in the community, even helping organize a fundraiser for her church when it looks like it will be sold off. However, Eliza has a secret: she has been posting artistic, sexually explicit self-portraits online.
Through this dichotomy of her public and personal lives, and how they intersect with each other, Eliza grapples with her identity, her public perception and her budding relationship with Toni, played by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers.
Rural queerness
In an interview with The Coast, Oates says she conceived of the idea in 2014, but ended up sitting on it when she decided that her first feature film would be Body and Bones, which premiered at AIFF in 2019.
“This film sort of changed a lot in those years, but yeah, it was a long time of waiting to write it,” says Oates.
From Fermeuse, a small village south of St. John’s, Oates had a clear picture of what rural living was like. Your neighbours were your world, whether you liked it or not, and they had great sway over what you did and who you were. With the rise of social media, that feeling of every action being watched and scrutinized only grew.
“The public and private personas in a small town and online… they’re sort of the same, to a different degree,” she says. “In a small town, the same intensity of being watched, and people having this really strong idea of who you are, and what you’re about, and what you are sort of allowed to do and be.”
When she first started writing the film in 2014, there was a rise in social media use by women to do self-portraits similar to what’s done by Eliza in the film—an artistic expression that was innately feminist, but could also see those who create them be shunned by the people they care about. While Oates acknowledges that social media has taken a more influencer-oriented route, its relevance can still be seen today with the rise of platforms like OnlyFans and other sexually-explicit art forms available all over the internet.
The dichotomy also acts as a metaphor for queerness. A comparison could be made between Eliza’s portraits and the secret lives many queer people lead due to discrimination, only for both to be heavily scrutinized once discovered. Eliza’s queer relationship in the film only makes this comparison more apparent, and the queer themes are embraced by Oates.
“I’m queer, and grew up in a similar town, like a small fishing town,” says Oates. “That definitely was not something that people were open about or was readily accepted when I was growing up. So, I always wanted to grapple with that in a story.”
The relationship between Eliza and Toni was something she wanted to depict as truthfully as she could, giving them as much space on screen to build a genuine connection that audiences can relate to and understand. While Oates also acknowledges that there could be an argument made for closeted narratives being detrimental at this point in time, she still sees them as equally important as queer narratives without social barriers, especially when based in rural communities where acceptance isn’t a given.
“It’s still true that in small places like this, there is still stigma. It is still really hard for people, and people really struggle with it still,” she says.
Tickets to the theatrical release of Sweet Angel Baby can be purchased at Carbon Arc Cinema’s website.
This article appears in Aug 1-31, 2025.