An independent film festival

Paper Moon

Oct 16 – 18, 2026 · Marigold Theatre · Hollis Bay

three nights of handmade cinema —
six premieres, one projector, zero algorithms

Get your badge See the program

What this is

A festival you can hold in your hands.

Paper Moon started in 2015 with a bedsheet, a borrowed 16mm projector, and forty folding chairs on the cannery floor. Twelve editions later, not much has changed on purpose. We still print the program on a Risograph. We still hand-stamp every badge. We still believe a film is something you attend, not something you scroll past.

This year: six features from six countries, chosen by humans who argued about them over bad coffee. Every screening ends the way it should — with the lights coming up slowly and three hundred people deciding, out loud, what they just saw.

— the programming committee (all four of us)

The 2026 selection

Six films,
three nights

tear along the perforation ✂ keep the stub

No. 01 Road movie Kazakhstan

Night Bus to Aral

dir. Aliya Bekzat · 104 min · Kazakh & Russian, subtitled

A retired marine biologist boards the last overnight bus toward the dried seabed where she once mapped fish that no longer exist, carrying her husband's ashes in a thermos and a lifetime of unsent letters. Bekzat shoots the steppe like a memory that keeps correcting itself — and the bus's rotating cast of smugglers, brides, and insomniac teenagers becomes a floating parliament of everything the sea left behind.

Fri Oct 16 · 7:00 pm · opening night
No. 02 Horror Ireland

Marrow

dir. Colm Ferriter · 91 min · English & Irish

Two estranged sisters inherit their grandmother's bone-button workshop on a peat island where the tide only goes out once a year. When it does, something in the exposed flats starts returning the buttons — one at a time, polished, and warm. Ferriter's debut trades jump scares for a slow tightening of the chest: folk horror carved from grief, craft, and the terrible patience of the sea.

Fri Oct 16 · 9:30 pm · midnight-ish
No. 03 Animation Japan / France

A Brief Inventory of Falling

dir. Emi Charbonneau · 78 min · hand-painted, 12 fps

An insurance clerk in a vertical city catalogues every object that has ever fallen past her window — 4,212 of them — until item 4,213 turns out to be a man with a parachute made of receipts. Painted frame by frame in gouache over seven years, Charbonneau's film is a love story told entirely in descent: funny, weightless, and quietly devastating about what we choose to catch.

Sat Oct 17 · 4:00 pm · matinée
No. 04 Drama Portugal

The Cartographer's Daughter

dir. Inês Valadares · 116 min · Portuguese, subtitled

Lisbon, 1974. While the revolution hums outside, a teenage girl discovers her late father's atlas contains streets that don't exist — until she starts walking them and they do. Valadares folds magical realism into archival grain so gently you stop noticing the seam. A film about maps as promises, fathers as unfinished countries, and the year Portugal redrew itself.

Sat Oct 17 · 7:00 pm · centrepiece
No. 05 Science fiction USA

Static Bloom

dir. Theo Okafor · 98 min · English

In a near-future Detroit where dead radio frequencies have started growing — physically, like coral — a pirate-station DJ and a city surveyor race to broadcast one last signal before the bloom swallows the AM band and every voice archived inside it. Shot on expired 16mm stock that literally decays with the story, Okafor's film is science fiction as elegy: for radio, for rust-belt nights, for everyone we only ever knew as a voice.

Sat Oct 17 · 9:45 pm · late show
No. 06 Documentary Iceland

Salt on the Windowsill

dir. Guðrún Ísfeld · 84 min · Icelandic, subtitled

For sixty-one years, the residents of a shrinking fishing village have left a line of salt on their windowsills the night before a funeral. Nobody remembers why. Ísfeld spent four winters filming the last forty-three people who still do it, and what begins as an anthropology of a dying ritual becomes something rarer: a documentary about how communities say goodbye to themselves, with the driest wit north of the Arctic Circle.

Sun Oct 18 · 6:00 pm · closing night

Overheard at the Marigold

“The only festival where the programmer hands you your ticket, the director hands you your soup, and both stay for the argument afterwards.”

— Margarethe Voss, Lantern & Reel

“I came for one screening in 2019. I have not missed an edition since. My marriage survives this, barely.”

— badge № 0047, eight years running

“Paper Moon does with forty volunteers and a Risograph what festivals ten times its size cannot: it makes cinema feel like a place.”

— The Hollis Bay Ledger

Plan your weekend

The schedule

doors open one hour early · Moon Yard soup from 5 pm daily

FridayOct 16
  • 6:00 pmDoors + badge pickup, Moon Yard opens
  • 7:00 pmNight Bus to Aral — opening remarks by Aliya Bekzat
  • 9:30 pmMarrow — with intro from the programmers
  • 11:15 pmFirst-night toast at the Print Room
SaturdayOct 17
  • 2:00 pmTalk: “Cinema by hand” — Emi Charbonneau, Print Room
  • 4:00 pmA Brief Inventory of Falling — matinée
  • 7:00 pmThe Cartographer's Daughter — 35mm centrepiece
  • 9:45 pmStatic Bloom — with live radio-collage pre-show
SundayOct 18
  • 3:00 pmFree community matinée: 12 years of festival shorts
  • 6:00 pmSalt on the Windowsill — Q&A with Guðrún Ísfeld
  • 8:30 pmPaper Moon Awards — one trophy, hand-carved, argued over
  • 9:30 pmClosing party, Moon Yard, until the lanterns give out

Finding us

The venue

everything is a 3-minute walk from everything ↓

Hollis Bay (cold!) Cannery Street Spool Lane Harbour Row 1 Marigold Theatre 2 The Print Room 3 Moon Yard 4 Ferry dock N you are under this moon

The archive

Twelve editions,
twelve moons

one moon per year, waxing — this is the year it comes up full

  1. 2015the bedsheet year
  2. 2016rain, all three nights
  3. 2017the projector caught fire (briefly)
  4. 2018first 35mm print
  5. 2019a proposal during the credits
  6. 2020the drive-in edition
  7. 2021masks and moonlight
  8. 2022soup becomes law
  9. 2023the seagull incident
  10. 2024a 700-name waitlist
  11. 2025our first world premiere
  12. 2026you are here ✶

Come with us

Badges & stubs

every badge is stamped by hand at the door — worth it for the thunk alone

The Stub $14
  • One screening of your choice
  • Hand-numbered ticket stub
  • Moon Yard access that evening
  • A pencil. Everyone gets a pencil.
Full Moon $79
  • All six features, all three nights
  • Riso-printed festival zine, №-stamped
  • Priority seating + closing party
  • Canvas tote with this year's moon
  • Your name in next year's program
Night Owl $32
  • Any single day, every screening
  • Same-day Q&As and talks
  • Moon Yard soup token included
  • Ferry-schedule bookmark (crucial)

Badges are limited to 312 — the exact number of seats in the Marigold. When they're gone, they're gone, like the sea at Aral.

see you under the paper moon —
and bring a sweater. the Marigold runs cold on purpose.