The metronomic sound of a drip punctuates the momentary silence inside of East City’s Take Cover Books. 

I’ve picked quite possibly the most inopportune time to stop by the store, as their upstairs neighbours’ air conditioning unit spills water through their ceiling tiles, creating yet another obstacle for delivery drivers to dodge as they crate boxfuls of books into the building. You know, business as usual. 

I have stopped in today to discuss Take Cover’s newest venture—Take Cover Film Club—with her proprietors, brothers Sean and Andrew Fitzpatrick. 

The free club held its first official meeting in May, with a screening of William Friedkin’s 1977 film Sorcerer, the first of an impressive opening slate which will see them through July.

This month features a double-header of Jeff Barnaby’s 2019 film, Blood Quantum, and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, from the same year.  

I’ve jumped at this opportunity, as it feels rather full-circle for me. My first ever Arthur article, back in summer of 2021, was a review of none other than Blood Quantum. In my time at Arthur I’ve lived and breathed film and film criticism. 

In many ways, then, Take Cover Film Club feels like a confluence of my professional and personal interests—depraved movies, and finding any excuse to spend more time in one of my favourite local hangouts, respectively. 

“Time to get serious,” Sean laughs as I hit “Record,” and perch myself on a stool by the cash register. The midday rush has slowed, and finally the brothers and I are able to get down to the reason we’re here.

EVAN: What possessed you to start a Film Club as the owners of a bookstore? 

ANDREW: Sean and I think about this in the same way that we think about our events and doing concerts. 

The bookstore is the first-order classification of this space, but we also know that we’re living in a town that is small enough that we can also operate an event space in the same place without running into many speed bumps.  

We have the freedom, and there’s enough interest in different types of programming, and it’s fun to do things in the space that it wasn’t necessarily designed to be done. 

We come from the DIY show organizing scene where we played shows in a bunch of different places, like in warehouses, in theatres, in bookstores. Black Squirrel Books in Ottawa was one of our favourite places to play, and that’s where the idea came from. 

SEAN: The idea being that you are a bookstore, but you’re also a room. 

ANDREW: And people who read, presumably also listen to music and watch movies. Sean and I love all of those things equally. We just happen to do books as the business. 

SEAN: [Film Club] was mainly the idea of having a room that would be interesting to watch films in. There used to be this place in Toronto called CineCycle, it was basically this brick cube where there bikes on the walls and all kinds of furniture, and it’s just a really interesting place to go and watch a movie in. 

With that in mind, I just thought it would be cool to have a place to watch “artier” movies or movies that I want to watch on a big screen—and talk about them. 

I think one of the things missing from film culture is getting a chance to talk about the movie afterward, not even necessarily with the people that you know, but just the people that saw it with you.  

That has basically been erased from theater culture, and most people—including myself—watch most of the movies they watch at home. 

ANDREW: It’s also something Sean was doing when he was in school. The Film graduate students used to do weekly screenings for each other. It wasn’t a rowdy screening, but it had the vibe of just hanging out, talking openly. It wasn’t like, super reverent. 

EVAN: How does it work if you want to screen a movie in a space like this for other people? 

SEAN: That’s a good question. It’s not easy to do it—legally. Essentially to screen a film in front of people, you need to pay for a licence, and there are two companies in Ontario that issue licences for a comparatively small set of films. 

There’s about 25,000 films available to each of these licences, and it costs a few hundred dollars to get a licence. And, if you don’t get one, somebody could easily report you. 

ANDREW: And they will sue you to the point where you’ll lose your business! 

SEAN: I was talking to a couple of ReFrame employees, just casually, as we were planning the Film Club lineup. I said “Oh, we’re just going to screen it for free, so we probably don’t have to get a licence for the screening.” 

They very quickly disabused me of that notion, and told me why and how it’s reckless to do it that way, which was really helpful because then we had to navigate this incredibly weird system of movie rights. 

ANDREW: One thing that is actually kind of a boon to what we’re doing is that you’re limited to the catalog that your licence gives you access to, so we can’t do everything. 

It is kind of neat. You have a plan, and we kind of spitballed all these things that we wanted to screen, and then you have to actually look at the list and be like, “Can we get all of these?” 

SEAN: I think we had to make a lot more choices than we thought there would be. A lot of the more left-field stuff that we were interested in programming at first wasn’t even available through Canadian rights holders, which was frustrating. 

Still, there’s a lot of good stuff on there, but we’re still a bit limited in what we have to pick. 

EVAN: I imagine to the average person 25,000 films sounds like an incomprehensibly large amount. 

SEAN: (laughs) Yeah, yeah. 

ANDREW: It’s like going on Netflix or Crave and you're looking for the thing that you want and it’s not there. It’s not like you’re content just settling for something else. 

SEAN: Our public needs to watch Tampopo! 

EVAN: I think the cost (or lack thereof), as you gestured to, is something significant about Take Cover’s Film Club. A lot of other clubs, or screening series, or review cinemas tend to charge people. 

ANDREW: We basically built the cost of the licence into the cost of the store. We didn’t want there to be any barriers to access, because all the clubs that we run are free. All of our events are generally free. We wanted it to be completely accessible regardless of who was coming, as a way of building a community. 

EVAN: But something like Film Club’s not necessarily 1:1 with your other clubs, is it? For one it’s in a physical space, as opposed to sort of in the ether over Zoom. 

ANDREW: That is the other thing that’s really fun, yeah. With Reading Club, it’s hard to read a book and discuss it in real time, right? Everyone reads it, does a little digestion on their own, and then you come together.  

In the Reading Club, everyone kind of throws their ideas in the pot and starts talking about them, whereas you do get a little more “first take, best take” with watching movies together because you all have that collective experience that you just can't get with reading. 

SEAN: You can experience a movie totally differently if other people are in the room. I remember watching Society by myself and thinking it was great, and then going to the Royal and seeing it with 100 other people and having an entirely different experience. 

I also think when we talked about costs and charging admission, we felt that we don’t necessarily want people to feel like they have to pay, cause these are mostly old movies. We wanted the freedom to pick whatever films we want and nobody to be disappointed by coming through and seeing a movie they didn’t like. 

We want people through the door at the end of the day. 

EVAN: I mean, if your first screening was anything to go by, it seems to be working. 

SEAN: Yeah, the first night was great. I have no notes for how it went. I was glad people seemed really into it. 

We really sweat over which film to put first. Sorcerer was originally slated at closer to the end of the year. I think my argument to move it up was that I had seen it a couple of times alone and I thought it was great, and it’s one of those movies that I would imagine a lot of people haven’t seen on a bigger screen or with other people, because it was a lost film for a while, and then when it did get rereleased, it was in the middle of the pandemic. 

Plus, [Sorcerer] is very high-concept. As you [Evan] said, it’s Mad Max: Fury Road, essentially. There’s not a lot of informational buy-in required. 

The response was better than I thought it would be. I was honestly expecting a few more negative reactions, simply because it’s so slow in the first hour.

ANDREW: We were also worried about the format. We didn’t know if people would want to stay and chat. And then, when we said you could stay and chat, no one left. 

SEAN: (laughs) I wasn’t expecting that. 

ANDREW: I was worried it would just become like a little rep theatre where people come to watch movies, and that kind of defeated the club purpose, right? 

SEAN: We wanted there to be a reason we called it “Film Club” as opposed to “Take Cover Cinema” or “Take Cover Film Series.” 

That’s the other component of a lot of “bad film” culture, which I think is great, that doesn’t always exist outside of film festivals for people who are into, like, “Good movies,” I guess. 

With bad films, you go see The Room with a bunch of people and the tradition is you go for a drink before or after and you talk about it and you talk about all the crazy shit that’s going to happen when people act out stuff in front of it. 

EVAN: I have a mortifying story in that vein I wrote about in Cinevangelism last summer. 

ANDREW: In a different way, the first time I went to see The Room you [Sean] were like, “This movie is terrible. We have to see it.” 

I had no idea what it was. At Western the university community centre had a full theatre, and we went to watch The Room.  

People were dressed in tuxedos, they had the wig, they had football spoons, they had lasagna trays full of popcorn. 

SEAN: That was something Western Film did. Western Film had something called “the trough.”  

ANDREW: It was a double-wide lasagna pan full of popcorn, and there was a queue in the movie where you throw popcorn, and people just took the trays and launched them. (laughs) 

I still have memories of sitting there, almost in slow motion, seeing all of these troughs flying from the back of the theatre. A guy who I was in residence with, who I hadn’t seen in a few years, was suddenly up at the front in a full tuxedo, playing football with some other dude. It was just such a bizarre and joyful thing to unite like 100 people—100 strangers —and they’re all just making a mess. 

SEAN: There’s just a joy of being badly behaved at movies, and that’s not quite what we’re doing. 

ANDREW: (laughs) It’s hard to do a rowdy screening in a place where everything is fragile. 

SEAN: But the participatory idea is something that we really want. 

ANDREW: Creating a space where you can laugh, you can talk, you can do stuff as long as we’re respecting each other and we’re not ruining the movie. But if there are things that are objectively ridiculous and you want to point it out, that’s the point of this—that we can all get to the point where we’ve watched enough together that there’s a mutual respect. 

That’s the club aspect. 

SEAN: I would like to do some sillier, weirder things. I think there’s more to the catalog than I thought. I’m discovering the abyss. 

ANDREW: Yeah, we’ll be doing a rowdy screening of James Cameron’s The Abyss. 

SEAN: A lot of people don’t know that that movie stares back. 

EVAN: If you screen The Abyss I will talk for 20 minutes about the colour grading of that movie and it will not be a good time for any of us. 

SEAN: I think the other thing about Sorcerer is it’s one of those movies where so many of the things that are captured just could not happen now. Like, the actors were put in danger in so many ways that would be completely impossible. 

ANDREW: Downright illegal. 

EVAN: They do blow up an oil well on camera.  

SEAN: But it’s also just normal enough that we wouldn’t alienate anybody right away. We had other ideas for the first screening—I did think that Salò [or, the 120 Days of Sodom] would be a great first screening simply because it’s so shocking that I think you would almost have to talk about it.  

But I was talked down from that, I think smartly. I think screening Salò to a bunch of unsuspecting people is a form of abuse. 

EVAN: I think we’ve talked Sorcerer to death. Walk me through the slate of June movies and why you picked them. 

ANDREW: June is a double month. It’s Indigenous History Month and Pride Month. We were like “We can do a single movie, or we can do one for each,” which we decided was more fun. 

And for Indigenous History Month, [Sean] right away was like, “Blood Quantum.” 

I think there’s a really interesting conversation around minority filmmakers and exploitation films as a vehicle for storytelling. I also just love gore done well when it’s fun and exciting and not, you know, a terrible slog. 

It takes a lot of skill to do that.

SEAN: Jeff Barnaby is—or was—an incredible filmmaker. It was either Blood Quantum or Rhymes for Young Ghouls. I wanted to screen a Jeff Barnaby movie. 

The world building of Blood Quantum is remarkable in how efficient it is. It feels almost like [George] Romero made it in the confidence of establishing the world as quickly as it does, and yet it also works as an allegory in a way that a lot of modern zombie movies don’t. 

So there is that serious component, but as we’ve all said it’s just like a fucking awesome zombie movie. It’s so good. It’s so gory. It has an emotional component, but it doesn't overplay that. It’s got a metaphor that you can dig into.  

It’s just got everything, and unlike a lot of modern zombie movies, it also has an incredible amount of violence. 

EVAN: The violence is what I really zeroed in on in my Blood Quantum review. In comparison, something like Army of the Dead gets lauded as having all this violence—and it does—but a lot of it is computer-generated and not really all that compelling. 

SEAN: Right. [Blood Quantum] is going back to Day of the Dead-style violence, which feels very personal. Like when you watch Day of the Dead, the ending is so unbelievably bleak.  

When you see [Rhodes] get ripped apart, even though he’s a terrible character, he’s evil the entire movie, he’s a jackass, but when you see him get ripped apart there’s something weirdly personal about that. 

Blood Quantum really does understand that the horror of the zombie is its teeth, and therefore that is the brutality of it. It’s this up-close and personal brand of violence.

ANDREW: [for Pride Month] We batted around a lot, because there’s so much good queer cinema. 

At first we were like “Hedwig [and the Angry Inch]!” But I’m a Cheerleader was also a big candidate. And then Sean threw in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and I was like, “I’ve never seen that!” 

We talked about it, and it’s such a gorgeous movie. 

EVAN: Yeah, it’s Blue is the Warmest Color but less pornographic. 

SEAN: (laughs) Yeah, and less questionably made. 

I think Celine Sciamma is just a very fascinating, low-key director who doesn’t get a lot of flowers for what she did in Portrait of a Lady on Fire—how she used these existing sets but made them look lived in. 

A lot of period pieces have a tendency to do Pride and Prejudice or do Bridgerton and make it look very fancy and new. 

ANDREW: You look at something like Barry Lyndon, which is set in the same historical period, and it’s so lived in and populated. Everything being lit by candlelight and natural light from windows—it’s a movie where you experience the feel of it. 

You really feel like you’re there as opposed to a more modern period piece. They get glossy real fast. 

SEAN: I think Portrait of a Lady on Fire just tells a good story. I just really like it. It makes me feel warm inside in a way that a lot of movies don’t.

EVAN: It’s interesting you mention But I’m a Cheerleader. I don’t know if you know this but the Trent Central Student Association has taken to screening movies on the second Tuesday of every month. They’re screening But I’m a Cheerleader this month. Seems like you two have competition. 

SEAN: (laughs) Call the lawyer! 

ANDREW: I think that’s neat, the proliferation of small film societies in town—between Trent Film Society, which is not the same as the TCSA, and Tapeworm.  

We don’t have the rep cinema that Toronto has, we don’t have any Royal, we don’t have a Fox, or Review, or Paradise, right? So the fact that a bunch of us are doing this I think is great. 

That’s our little community, right? We all had the idea to do this and we’re combatting the fact that I would say 50 weeks of the year, the Galaxy kind of sucks. 

SEAN: Or if they do get good films, it’s for like two days (laughs). 

EVAN: Anything before we leave it today? 

ANDREW: The interest in the club has been really heartening. When you make a plan for something you always hope that people will be into it, because you go through all the design, you make a logo, you make a program, and you put all the work into it before anyone knows about it. 

It would be fun to eventually get to the point where people are comfortable suggesting movies, and having other people intro them—talk about why they picked them, make it kind of like an A.V. Club feeling. 

EVAN: I’ve already been pitching you—October 2024: Evan Robins presents Guinea Pig 2. 

ANDREW: Nope. 

SEAN: I love it. That’ll be the first one, Flowers of Flesh and Blood; don’t worry, it’s only 40 minutes! Yeah it will haunt you for the rest of your life, but it will go really quickly. 

EVAN: I have alternatives. I’m thinking Evan Robins presents Dogville.  

SEAN: That would be so fucking funny if one week it was a 40 minute film and then next week it was a three hour movie about America made by somebody who’d never been there. 

EVAN: If people wanted to join Film Club to experience that for themselves, where can they find you? 

ANDREW: Go to our website, TakeCoverBooks.ca! There is a tab called “Film Club.” Go there. You can sign up, you can see what we’re screening, you can buy a t-shirt. 

SEAN: They can also just come into the store. They can email us at info@takecoverbooks.ca. There are many ways to reach out. There is no proper way to sign up. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.