DRINKING AND DRIVING

a film by Avalon Fast and Jillian Frank

FEATURE PRESENTATION

MAY 28, 2026 • 7 PM
@ THE BUS STOP THEATRE
(2203 GOTTINGEN STREET, HALIFAX)

2026 / CANADA / 105 mins

Set in the summer of 2016, Drinking and Driving follows best friends Palmer and Iris (played by Vancouver-based co-directors Avalon Fast and Jillian Frank), waitressing together in the same small town they grew up in. They kill the rest of their time looking for the next party, drug run or drive to a lake, seeking liminal pockets of connection and relief between calls from mentally unstable boyfriends and mothers. The world Fast and Frank evoke is bruising and familiar. There is an empathetic and astute understanding of every character, on and off-screen.

Drinking and Driving feels like watching gauzy, melancholy footage of memories you shouldn’t long for, but sometimes do. Fast and Frank beautifully explore the insular, co-dependent worlds of instant gratification created by low-income twenty-somethings, hiding from the world together in a procession of sweaty bedrooms. Fast has described their film as a “period piece about how fucked [Jillian and I] would be if we never left,” but anyone who was in their 20s in the 2010s may also experience a disarming nostalgia for a less isolating and perpetually online time, when our desperate clawing for connection and instant gratification was messy, intimate and in-person. —Rebecca Falvey

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