“Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.” (H.G. Wells, “The Time Machine,” 1895)
In a 1908 collection of essays titled “New Worlds for Old,” the English writer H. G. Wells wrote that “We all have our time machines, don’t we? Those that take us back are memories…And those that carry us forward are dreams.” With an impressive written output in disciplines as diverse as history, social commentary, and fiction, Wells remains best known today as the ‘father of science fiction.’ Seventy years after Wells wrote those words, a man in the most unlikely of places took up the mantle as a purveyor of both memories and dreams, instinctively divining that, for most of us, movies are our time machines, our chief and irreplaceable gateway to dreams and memories, and our window onto the wider world. How better, after all, to learn the world’s ways than to vicariously experience other times, other places, and other ways of living through the stories projected onto the silver screen?
As a child, Keith Stata was fascinated by the 1960 film “The Time Machine” (which won an Oscar for its Special Effects long before computer-generated imagery made such things ubiquitous). It remains one of his favourite films today (along with everything from “Cloud Atlas” to “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” “Soldier Blue,” and “Atlantis, the Lost Continent”). In 1978, he began building what amounts to his own figurative time machine on twenty-two acres of property situated at the junction of Haliburton, Kawartha Lakes, and Peterborough County. In its heyday, Kinmount, Ontario was home to a thriving lumber industry. Nowadays, the small municipality is home to a mere 300 souls. Yet, the surrounding expanse of forests and lakes draws thousands to its cottages, resorts, and campsites during the spring through early fall.
“If you build it, they will come.” That’s what an unseen voice tells Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella in 1989’s “Field of Dreams.” The protagonist of that film, and of the novel by Canada’s W. P. Kinsella upon which it was based, feels simultaneously inspired and compelled to build a baseball field in the midst of his corn crop. In Stata’s case, the compulsion and inspiration was to erect silver screens in the wilderness in the belief that if he built them, people would come. It would be memories and dreams that would draw them:
“Ray, people will come Ray. They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom.
They’ll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won’t mind if you look around, you’ll say. It’s only $20 per person. They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they’ll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray.”
Baseball was the catalyst in Kinsella’s story; movies are the driving force in Stata’s. His Highlands Cinema started with a single theatre with fifty-eight seats and grew over the years to a homemade multiplex of five theaters, the biggest seating two hundred, the smallest seventy-five. In total, there are five hundred and fifty seats catering to locals and summer season folk alike. First-run Hollywood features are on-screen (though Stata had to fight to get access to first-run shows), while the complex’s extensive corridors are home to an impressive collection of pop-culture memorabilia arranged by decades and meant to be instantly evocative of their time. It’s a virtual museum of popular culture, with artifacts worthy of the Smithsonian, among them, hundreds of film projectors, including one from the late, lamented Cinesphere at Toronto’s Ontario Place and antiques (like an 1890 Lumière) from the very earliest days of motion pictures.
Stata’s goal has always been to “create an experience that you’d remember” by getting people of all ages to “go to some place they’ve never been and have a magical experience.” Their immediate destination, of course, is his array of indoor silver screens in the boundless forest; but, in a figurative sense, the destinations are as diverse as the movies his patrons experience. They came in throngs to see blockbusters like “Jurassic Park,” “Twister,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” An Imperial storm trooper in white armour was on hand for the premiere of “Solo.” And there is no dilettante programming here or one-off single screenings: every film plays for at least a week. Meanwhile, at the snack bar, patrons flock to the popcorn, whose secret ingredient is coconut oil: ‘Accept no substitutes,’ say devotees, among them the wildlife (some forty raccoons, two bears, solitary deer and skunks, and a veritable legion of squirrels) who feast on the nightly leftovers. Stata must have had the same objective (of opening a gateway to enchantment), if only unconsciously, from his youngest years, when, at age six, he unspooled condensed versions of movies on 8mm film in his family’s woodshed.
The Highlands Cinema grosses $400,000 in an average year, with the bulk of that earned in a mere nine weeks out of its five-and-a-half months’ operating time. When asked if he ever considered going year-round, Stata retorts, “Do I look crazy?” In the winter, the audience have decamped to warmer climes; the steep hills are a slippery obstacle; the sewers are apt to freeze; and Stata needs time to decompress: “There’s a limit to how much I can do anymore…I didn’t count on getting old.” Well, at seventy-seven, not exactly ‘old,’ but not as young as he used to be. For such a small community, the cinema is a significant employer…with eleven at its peak (though not all at once) and about half that these days. But the global pandemic known as COVID, with its mandatory shutdowns, posed a mortal danger to the enterprise. Income fell to nil, ‘social distancing’ was impossible in intimately sized amphitheaters, and the financial picture looked very bleak. Selling off some of the land to keep things afloat fell afoul of bureaucratic red-tape, and at one point Stata responded with a caustic billboard worthy of the 2017 film “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” Stata is one of those forthright people whom you never need to ask twice about he really thinks. For instance, about the irresponsible hunters who trespass on his land and whose reckless aim has potshots flying dangerously close to his head, Stata says he’s sorely tempted to shoot back.
Stata was born and bred in the environs of Kinmount. Work took him to Toronto, but he soon concluded that the Big Smoke wasn’t for him. Back on familiar turf, he ran a construction business for twenty-six years, which gave him the know-how and resources to build his cinema. A career in making movies didn’t seem to be a viable option; but showing them certainly became one. His work in construction included a sideline in dismantling old cinemas across North America, places whose flotsam and jetsam provided the raw material that make up the very bones and sinews of the Highlands — the chairs (all of them reupholstered), moldings, doors, and assorted architectural features hail from all over cinematic creation…making the structure itself a monument to the art of cinema. There are artful touches here with intricate ceiling fixtures and stained glass; but there’s also an occasional touch reminiscent of Ed Mirvish’s “Honest Ed’s” store in Toronto with its dryly humorous indoor signage and sly bits of deliberate near-kitsch.
Regrettably, there are no plans for the facility’s long-term survival, no arrangements for a foundation, or an educational institution, or a museum, or a regional parks and recreation department to take over the reins when Stata quits the stage. In the short term, a longtime co-worker will do so; but it’s a shame that arrangements haven’t been made to ensure the long-term continuation of this one-of-a-kind place, a place the Canadian rock band the Barenaked Ladies dubbed “the coolest theatre in the world.” For, surely, as Stata himself says, “Somehow, the show must go on.”
Stata’s cinema may be off-the-beaten track, but it has received extensive media attention over the years from far and wide. The late Elwy Yost, of TVO’s long-running “Saturday Night at the Movies,” made a professional pilgrimage here. The big Toronto daily papers have made repeat visits. And, in 2024, director Matt Finlin released a feature-length documentary about Keith Stata and the Highlands Cinema: “The Movie Man” is an award-calibre treat of a film about a man who loves films and single-mindedly made his labour of love in showing them to others a reality. It’s an utterly absorbing up-close-and-personal look at the man, fueled by his vibrantly colourful personality, with a large dollop of sheer pleasure for viewers in observing a dream come true: “The world needs more people like him who actually do what they believe in.”
There’s something else close to Stata’s heart, and that’s his love of the natural world and a resulting drive to protect its helpless orphans. His property has a cat sanctuary that’s home to almost sixty felines. They’re housed in several separate cat domiciles, with enclosed passageways suspended above ground for daily exercise. It’s a registered charity that relies on the kindness of strangers to cover the considerable cost of food, litter, and vet bills. Caring for those wards strikes us as a daunting task, but for Stata, it is a labour of love, just as his self-made cinema in the wilderness was, is, and remains. As he tells his cinematic biographer in Finlin’s documentary, “Time is limited. You have to make the most of it. The only significance we have is whatever we do here.”
John Arkelian is film critic and editor at Artsforum Magazine and director of the Cinechats Film Program.
Visit the Highlands Cinema at: https://www.highlandscinemas.com/
See the trailer for “The Movie Man” at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7FQgwvTJTc
PHOTO CAPTIONS
***N.B. Using these captions with pictures credits is a precondition of their use in the magazine.
(1) Keith Stata at the threshold of the Highlands Cinema in Kinmount, Ontario. Photo by Scott Ramsay, courtesy of Door Knocker Media.
(2) Keith Stata in one of the five theaters at the Highlands Cinema in Kinmount, Ontario. Photo by Scott Ramsay, courtesy of Door Knocker Media.
