When Shaun Aquiline saw Michael Mann’s at his local cinema as a teenager in 1995, he was spellbound. “Going to the movies was the most important thing to me. It was magic.”

Decades later, in 2022, Aquiline and his wife, Kirstin, acquired the Gem Theatre in Grand Forks, B.C., a 185-seat theatre built in 1913. They learned the ins and outs of the movie business: making popcorn, swapping letters on the cinema’s street-facing marquee and how to book films.

The couple is among a new crop of exhibitors operating independent cinemas in smaller markets throughout the country. In many cases, these theatres are the cultural pulses of their communities, but they’re being squeezed from all sides — by streaming, studios, policy and economics.

Even in the big cities, the landscape is shifting. In

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