A light left on: The Bookstore That Never Sleeps comes to Doc Edge
There is a bookshop in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, that only opens after dark. Most evenings the door swings open around 8pm and stays open until the night feels finished – sometimes midnight, sometimes one or two in the morning, whenever the last customer drifts out. It is called Elizabeth’s Books, it sits on Montague Street in a UNESCO World Heritage port town of brightly painted timber and tall ships, and it is run by an 83-year-old former seaman named Chris Webb. If you ask a local why the lights only come on at night, they tend to shrug and say the same thing; “oh, that’s just Chris.“
That shrug is where the whole film begins.
The Bookstore That Never Sleeps, a documentary by Canadian filmmaker Justin Zoras, has its world premiere at Doc Edge 2026. The 30m documentary is, quietly, one of the loveliest things a bookseller could hope to watch this winter. I was lucky enough to speak with Justin ahead of his trip to Aotearoa, and I can’t wait for booksellers, bookshop lovers and anyone who loves a good story to see this film.
How Justin found the town (and Chris)
Justin works in unscripted film and television, and a few years ago a production put his cast and crew up in Lunenburg for a stretch of months. Anyone who has worked long shoots knows the relief of being billeted somewhere beautiful rather than a remote motel, and Lunenburg is genuinely picturesque. But it also closes early. After a twelve-hour day on set, the crew would wander a pitch-black town looking for anything still open, and the one thing they kept seeing was light spilling onto the street from a bookshop that, against all sense and logic, was alive at night.
So Justin did what any curious person would do: he went in as a customer. Chris, an 83-year-old former seaman is the bookseller and the proprietor. After a lifetime at sea and experiences that left him with PTSD, Chris created a bookstore unlike any other. He keeps a chair beside his desk, originally as a courtesy for older visitors, now an open invitation for anyone who wants to sit a while and talk. Justin sat. They talked about books and films and the sea, and slowly the stories came out. These stores and the interview that anchors the documentary ran to roughly five hours, and crucially, everything that follows is built on Chris’s own words rather than any preconceived idea of what a film or documentary should be. .
Show, don’t tell
The thing booksellers will recognise instantly is the film’s restraint. There is a moment early on where the camera holds on a boat in the dark and shifts focus to the ropes in the foreground while Chris, in voiceover, mentions being caught in a typhoon for ten days. The film never pushes him to explain why those ten days were terrible. It doesn’t need to. You feel the weight of it, and the weight is the point. As Justin put it, if they had gone deeper, it would have lost its gravity. For me it’s the power of show-don’t-tell, the same thing a good story does.
That principle shaped the whole look of the film. There is no stock footage and no fancy lighting; every night-time image was shot in Lunenburg itself, often within a hundred feet of the shop, and much of the B-roll was chosen specifically to echo something Chris said. The crew were patient in the way nature filmmakers are patient: like a nature documentarian waiting for a penguin to nuzzle it’s egg, or a lion to yawn, Justin sits inside the shop during the day with a camera trained on the street, simply waiting for a passer-by to cup their hands to the glass and peer in, because that glance is exactly what really happens outside a bookstore that’s shut all day. You cannot fake that. You can only wait for it.
Why it matters to us
This is, by Justin’s own description, a genuinely independent film: no funding, no government money, a small core team who came aboard largely because they believed in the story and the moment. It runs around half an hour: long enough that you settle in, the way you’d settle into the shop itself, rather than being ushered in and out. It is a finalist in Doc Edge’s International Short competition.
For a bookseller, the film lands somewhere tender. Modern bookselling is beset by financial stress, supply-chain delays and, in too many places, censorship. Justins film simply strips all of that away and returns us to first principles. Why are any of us here? To stand in a room full of stories, to meet people, and to help them find the story they happen to need. The Bookstore That Never Sleeps sees that, and it sees Chris, who has chosen to forgo a tourist town’s worth of daytime trade because the night is when real conversation happens. It is also, quietly, a record of a moment, a small pocket of grace that may not exist forever, captured while it still glows.
If you love bookshops, you will feel seen.
See it, and maybe host it
Justin is travelling from Nova Scotia to New Zealand for the festival, and he is keen to visit bookshops while he’s here. He has even floated the idea of pop-up screenings in bookstores down the track: “a bed sheet, a Bluetooth speaker, a laptop and a projector,”, where the seats aren’t bolted to the floor and the audience can turn their chairs into a circle and actually talk afterwards. If that sounds like your bookshop, it’s well worth getting in touch.
Screenings at Doc Edge 2026 (tickets at docedge.nz):
- Auckland — Takapuna Beachside Cinemas, Sunday 28 June, 1.00pm
- Auckland — The Capitol Cinema, Sunday 5 July, 1.15pm
- Wellington — The Roxy Cinema, Wednesday 15 July, 4.15pm
- Online — Doc Edge Virtual Cinema (geo-locked to NZ), 27 July to 10 August
Win a double pass: we have two double passes to give away, each valid for any one of the screenings above. To enter, tell us a story!
Booksellers in Auckland and Wellington: if you’d like to set up an event, screening or author-style visit while Justin is in the country, please contact us and we’ll put you in touch with Justin; or follow and message The Bookstore That Never Sleeps on Facebook and Instagram, where Justin shares clips and stills he’s happy for shops to use.