‘Fast & Furious’ Film Fest

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Car season in Canada is nearly over. Summer cars, show cars and race cars are being put away for winter storage, or getting rebuilt during the deep freeze. So what’s a gearhead to do for fun, that doesn’t involve doing donuts in a snowy parking lot until the cops show up?

We asked ourselves that same question, and decided to rent out a private screening room at the local Film.ca Cinemas movie theatre in Oakville. Every second Sunday for the next 20 weeks Demaras Racing will host our own ‘Fast and Furious’ film festival, starting with 2001’s ‘The Fast and the Furious‘ on Sunday October 26.

The plan it to screen everything in the F&F universe, including oddballs like ‘The Turbo Charged Prelude for 2 Fast 2 Furious‘ that was only available on DVD, and the short film ‘Los Bandoleros‘ which was a prequel to FF4 directed by Vin Diesel.

At only 16 seats capacity, it was never going to be all that hard to find enough gearheads to fill up the screening room, and thanks to social media, we had a full house. In excess of a full house, as one movie-goer brought a guest at the last minute, and we had to bring in an easy chair from the lobby!

Sure, the F&F films aren’t Citizen Cane‘ but they still resonated with people. And for several different reasons. To gearheads in their 40s, the original F&F film from the turn of the century reminds them of their youth. The current crop of street racers may look at these films as the origin story of hooliganism and takeovers, like an instruction manual.

The smart ones just view these as fun, escapist, action movies.

To make movie night more of ‘an experience’ we brought lots of extras. Simple things like a little Panasonic ghetto blaster with a playlist of songs from F&F movies, plus Halloween candy in bowl shaped like a ’69 Dodge Charger. With a more foresight, we could have brought a cartoon like ‘Speed Racer‘ from 1967 to play before the feature presentation.

A week before the F&F Film Fest, we started looking for raffle items. We visited the Movie Poster Warehouse at 1875 Leslie St in Toronto which is a great shop carrying classic, vintage and modern movie posters. From inexpensive reproductions to rare originals from the ‘golden era’ of film.

We excitedly told them about our Fast Film Fest, and our love of movies clearly showed through. The head honcho was so nice he just gave us the three posters we came in to buy (FF, 2F2F, FF3 Tokyo Drift). Look at the smiles on the faces of our three raffle prize winners!

Now that the movie was over, it was out to the parking lot for donuts and big, smoky burnouts!

Hard as it is to believe, we had friends, guys in the car scene, decline invitations to the Fast Film Fest because they truly believed things would get out of hand. One buddy even wrote “…I imagine it turning out like when the very first Fast and Furious came out in theatres at Scarborough Town Center and it was full of hooligans tuner cars…”.

Unfortunately, since it was a school night, three of the high-performance cars at the event left promptly after the movie, but big boys Kyle, Dave, Filip, Red and Chris all remained to pose their radical rides cars under the marquee.

The combination of those hundreds of Hollywood-esque lightbulbs, shimmering paint, and flashy underglow made the parking lot looked like a scene out of an F&F film. The neon lights on the art-deco cinema made the perfect backdrop.

This first event was definitely a soft-launch, but the second installment of the Fast and Furious Film Festival should be over the top. Up next will be Paul Walker and Tyrese Gibson in the 2003 sequel “2 Fast 2 Furious” on Sunday, November 9th 2025. Hopefully, the parking lot will be like a car show this time!

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