The Alban Arts Center in St. Albans will host a one-night screening of "Withdrawal," a feature film drawn from writer-director Aaron Strand's own experience with heroin addiction, on Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026, from 7 to 9 p.m. The evening pairs the feature with a short film by West Virginia filmmaker Jen Ogrin, followed by a question-and-answer session with Strand moderated by Salwa Amin, program director of Help4WV, the state's 24-hour addiction and mental health helpline.
The film follows Viv and Jay, artistic lovers caught in a codependent cycle of heroin addiction. When Viv's wealthy parents hire an interventionist to take her to rehab, the couple decides to go it alone with nothing but a Suboxone prescription and each other. All they have to do is survive one harrowing night of withdrawal. As the hours pass, physical and emotional torments send them rifling through fractured memories, trying to work out where it all went wrong.
That premise is not invented. Strand has said the story grew out of his own life. In an interview with Film Fugitives, he explained that the film was inspired by his experience as a former drug addict, but that it took him ten years to see those memories as material. In 2022, after losing financing on another project, he was frustrated and anxious to make his first feature. He had just read Melvin Van Peebles' book about making "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song," and, as he put it, with a mind full of "indie piss and vinegar," he realized he could shape some of his most painful experiences into a self-produced, single-location narrative. He wrote a ten-page treatment and found two actors, Brent Michal and Millie Rose Evans, willing to rehearse for more than four months and flesh out the script with him.
The road to that decision ran through a hard decade. Strand got sober and tried to re-enter the acting industry. "Withdrawal" was shot in Athens, Ga., about 90 minutes outside Atlanta, with a cast and crew drawn from the local scene. Strand wrote, directed and edited the film himself.
The production numbers are part of the story. The Alban's own event page describes a film "made for just $60k on miniDV camcorders," while the Saporta Report, writing around the film's New York premiere, put the figure at $40,000, a 700-square-foot house, four months of rehearsals and years of preparation. Either way, it was made well outside the studio system, and it has since built what the Alban calls a grassroots following. It premiered at the 2025 Atlanta Film Festival; according to the Alban, "Withdrawal" has gone on to win 12 awards at festivals around the world and holds a 100 percent critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Strand has become an outspoken advocate for the kind of distribution that brings a film like this to a place like St. Albans. In an interview with Moviejawn, he aligned himself with the "NonDe" movement, a term for filmmakers and audiences who reject dependence on the Hollywood system for making or showing movies, and who instead carry their work directly to viewers through in-person roadshows. The film's own website lists a string of such dates across the country, from Atlanta and Athens to Charlotte, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Toronto and beyond. Self-distribution, the Moviejawn interview notes, is less a new invention than a return to the original model, when filmmakers like the Lumiere brothers traveled from town to town, transforming a space to present their pictures to a live audience. That is essentially what the Alban date is: a traveling independent film stopping in a small West Virginia city, with the director in the room.
The venue itself has a long history of putting a screen in front of a local audience. The Alban Theatre opened in 1938 with the film "Ebb Tide," and its grand opening advertisement billed it as "a new and modern theatre entirely in keeping with the progressive spirit of St. Albans," according to the West Virginia Historic Theatre Trail. The Charleston Daily Mail called it "one of the most modern theaters, from a design and mechanical standpoint, to serve patrons in cities of that size." It offered 500 seats, a lounge, and a stage with dressing areas for performers, and it carried Colonial and Neo-Classical styling inside and out. Its owner, O.B. Pierce, also ran the older Main Theatre downtown, which he announced would be remodeled and reopened as a "colored" cinema serving the area's African-American population during the era of segregation. Over the decades the Alban hosted community fashion shows and fundraisers, later became part of the Cinema South chain, and kept showing films into at least the late 1970s. At some point the building was used as a church; the city of St. Albans eventually bought the former movie house for $175,000 and renovated it into the Alban Arts and Conference Center, which today runs stage plays, concerts, film screenings and classes through its arts academy.
Pairing "Withdrawal" with a West Virginia short film and a Q&A led by Help4WV's program director gives the evening a distinctly local frame. Help4WV, which is run through First Choice Services, provides a 24-hour helpline for West Virginians seeking help with addiction or mental illness, offering free assistance in securing a referral or placement for treatment. Amin has headed the program for nearly a year, taking over from former director Ann Hammond, and the helpline marked its tenth anniversary in September. In a state hit hard by the opioid epidemic, a film about one night of withdrawal, followed by a conversation with the person who runs the phone line people call when they are ready for help, is about as on-the-nose as a movie night gets.
Admission details for the Oct. 15 screening were not listed on the venue's event page. More information is available through the Alban Arts Center, at 65 Olde Main Plaza in St. Albans.