Rebadged or Genuinely New? What the Flic Film Announcement Tells Us About the Film Industry
Back in June, Flic Film, a Canadian manufacturer and distributor of analog photography products, posted on social media about an "all-new film stock." The announcement set off a wave of questions, speculation, and no small amount of controversy.
This kind of debate isn't new to the community. But the reaction was sharp enough that Flic Film ended up releasing a clarification video. In it, a company representative admits: "The only honest answer I can give is that I don't know." He explains that the company knows who makes the film, but that when they receive it, it comes with a code number, not the original product name.
Flic Film: who are they, exactly?
Flic Film is based in Longview, Alberta. The company currently produces two black-and-white films, sourcing emulsion directly from Eastman Kodak and Filmotec and rolling it into 35mm cassettes. Their black-and-white offerings include Kodak Double-X rebranded under house names, along with Filmotec emulsions (the legendary East German manufacturer, now operating out of Wolfen).
On the color side, their films come from Kodak, Foma, or Filmotec. Street Candy ATM 400, for instance, was originally film recovered from ATM surveillance cameras. Aurora 800, their high-speed color offering, has generated plenty of online debate about its true identity, with some sources suggesting it's Kodak Gold 800 or Max 800 originally destined for disposable cameras.
So Flic Film is a bulk loader and distributor. That's a perfectly legitimate business model, and the company says as much on their own website. But when you announce a film as "all-new," you're stepping onto trickier ground.
Rebadging: a structural reality of the market
In the analog world, a rebadged film is straightforward enough: a brand buys emulsion in bulk from a manufacturer, rolls it into 35mm or 120 cassettes, gives it a house name, and sells it under their own identity. The term "OEM" (Original Equipment Manufacturer) comes from the industrial world, but the practice itself has been around for decades. Supermarkets used to sell their own house-brand films that were nothing but relabeled Fuji or Kodak. What's changed is how widespread this model has become in the analog community since roughly 2018-2020. It feels like every few weeks there's another "new" film, whether it's Candido, Vandal, Cinémot, Mr Negative, and the list keeps growing. But most of these are variations on the same theme, often Kodak Vision 3 cinema film in a different box.
The number of manufacturers actually producing emulsion is small. Kodak Alaris and Kodak Professional for traditional photographic films, Kodak for cinema stocks (Vision 3 in particular), Fujifilm, Ilford, Foma in the Czech Republic, Filmotec in Germany, and a handful of niche players. That's the whole list. Everything else is distribution, rolling, and sometimes additional processing.
The real question: what makes a film stock "new"?
This is where it gets interesting, because the answer isn't binary. There are several ways to meaningfully alter how a film behaves, some done upstream by the original manufacturer, others carried out by the brand in their own facility. These changes can completely shift a film's color palette, light sensitivity, contrast, and grain, giving it a genuinely distinctive look.
In practice, here's the range of what's actually out there:
- Pure rerolling: buy a known emulsion, put it in a different cassette, give it a new name. The film is identical to the original.
- Rerolling with remjet removal: for cinema stocks like Vision 3 or Double-X, the brand strips the anti-halation backing before packaging the film in photo format. That's real processing work, and it changes the results.
- Sensitivity reformulation: a brand can ask the manufacturer to produce an emulsion at a different speed than the standard version. Less common, but it happens.
- Additional chemical or optical treatment: some brands modify the emulsion after receiving it, pre-bath treatments, coatings, and so on.
- Emulsion co-developed with a manufacturer: the brand collaborates on developing a formula from the ground up. Rare, expensive, and it takes years.
- Fully proprietary emulsion: the manufacturer creates the emulsion entirely in-house. Ilford, Kodak, Fujifilm, Foma, Rollei/Agfa-Gevaert are in that very short list.
Why transparency is hard in this market
Flic Film's "I don't know" is more honest than what you usually hear. Commercial agreements between rollers and manufacturers typically include confidentiality clauses. The manufacturer doesn't want end consumers to realize they can buy the same emulsion under ten different names. And the brand has no interest in undermining the identity it's built around a film.
Opacity is baked into this market's structure, and consumers looking for straight answers often hit a wall. The online community sometimes fills that gap through analysis: comparing spectrograms, density curves, development behavior. It's not always conclusive, but it's usually more informative than the press releases.
How I evaluate a "new film" announcement
When a brand announces a new film stock, a few concrete questions help calibrate expectations.
Does the manufacturer say who produces the emulsion? If yes, that's a good sign. Flic Film generally does this for their black-and-white films, naming Kodak and Filmotec outright. On the color side, it's less consistent.
Does the brand describe what they actually do to the emulsion? Remjet removal, reformulation, additional treatment… if those steps are documented, the claim of "newness" rests on something tangible.
Are the announced characteristics consistent with known emulsions? A 500 ISO color film in 2025 points to a handful of existing emulsions. Grain, latitude, pushing behavior: all of that leaves clues.
Is a technical datasheet available? Not necessarily a full H&D curve, but at least reference development times, a rated speed, a suggested exposure index. A complete absence of technical information is a red flag.
What's the brand's track record? Flic Film has built genuine credibility in the Canadian analog community, with products that deliver what's advertised, even when the marketing language gets imprecise.
A question of honest communication, not condemnation
The DPReview piece that made the rounds in the community makes the point that more film options deserve to be celebrated, even if they aren't entirely new. That's a reasonable position. The roller-distributor model has real value: it makes emulsions accessible that would otherwise be hard to get in photo format, it creates price competition, it encourages experimentation.
The issue isn't distributing an existing emulsion. The issue is calling it "all-new" without further explanation. The people buying these films are often well-informed and don't appreciate being treated like they don't know what they're doing. Something like "new addition to our catalog" or "reformatted emulsion with exclusive processing" would have been more accurate, and honestly not that hard to write.
This isn't a minor marketing quibble. When you're spending $15-20 per roll and planning your development times accordingly, knowing what you actually bought has real practical consequences.
Going further
Browse the Flic Film catalog directly at flicfilm.ca, where the brand documents its supply sources for black-and-white films, naming Kodak Eastman and Filmotec specifically. It's a model of partial transparency that's worth acknowledging and encouraging.
Read the community analyses on Film Photography Project, Analogue Wonderland, and the Reddit forums (r/analog, r/AnalogCommunity). These are the places where photographers do the comparison work that brands don't: cross-testing, grain analysis, lab behavior. Not infallible, but often genuinely useful.
Sources
- dpreview.com — More film options are worth celebrating, even if they aren't entirely new
- flicfilm.ca — Film and Paper catalog
- filmphotography.eu — Flic Film
- eclectachrome.substack.com — What is Aurora 800?
- flaneuronthestreets.substack.com — Why all this new film?
- dpreview.com forums — Flic Film Aurora 800 discussion