Matt Finlin

Matt Finlin is a Canadian documentary filmmaker,^[1] who is partner with Karen Barzilay in the Door Knocker Media film studio.^[2] He is most noted for his 2024 film The Movie Man.^[3] and his 2025 film Matter of Time.^[4]

Background

Born and raised in Cambridge, Ontario,^[1] he studied psychology at the University of Guelph.^[5] His student film Pipe Dreams was screened at the university in 2006.^[5] He then spent some time working as an English as a Second Language teacher in Taiwan,^[6] where he made the short film The Glass Box, about Taiwan's betel nut trade.^[7]

He then spent some time living in New York City, where he released the film Below New York, a short documentary about the city's subway buskers, in 2011.^[8]

Door Knocker

Finlin founded Door Knocker Media in 2014 with producing partner Karen Barzilay. With the company, he worked as a director and producer of television specials and sponsored films for charitable organizations, including We Day specials,^[9] and a posthumous tribute special to actor Leslie Jordan.^[10]

The Movie Man, his feature documentary debut, premiered in February 2024 at the 39th Santa Barbara International Film Festival,^[11] and had its Canadian premiere at the Kingston Canadian Film Festival.^[3] The film received a Vancouver Film Critics Circle award nomination for Best Canadian Documentary at the Vancouver Film Critics Circle Awards 2024.^[12] Pete Hammond of Deadline dubbed the film "A Canadian Cinema Paradiso".^[13]

In 2025 Finlin released Matter of Time, a film profiling Eddie Vedder's series of fundraising concerts to raise money for reseearch into a cure for epidermolysis bullosa.^[14]