FlicFilm Aurora 800

Aurora 800 is Flic Film's high-speed daylight color negative, released in early 2024 from their Alberta operation. The Longview, Alberta company started as a small developing-kits shop and grew into respooling and rebranding emulsions for the working hobbyist market. The exact source emulsion behind Aurora 800 is not officially disclosed; the strongest community guesses are that it is rebadged Kodak Gold 800 or Max 800, the consumer films that historically loaded disposable cameras at 800 speed.

What you get is a daylight-balanced 800 ISO C-41 film with finer grain than most night photographers expect at that speed. It pushes cleanly to 1600 with extended development. The signature is honest color rendering rather than the warm tungsten bloom that defines Cinestill 800T; if you are after the red halation look, Aurora is not it. If you want a daylight 800 that holds skin tones and renders a blue sky correctly, this is among the better current options at the price.

Compared with Lomography Color 800, Aurora runs slightly less saturated and slightly cleaner in shadows. Compared with Portra 800, the grain is a touch heavier and the latitude is narrower but the price runs roughly half. For street and event work where you want speed without the look-at-me cast of Cinestill, it lands well.

Two practical notes. Aurora cassettes are not DX-coded, so set your camera meter manually to 800. And the film tends to curl more aggressively than Kodak or Fuji stock when you cut it off the roll, which matters if you scan at home with film carriers rather than glass.

Available in 35mm 36-exposure cassettes only. No 120 version. Flic Film sells direct from Canada and through specialty shops in the US, UK, and EU.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.1. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 4-second exposure becomes around 5 seconds at the negative, a small bump that matters more than it looks at first because indoor available-light shooting on an 800 film puts you in that range constantly.