Is it possible to filter and paginate products in BigCartel?

For example, I’d like to filter to only active products when displaying pages (BigCartel’s recommended sort does not do this). In the liquid template code for the “products” page, I’m currently doing this:

% paginate products from products.current | where: "status", "active"
by 10 %}

but the above is not working as expected – it’s causing the whole page to render empty, in some sort of mystery error. I am guessing that what is happening is the pagination is happening first and then the filter (I wanted the opposite order), and the blank page error is the page returning no results.

This post about Shopify’s pagination (also liquid, but with a bit different backend) seems to hint that this isn’t possible.

Is there a solution here? Or a way to debug?