It’s a warm autumn evening and the graffiti along the side wall of Bristol’s Cube Microplex cinema shouts in the unseasonal sunshine as a gaggle of people gather quietly around the front gates. They are here for a screening of five short films, showcasing the work of some of the UK’s up-and-coming black film-makers. Several of the writers and directors are expected, and there is a tantalising buzz of voices from the cinema courtyard.
The punters surge in and are directed to a cash-only volunteer-run bar, before settling into faded velvet seats in a 100-seat auditorium. There is a ripple of excitement when someone in the audience recognises a famous face. She can’t quite put a name to him, but all becomes clear when the first film opens: it’s an exploration of fatherhood featuring the three Plummer brothers, Tremaine, Twaine and Tristan, who became celebrities through their appearances on TV’s Gogglebox.
The screenings are part of an occasional Regional Voices night by local impresario and activist Gary Thompson, who has set up a company, Cables & Cameras, dedicated to promoting talent from ethnic minorities in the UK. Tonight’s participants have travelled in from London and Birmingham as well as Bristol, and afterwards they sit around chatting with each other and the audience. “There’s a whole new generation of talented black and brown film-makers who are exploring the rich culture of various UK regions, but they don’t have a platform,” says Thompson. “The question is how to connect these diverse voices in a way that makes a difference.”
The Cube, which has been run by volunteers since it was founded in 1998, is one of the oldest independent cinemas in the UK. Counterintuitively, at a time of rising prices and falling incomes, many more have opened over the last few years. The UK now has 1,500 volunteer-run venues, according to Jaq Chell, CEO of the charity Cinema for All, which supports them with everything from licensing and insurance to equipment. Some are just pop-ups in pubs or community halls. “It’s a hidden world, especially in rural places: anywhere you can set up a screen you can have a cinema.” She attributes the growth to a combination of lighter, more user-friendly equipment and successive changes to licensing laws, which have cut the bureaucracy for community venues with fewer than 500 seats.
But as Bristol demonstrates, there are many different types of independent cinema. A little over a mile away from the Cube, up a flight of cobbled steps, a different sort of screening is taking place at one of the UK’s last surviving video shops. At 20th Century Flicks, which is like a retro sweet shop for movie buffs, its shelves crammed floor to ceiling with filmic allsorts, from the latest DVDs to a heap of 20th-century laserdiscs, that customers keep donating because they are basically unplayable today. “We’re hoarders,” says Daisy Steinhardt, before heading off to load up this evening’s film in the 18-seater Videodrome, a vintage cinema in miniature that opens off one side of the shop. On the other side is the even smaller Kino, whose 10 seats are available for £80, or £50 for couples looking for a romantic night out.
The shop was founded in 1982, but has moved location a couple of times, ending up in its current spot nine years ago. “We have discovered what solvency means. It means subsidising the rental with the cinema,” says owner Dave Taylor. He also runs screenings in an old, purpose-built Imax cinema which was rediscovered, complete with fully functional equipment, in the building now occupied by the Bristol Aquarium. Among his recent offerings was: “Threadgames – a nuclear double-bill”, a film night that piggybacked on the Barbenheimer phenomenon to present two back-to-back 1980s classics, War Games and Threads.
You can see why Bristol is one of the UK’s two Unesco Cities of film (along with Bradford): it is buzzing with entrepreneurial enthusiasm. The city already has eight cinemas, but a campaign is under way to reclaim another in the east of the city. The Redfield sits on a busy street corner behind an unglamorous pebbledash wall. It opened in 1912 but – like so many art deco cinemas in the UK – it was converted into a bingo hall in the 1960s. It then became a fast food restaurant, and when that also closed a few years ago, the original interior was found to be largely intact.
Spearheading the campaign are Paul Burke and Dave Taylor-Matthews, who have enlisted local architecture students to draw up plans for a three-screen cinema with a food hall, supported by the development of social housing above it. It is a model that has been rolled out successfully elsewhere in the UK, mostly in the south-east of England. “I make the distinction between community and social cinema,” says Taylor-Matthews. “I don’t want to be dismissive of a movement that has brought film to all sorts of areas, but if you say ‘community cinema’, you think of Disney sending out videos to community halls with folding chairs and bad projection. That’s not what we are about.”
It’s not lost on them that Cineworld, one of the world’s largest chains that has a multiplex in the south of the city, has recently had a close brush with bankruptcy. The big screen multiplex model is in trouble, they say, because changing viewing habits mean there aren’t many films that can attract 600 people to often out-of-the-way venues. But it’s not only the big chains that are suffering. A new survey by the Independent Cinema Office revealed that, out of the 157 independent cinemas sampled, 45% are operating at a loss this year, with 42% predicting that they will close in a year or less unless things improve.
So why are so many still opening (or reopening, as two Filmhouse cinemas in Edinburgh and Aberdeen are on course to do next year)? “We show films that are of cultural significance,” says Rod White, the head of programming at Edinburgh Filmhouse. “There’s a whole stream of films that wouldn’t exist in this country if you didn’t have these sorts of venues that are prepared to show ones that are not commercial.”
Another eternal optimist is Tony Mundin, the founder and director of Northern Light Cinema, a family business that now has cinemas in Cumbria, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Greater Manchester. He is currently in negotiation for a new venue in the Manchester area that will be his smallest yet, with three screens, none with more than 50 seats. All of his cinemas, he says, are in market towns or urban villages, where regulars can walk in for a film and also have a drink. The new venue will have staggered screenings administered by a staff of three. “It’s all about keeping your borrowing and your staff size down, which is where the big boys have fallen down,” he says. “There’s no doubt that relatively small cinemas appeal to people because they get proper attention.”
It is not all plain sailing though, as the team behind another community cinema know. ActOne is a not-for-profit venue which opened in 2021 and has two 60-seater screens on the site of an old library in the west London borough of Ealing. It is a stylish, laid-back space, with free wifi in a cafe and bar area furnished with bookcases, sofas and a big table for remote workers or children’s parties.
ActOne is in an informal supportive partnership with two older London independents: the Phoenix in East Finchley and Dalston’s Rio Cinema. It has two full-time staff and up to six more who work on a shift basis, supported by a large team of local volunteers. But its founders’ calculations were based on a pre-pandemic average attendance between 30 and 40%. Since then, the growth in streaming has changed viewing habits, big films have been delayed by the Hollywood strikes, and they are always having to think of new ways to entice more people to come in.
One of their successes has been monthly screenings of plays recorded under the National Theatre Live programme (three upcoming showings of Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s cult novel A Little Life quickly sold out). But they are also committed to meeting the demands of their community, such as Somali films. “We are very proud of what we have done,” says board member Nick Jones, “but film exhibition at the moment is a very tricky area to be involved in and we face monumental difficulties.”
Across the other side of the country, in the north Welsh town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, youth worker turned cinema factotum, Rhys Roberts, knows exactly what he means. Back in 2005, he bought the old police station from the local council for £127, thinking he would convert it into a theatre. But when he canvassed the young people he worked with about what they wanted, he says, top of the list was a McDonalds and second was a cinema. There had been no cinema in the town for 40 years, “so we bought a projector and a screen and started to run a film night.” One thing led to another, enabling Roberts to get funding to build a proper cinema, CellB, which is partially financed by a two-room hostel in part of the building.
CellB now employs three full-time staff, including two teenagers who came through the youth programme. Two years ago it opened a second 50-seater screen in the old courtroom upstairs, “but we found there wasn’t much money to be made in film these days. Barbie packed it out for two weeks in the summer, but what people don’t realise is that the distributors want 50% of the takings. So we’re building up the cinema experience,” says Roberts. A lot depends on a recent investment in a huge pizza oven.
Back in Bristol, Taylor-Matthews looks out on a street full of people looking for a coffee or some groceries, and says that if the property developer who currently owns the Redfield site won’t release it, they will find another building nearby. For all the beauty of old cinema buildings, film is not just about bricks and mortar: it is about ways of being as well as seeing. “A lot of people will say: ‘I want to go out on Thursday. I will see what there is to do in my local area’. The competition nowadays isn’t a multiplex but the pub opposite and the restaurants up and down the street.”
