Inside Atlas Cin­e­ma, the space democ­ra­tis­ing film exhibition

Nes­tled in a reclaimed rail­way arch in South Lon­don, an exper­i­men­tal film coop­er­a­tive named Atlas Cin­e­ma is upend­ing tra­di­tion­al film exhi­bi­tion. Found­ed by Abi­ba Coulibaly of Brix­ton Com­mu­ni­ty Cin­e­ma and built by archi­tec­ture and design col­lec­tive BAFALW, Atlas Cin­e­ma has spent the sum­mer qui­et­ly thriv­ing as a hub for fledged film cura­tors and the cura­to­ri­al­ly curi­ous to sharp­en their claws as pro­gram­mers and cre­ate a non-hier­ar­chi­cal envi­ron­ment for audi­ences to engage with an afford­able array of dis­tinct works. Derek Jar­man, Kha­lik Allah, Hirokazu Koree­da and Leilah Wein­raub are a few of the film­mak­ers so far for­tu­nate enough to have their films beamed from the Atlas projector.

Accord­ing to Coulibaly, the aim of the project is ​“to explore if an inde­pen­dent arts venue with no fund­ing and afford­able pric­ing can be sus­tained, while offer­ing a pro­gramme that sees London’s plu­ral­ism reflect­ed in its cura­tors and audi­ence mem­bers, at a time when access to careers and pro­gram­ming in the arts is increas­ing­ly exclu­sive, plac­ing the pio­neer­ing work­ing class cre­atives and irreplic­a­ble DIY spaces that pow­er the city’s rep­u­ta­tion as an inter­na­tion­al cul­tur­al incu­ba­tor in irre­versible pre­car­i­ty and jeopardy.”

Tick­ets to Atlas Cin­e­ma screen­ings cost a max­i­mum of £5 with any prof­it going to char­i­ties such as the Pales­tine Children’s Relief Fund, or towards secur­ing screen­ing rights for the titles. The aban­doned rail­way arch in Lough­bor­ough Junc­tion that Atlas Cin­e­ma calls home was refur­bished with found, sal­vaged and donat­ed mate­ri­als with vol­un­teers cut­ting and repur­pos­ing pal­lets into tiered seat­ing and turn­ing left­over cof­fee sacks into cush­ions and soft fur­nish­ing. BAFALW com­ment­ed that ​“the way it was built cre­at­ed a bet­ter sense of own­er­ship, belong­ing and shared respon­si­bil­i­ty with the space”.

Speak­ing with a hand­ful of the cura­tors, I learned more about their approach to coop­er­a­tive film exhi­bi­tion, the chal­lenges cura­tors face from dis­trib­u­tors and what’s wrong with the Lon­don film scene. Har­ry Kalfayan, one of the more estab­lished cura­tors in the co-op, cre­at­ed the Dark Room strand which took place once a month on a Sun­day, ​“I always thought of the cin­e­ma as a sort of reli­gious space, going into often the exact same dark space every week for 2 hours…With that pas­sion for the phys­i­cal space of cin­e­ma, along with the impor­tance of the dark­ness to queer people’s per­son­al devel­op­ment, whether that be in pri­vate or out at the club, the idea for a night called Dark Room started.”

Kalfayan invites audi­ences to com­mune around the works of Jar­man and Wein­raub and Ming-liang Tsai, ​“For every screen­ing, I get peo­ple to light a can­dle as they walk into the cin­e­ma and place it where they want. The dark is more than just about sex – it’s about danc­ing, it’s about think­ing, it’s about com­ing to terms with your­self and the world around you.”.

For Ade­mol­la Bel­lo, for­mer­ly a pro­gram­mer for Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val who start­ed the Spaces & Faces strand, ​“this film club is a por­tal to someone/​somewhere else”, tak­ing the audi­ence from Nige­ria through a shorts pro­gramme fea­tur­ing a vari­ety of pol­ished and unpol­ished works autho­rised direct­ly from Niger­ian film­mak­ers, through to Jamaica with Kha­lik Allah’s short Khamaica and Per­ry Henzell’s The Hard­er They Come. On oth­er occa­sions, Bel­lo chose to show excerpts of films rather than them in their entire­ty. ​“Some peo­ple may chafe at the idea, but it was a real­ly fun and exper­i­men­tal approach and I’m glad I did.”

Colm Moore (not a film cura­tor by trade), in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Sab­ri­na Jones, over­saw ​‘Flim Club’ and took a sim­i­lar approach focus­ing on ​“short-form pieces from art house films, archival mate­r­i­al, doc­u­men­taries and every­thing in between.” Their con­cept, Moore con­tin­ues, was to ​“show­case a vari­ety of styles and sto­ries, aim­ing to present a diverse mix of ideas in one screening”.While purists might baulk at the idea of clip­ping estab­lished works, anoth­er argu­ment might be that it shows cura­to­r­i­al prowess, as well as a faith in audi­ences. When so many peo­ple dis­cov­er reper­to­ry film as decon­tex­tu­alised screen­grabs or snip­pets on social media (often with lim­it­ed infor­ma­tion or access to source the full mate­ri­als), a per­son­al­ly select­ed ​‘tast­ing menu’ in a cin­e­ma space doesn’t seem so blasphemous.

The respons­es from audi­ences has been over­whelm­ing­ly pos­i­tive with the com­mu­nal aspect of Atlas becom­ing as appeal­ing as the eclec­tic pro­gramme. ​“I think what’s spe­cial about Atlas is hav­ing a space that’s afford­able, infor­mal and always has some­thing excit­ing to watch,” Kalfayan tells me. ​“Plus every venue has got to start some­where and gov­ern­ment fund­ing for start­ing your own arts venue or organ­i­sa­tion basi­cal­ly doesn’t exist in the UK.”

The issue with lack of fund­ing is one that’s echoed by founder Coulibaly. At the moment none of the tens of peo­ple involved in Atlas are able to pay them­selves even a token fee. How­ev­er, Coulibaly and the team see Atlas, even with­out mon­ey, as the solu­tion not the prob­lem in an increas­ing­ly risk-averse and finan­cial­ly squeezed land­scape. ​“I’ve worked with var­i­ous major film insti­tu­tions pro­gram­ming for no or lit­tle pay, pro­gram­ming for places that wouldn’t make an unequiv­o­cal state­ment about Pales­tine, pro­gram­ming for organ­i­sa­tions lack­ing dynamism in which it was nec­es­sary to wait a year or more for screen­ings to go ahead. Atlas was born from a frus­tra­tion with these expe­ri­ences and con­vic­tion that oth­er aspir­ing film pro­gram­mers shouldn’t have to face this drain­ing process, which is stop­ping a lot of great cin­e­ma reach­ing var­ied audi­ences,” says Coulibaly.

Part of this rad­i­cal DIY approach comes from Coulibaly’s own back­ground in Urban Geog­ra­phy, tak­ing a holis­tic approach to film cura­tion and see­ing the phys­i­cal space and films exhib­it­ed there­in as a con­tin­u­ous dia­logue with the city.

“The use of a vacant space is about occu­py­ing sites when space in the area is increas­ing­ly fenced off, com­mod­i­fied, and ren­dered exclu­sive and exclu­sion­ary, while many prop­er­ty own­ers would rather see space lie emp­ty than let it for any­thing below an extor­tion­ate mar­ket rate, hav­ing a detri­men­tal effect on not just cul­tur­al activ­i­ty but basic hous­ing rights and com­mu­nal well being.” Coulibaly con­tin­ues, ​“My approach to Atlas has been that the pro­gram­mers and pro­gram­ming reflect the plu­ral­ism of London…We’re so lucky to have such a het­ero­ge­neous – I’m tired of the word diverse – soci­ety, but this is reflect­ed very patchi­ly in regards to who holds posi­tions with cre­ative con­trol in the cul­tur­al sector.”

But out­side of the stale, pale, male epi­dem­ic in most decent­ly fund­ed cin­e­mas, dis­trib­u­tors – in some sense, the mid­dle man between film­mak­er and audi­ence – are anoth­er thorn in Atlas’ side and indeed keep­ing the cin­e­ma expe­ri­ence alive. ​“We need film dis­trib­u­tors and the peo­ple and enti­ties who own the rights to films to offer afford­able rates because if and when they don’t peo­ple are pushed to turn to pira­cy. It isn’t fair that only mon­eyed venues can afford rights to films because it often means in turn, only mon­eyed audi­ence mem­bers can attend” Coulibaly tells me.

Sep­a­rate­ly, and off the record, anoth­er cura­tor tells me a film­mak­er who had their fea­ture avail­able for free on their web­site agreed to Atlas screen­ing the work for free, but once their dis­trib­u­tor was looped in a fee of $750 (well above stan­dard even for a fund­ed cin­e­ma) mate­ri­alised seem­ing­ly out of nowhere. ​“Film­mak­ers absolute­ly should be paid, but audi­ence mem­bers and inde­pen­dent venues should not be priced out either. I would love dis­trib­u­tors to offer more flex­i­bil­i­ty in their terms and be less extrac­tive, demon­strat­ing more of a desire to get their films in front of peo­ple who appre­ci­ate and relate to their titles rather than just the peo­ple who can afford to see them.”

It isn’t often we share snacks with the peo­ple who built our cin­e­ma seat or share a drink with the pro­jec­tion­ist, and it’s only in very select spaces in Lon­don that you get to pick the brain of the cura­tor after­wards – should you have the ​‘insid­er knowl­edge’ on who exact­ly they are and what a film cura­tor even does. And at Atlas, we may well be talk­ing about one per­son. What the Atlas Cin­e­ma coop­er­a­tive have accom­plished is a social view­ing envi­ron­ment where no film is too obscure or too main­stream, where the ​‘plu­ral­i­ties of Lon­don’ are reflect­ed in the pro­gramme and those who show up to watch but most impor­tant­ly, where the bureau­cra­cy of con­nect­ing films with audi­ences is abolished.

Learn more about Atlas Cin­e­ma on their Insta­gram and Events page.