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.
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