There’s a certain feeling to community cinema that can feel a bit like some form of occult magic; the sensation of coming away from a film with a fire brewing – more close-knit with everyone you’ve shared the film with, but also transformed personally, intimately.

Of course, that thrill can happen anywhere – being able to watch something totally new (and probably at least a little bit weird) at Odeon New Street’s screen 7; a comfort watch in a living room with loved ones and a nice old bean stew – but I don’t think either of these match to the same sensation as what pop-up exhibition can do. It’s something even But what exactly is it that creates this sensation?

The answer might be glean-able from ScreenB14s trilogy of screenings earlier this month, titled ‘100 Years of Community Cinema’ and comprising the films Funeral Parade of Roses, Goodbye, Dragon Inn and The Big City. All three films have guilt by association to the title: ‘100 years of Community Cinema’ – and thus must answer themselves the question of what community cinema is all about. 

I’ll try my best to assume the role of solicitor here: to suggest how each film might best comment on community cinema, and what makes these screenings so important to the ecosystem of film. It won’t be some complete image of what makes community cinema so important, but I think each film captured a key part of the phenomenon that makes Community Cinema important, both to film and to Birmingham.

Out of the three films chosen by ScreenB14 to commemorate the 100-year anniversary, Funeral Parade of Roses was the only one I’d seen before. My first watch was hyper-casual, on a laptop while cooking, and the thought of devoting myself more to such an experimental film was both exhilarating and a bit exhausting.

Funeral Parade of Roses stands strong particularly as a dizzying snapshot of counterculture in Japan – one that clashes against modern-day representations. In an early scene, we get a vox-pop of different trans women in Japan, asked about what it’s like to be a “gayboy”. The term feels particularly provoking when watching as part of a British crowd, especially as the term feels like it made up around 30% of my time in school; it guaranteed giggles every time it appeared, to the point of feeling almost non-voluntary. It became, to me, almost a crucial detail of the night to see that laughter capture a divide between country and time so clearly.

Taking this a step further to the present, I appreciated how the film felt in its tension against a contemporary queer scene – one where terms have largely been ‘figured out’ for each category of unstraight identity. Even the word ‘queer’ feels like a reduction of the identities of many of the film’s characters – what other word could describe the disruptions of gender and cinema that the film pushes towards? In the vox-pop scene, one interviewee’s response struck me particularly, saying they didn’t necessarily feel like ‘becoming entirely female’, or staying entirely male; we might be able to offer a distinct name for that feeling now, to offer a nominal home that comforts that sense of identity. I find myself most drawn not to this potential comfort, but to the emerging feeling caught in this vox-pop, a personal journey being fleshed out. 

Funeral Parade of Roses’ space in film history also feels importantly between. The film (spoilers) largely takes from the story of Oedipus Rex – represented by main character Eddie, who blinds herself after unknowingly sleeping with her father. Naturally, the first time she meets her dad as a potential lover is in a street plastered with posters for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus, itself a vibrant, colourful, queer adaptation released just the year prior. Often, the radical and counter-cultural can feel new, bold – even the attempts to vilify trans people rely on the threat of their novelty, spawned from nowhere to fuck with J.K. Rowling. With such an overt reference to the film, we get to see a sharing of the queer cinematic movement that feels pretty momentous. This is not just radical for the sake of being radical, or some psychological reflection of its director, assumed as some auter-y ‘genius close to madness’: instead, we get to see the act of ‘figuring out’ cinematic languages, a sharing of styles, desires and revolutions on screen. There’s such a beauty in seeing art be inspired into creation with such an unmistakable – even potentially naive – passion.

One of the huge benefits of repertory cinema at large is that these feelings are openly shared, reckoning with the present and the past in one space, on one screen. In its violent, vibrant insistence on radicalising its own narrative, Funeral Parade of Roses is no exception, feeling like a symbol carved into a monument – woven into a noble history, while etching out of that same past into the conditions of our present. There’s humour in seeing its differences, comfort in its similarities, and never a moment where we could fall entirely within one point in time. 

I’d not officially decided to grab a ticket to Goodbye, Dragon Inn until the day of. While enjoying the rewatch of Roses, I hadn’t been fully convinced into the Community trifecta. My experiences watching Tsai Ming-Liang-directed films prior – falling asleep to What Time is it There? and hearing snoring to an ICA screening of Abiding Nowhere – didn’t give me much confidence. Still, something about the night – maybe the love ScreenB14 have showed Concrete, the £3 ticket, or the 15 Minutes of Potential Fame with The One Show Cameras in attendance – drew me in.

It’s this on-a-whim mentality I carried into screen 1 – a slight ‘fuck it’ mentality. Hitting torrential downpour head-on, I ended up at The Mockingbird almost perfectly as late as I’d been the week before. The only context I had for Goodbye, Dragon Inn was a story from my friend Theo, who recalled hearing Peter Strickland masterfully fumble his way through an introduction for a screening of his ‘favourite films’ – the only issue being that he had never seen it, and wouldn’t even have the time to that night. 

Little would I realise that this context would feel so perfect: Goodbye Dragon Inn, on its own merit entirely, comments on the abstract nature of the movie theatre with such style and sincerity. With its own heavy rain obscuring most of the outside world, we’re confined entirely towards the space of the cinema.

That’s not to say we’re simply watching another screen, though. The beige bathrooms, illusory hallways and regular attendees on screen feel insistent on calling out to each inch of the cinematic space, in all cinemas everywhere, across time. While envisioning an almost dystopian rejection of the screen – rough turnouts, viewers completely careless to the film itself, the light of the exit visible at all times – I felt nothing but love for the space, and its labyrinth of items, ghosts, ephemeral moments.

My favourite feature of the film was its response to the idea of ‘irritation’. With any movie about “the cinema”, you’re bound to find a heap of reactionary representations of annoying Natterers, Snorers, Munchers, etc. – but Dragon Inn’s co-protagonist (a japanese tourist in a Jacob-Rose-ish shirt) has no leg on which to stand. He hardly cares about Dragon Inn (the film screening) either, constantly battling his attentions with other attendees in its dingy theatre more than any kung-fu on screen. My favourite shot of the movie sees this tourist finally content to watch the film; then, a 180-degree camera switch beckons us to focus on a menial action – someone simply leaving for the bathroom. The tourist can’t help but follow that action, desperate to do anything but watch the movie he’s paid for. 

Of course, the act isn’t as menial as it seems. Every cinema I’ve been in seems to call upon these distractions easily; the privacy it assumes on its audience leads to a tendency towards interruption. I’d seen the most recent Tsai Ming-Liang film, Abiding Nowhere, at London’s ICA where snoring became my favourite sound effect. The desire to look beyond the screen to its audience was enhanced in Goodbye, Dragon Inn: when a chocolate sphere clattered on the floor from the couple next to me, I couldn’t help but treat it as a necessary part of the film- wondering about their own reaction to the loss, whether they’d reach out into the void to get it back. When friend-of-the-mag Taylor Burns left the cinema halfway through, I couldn’t help but wonder about the act – what could he dislike about it? Was the leaving beyond the space itself? There was an obvious answer – confirmed when he returned, from the direction of the bathroom, in under five minutes – but I couldn’t help but desire ignoring.

In Taylor’s elegant letterboxd review of the film, he mentions the film’s sensation of letting the mind wander in a way that doesn’t reflect “true boredom”, but rather…

“a way that made me contemplate the small things in life that this film prioritises as anything but”. 

It’s a severely interesting take I can’t help agreeing with, especially in regards to the space of the cinema and its distractions. There will always be the potential of a silhouette blocking the screen, the squeaks of chairs,  the whir of air conditioning. Hearing the chatter of a viewer who might care less than me might be annoying, but it speaks to the full experience, rather than against. What does it say to disagree against these people, to be distracted and annoyed rather than distracted and relieved? Tsai Ming-Liang’s focus on stillness allows for the response of its audience as a whole, good and bad, to stand out. For a work that can easily be seen as difficult to follow, it’s so easy to relax in the comfort of community, and engage beyond the screen just as the Japanese Tourist and Projectionist choose to do. In one shot, close to the end of the film, we must endure the sight of the theatre for the last time. This time, the lights are on, all seats are empty. As an audience, the tension of waiting for this silence to end was more than palpable – how could I . Like a mirror in a haunted house, we were looking into a parallel universe – one where we didn’t exist. I don’t know what to call it – other than a relief – to be able to see the shuffle of bodies, the noise of immediate response, after a film like Goodbye, Dragon Inn.

ScreenB14’s run of Community Cinema ended in Moseley at The Cuban Embassy. Despite working opposite the building – heading there multiple times every week – I still found a way to be late, ordering food next door, I realised my mistake. Shit. 
To my luck, Ben and Rupert – head and co-exhibitor of ScreenB14 respectively – were willing to put up with my cartoonish antics by delaying the screening for ten minutes. It may have pissed off the other audience members (who could read and interpret times with much more grace, I assume), but the community of ‘community cinema’ could never be a hive mind, could it? Perhaps Goodbye, Dragon Inn taught me that my role as a cinemagoer was to intentionally irritate – to provoke a conflict of viewership, for the purpose of a richer, more complex filmgoing experience; that, or I was being a nuisance. 

Stumbling into the Cuban Embassy’s upstairs room with oily hands and the smell of baba ganoush emanating from my bag, I was almost relieved of stress from the beauty of the room itself. Before entering, I was captivated by the light of the projector bouncing around the room. The monochrome, high detail of the screen adorned the venue with the look of greyish abandonment. The space felt antique in its silence, as if untouched for 60 years.

The transformation of The Cuban Embassy came both in part to the structural shift – the big fuck-off projector screen taking the place of where I’d last seen a flush band perform to a bustling crowd – but also The Big City’s softly impacting narrative. Adopting the subtle neo-realism of Bicycle Thieves, The Big City expands the genre by giving each member of its central family a valued amount of interior emotion and response, eschewing any reductions to ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The city of Kolkata torments them all, lending both freedoms and new stresses to each family member – from the stairs that father Priyogompal falls down to the crowd in revolt who attack husband Subrata (the crowd, too, given a voice of sympathy). While the unmistakable heart of both family and film, from cozy beginning to teary bittersweet ending, is Arati Mazumdar, we’re treated to enough scenes of each secondary character to develop their complex, systemically flawed, perspectives – pinching just as much salt onto their thoughts as the exterior troubles of Kolkata at large. 

The location beyond the venue played just as much an important part as the embassy room. Just off Alcester Road on St Mary’s Row – near-opposite a Wetherspoons – we were treated to the faintly glimmering lights of cars passing behind a window blind, and the occasional noise of car horns with drunk arguments. Midway through, one building’s alarms began whining, imperfectly harmonising with The Big City’s Kolkata as Arati and Subrata tensely contemplated their concerns with balancing work and life commitments. I’m a sucker for the sounds of life invading a screening, almost more than what I can find inside the screening rooms; to come into conflict with the world outside – to hear locals oblivious to the streets of Kolkata so close to them – makes it all the more special to be so tightly wrapped by those worlds.

While films might struggle more to intentionally capture their point in time, capturing space feels comparatively easy in comparison; it can feel like the natural goal of certain films to immerse us in cities like Bicycle Thieve’s Rome, Blow-Up’s London, Touki Bouki’s Dakar. They become like monuments to memories, paths taken again and again, to the point of becoming traditions, rites of passage. Space will always be a conduit for memory, of course – I don’t know if I could ever escape the idea of homes – and films can extend that feeling out to something much larger.

I’ve been thinking recently about the end of the world – especially the idea of it occurring while I’m watching a film with other people. I think I’d prefer it to happen in a venue like the Cuban Embassy, where the outside world still invades.

A part of community cinema I enjoy is that you can never fully escape into the world of a movie. Necessarily, they are hindered by the need for exhibitors – people with the urgency to decide the importance of these films, for a specific audience, at this specific present, for a specific city. While that can be ignored to an extent – it’d be a bit of a pisstake if we couldn’t help thinking of anything else but a film’s narrative – I find that seasoning of passion so much more expressive than just choosing something to watch.



The day after seeing The Big City, me and Charlotte – co-editor for Concrete – went to see Nationalité Immigré, screened by Radical Exhibition Collective. I’d seen the film earlier that year, at the Watershed Cinema in Bristol, with a rich introduction by Abiba Coulibaly.
Its translation to Birmingham gave so much more to me because of that urgency of the exhibitor. To see the shift in atmosphere for R.E.C.’s screening – a workshop involving the subversion of a passport into a personal archive, handmade zines on each seat detailing the contextual purpose of screening the film, the Old Print Works as a location rich with a variety of artists and simultaneous emptiness – helped define a lot of the feelings I’ve been engaging with in this article.

I’m of course biased, but Birmingham feels like a city that excels in the uniqueness and diversity of its community cinema. We’ve got cinemas, of course – we’ve got ways to tune into film and film alone – but the ways in which screenings mutate and shapeshift according to venue, collaborator and audience make for an ever-new experience. There’s hints of the striving of Funeral Parade in the ever-constant fluency of Brum’s pop-up exhibition – sometimes more than enough examples of the desolate seats that Goodbye, Dragon Inn depicts. Even the interior/exterior clash of The Big City feels relatable to the experience of walking back from The Mockingbird into the city centre, jumping back into a shifting, fluid city with a heavy heart.

I’m being a bit trite, but I do take pop-up exhibition as a lens with me into every avenue of the city. While not its namesake, I look partly at the name Concrete with that same lens – that the best of the city is a sprouting up through what exists, to find the community around. It was a delight to devote myself to these three screenings with that purpose – finding the roots of what I see as an essential part of Birmingham’s film culture, to appreciate where it grows to next even more.


ScreenB14’s next venture finds them at Pan-Pan for a live score of ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ and a screening of ‘Sisters With Transistors’. Find more information here.