A theatre
built for the second floor

The film business has always been two businesses pretending to be one. The business of making films, which is small and messy and personal, and the business of distributing them, which is enormous and impersonal and cares only about the size of the room.

For a long time those two businesses tolerated each other because they had to. The big rooms paid for the small messes. But somewhere in the last decade the rooms got so big that the messes started getting changed to fit them. The films got broader. The credit rolls got shorter. The risks got smaller.

We started Cinema because we missed the messes.

We don't think every film should be made for a hundred million people. We think most films should be made for a few thousand, and that those few thousand should know each other a little, and that the person who made the film should be able to look out from the stage and recognize the people in the seats. That used to be possible. We're trying to make it possible again.

So we built three things into one site. A theatre, where you can watch good films in a room with other people who chose to be there. A round, where you can put a small amount of money behind a film you believe in and own a share of what it earns. And a studio, where filmmakers can do both — release their work and raise the money for what comes next — without surrendering the credit roll.

None of this is original. The repertory theatres did the first part. The community ownership movement did the second. The independents have been quietly doing the third for a hundred years. We just put them under one marquee and pointed the tools at the people who actually make the work.

If you stay with us, you'll see films you would not have seen anywhere else, by people who would not have been able to make them anywhere else, financed by audiences who otherwise would have been spectators. That is the whole pitch. There is nothing more behind the curtain.

We hope you'll come in.