Atlas Cinema and the Moving Image as an Experiment in Community Building
Exiting the 45 bus, the hot, misty air of London summer presses against our skin as we speed-walk past the gates of a community garden to Atlas Cinema’s tarpaulin covered theatre situated in a disused railway arch in Loughborough Junction. I am out of breath when we reach Bayryam Bayryamali and Jelena Viskovic of Old Mountain Assembly, tonight’s cinema hosts, who inform us that since people are running late, the film will start at 7.30pm not the originally scheduled 7pm. Grab a drink and come back, they tell us. We oblige, happy to slow down.
When we return, they are still setting up inside the arch, but outside the blue structure a small crowd has gathered on the picnic benches, chatting leisurely in the hot summer evening. The tarpaulin and other material to build Atlas Cinema has been recycled from their sister project Views on the Atlantic at the London Festival of Architecture in 2023. Both structures are made by BAFALW, a public-facing design collective which forms half of Atlas Cinema alongside Brixton Community Cinema’s Abiba Coulibaly. Together they operate with the objective of using moving images as a tool for collective reflection about the world around us. The semi-permanent space of Atlas Cinema offers the potential for place-making, fostering a more long-term engagement with community. With people returning weekly for screenings, emerging cine-collectives can build an audience over an extended season rather than precariously hopping between institutions.
Stepping behind the tarpaulin we are enveloped by intimate darkness as the last rays of day are removed. We take our seats amongst the bean bags and wooden pallets strewn about inside, settling with our bodies closely pressed together. Jelena and Bayryam introduce the writer Art Haxhijakupi who has co-curated tonight’s screening of Piro Rexhepi and Ajkuna Ttafa’s documentary The Trilogy: Skopje-Sarajevo-Salonika (2018). We are also informed that homemade Syrian food and a playlist, all prepared by the chef Faraj Alnasser, will accompany an informal discussion afterwards.
Such multifaceted activity is characteristic of the heterogeneous film programming at Atlas Cinema, which moves fluidly between histories, geographies, cultures, and practices. The emphasis on collectivity and participation reflects Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s seminal text “Toward a Third Cinema.” The essay opens with the epigram “we must discuss, we must invent…” by the Martinique psychologist Frantz Fanon as a call to action (Solanas and Getino, 1). Living under the US-supported military dictatorship in Argentina in the 1970s, Solanas, Getino, and their anti-imperialist film movement Grupo Cine Liberación, saw cinema as a tool to resist the neo-colonial system and evade censorship. Through the image of the screen and the gathering of the audience, Solanas and Getino believed that cinema could empower us to imagine otherwise. 50 years later, their text keeps guiding explorations of cinema as a space of political activity which can reinvent the distribution of power by challenging commercial exploitation and prioritizing artists and community-led projects over large institutions. Despite winning the 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, No Other Land (2024), which depicts the relentless struggle by Palestinians against Israeli settlers in the West Bank, remains self-distributed in the US (Lee). Access to the film has been limited to independent theaters and online. Initiatives like Atlas Cinema provide a space to showcase films like No Other Land that are overlooked or rejected by major distributors, making them hard to access through streaming services and high-street cinemas.
As one of several film clubs operating in the space, Old Mountain Assembly explores counter-cultures in the Balkan region and its diasporas through relaxed screenings involving audience discussion. Rexhepi and Ttafa’s film examines the simultaneous production of space and erasure of racialized bodies and Islam in the post-Ottoman cities of Skopje, Sarajevo, and Salonika, around which the narratives of the work’s three chapters are structured. Over shots of modernist architecture, a disembodied voice recounts memories hidden in the landscape, from the mobilization of decolonial Islam in non-aligned Yugoslavia, to the displacement and death inflicted on queer muslims, bodies deemed ‘other,’ amid intensified national boundaries. Between each chapter, Haxhijakupi provides a reading on his own experiences of home, migration, and memory in relation to Kosovo, which he fled as a child in the 90s during the Kosovo War. Haxhijakupi’s voice interrupts the flatness of the screen, breaking the fourth wall to give these stories physical form and forcing the audience to confront the projected narratives as real, lived experiences.
Moreover, the collapse of screen-time and real-time echoes Foucault’s notion of cinema as a heterotopia, a place of otherness that juxtaposes several spaces in one, allowing a communal gathering where diverse groups can thrive and share their experiences (Foucault, 25). Writing on the contemporary legacy of Third Cinema, Teshome Gabriel argues that the expanded availability of multiple cultures, media, and histories made possible by technological reproduction, means there are now numerous Third Cinemas rather than “a” Third Cinema (Gabriel). Such heterogeneity is present in the programming at Atlas Cinema where you might see Julia Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) in the afternoon, a documentary on the Palestinian Film Unit in the evening, and a drama by Vietnamese film-maker Tran Anh Hung the next day.
Despite the large diaspora of Kosovo Albanians in London, Old Mountain Assembly is one of few cultural initiatives in the city to regularly screen films from this region. At Atlas Cinema, film clubs of cinema sometimes deemed “periphery”, falling into the undefined and othering umbrella term “world cinema” because of their historic exclusion from the Western male canon, can take center space. The screenings are often coupled with fundraisers and activities like DJ sets, performances, discussions, and food. Waywaad Collective’s viewing of Black Orpheus (1959), was accompanied by a karaoke session while Cinema Palestine end their programs with talk over tea and sweets, forging collectivity through food. A double feature of the seminal documentary Paris is Burning (1990) and Midnight Rising (2024), a contemporary portrayal of London’s East and South East Asian clubbing community, by the collective Are We There Yet, closed with dancing. With the light of the cinema screen replaced by the luminescence of club lights, the collectivity formed in front of the image extended into the affinity of the queer dance floor.
Cinema, as a time-based medium, forms collective memory through the shared investment of time, as we not only commit to the film, but to spend time together. Writing on Esther Kinsky’s book, Seeing Further (2024), Saffron Maeve describes the cinema as “both a tactile and poetic site, like an oil rig or an airport gate, one which cannot fully exist without an accumulation of gazes,” dependent on its audience’s presence to be functional (Maeve). Yet, following the decline of cinema going post-pandemic and the rise of streaming sites, cinemas, like the films they show, have too felt fleeting, as visible in Kinsky’s failed attempt to revive a disused cinema on the Hungarian-Romanian border. With rising living costs, cinema increasingly becomes a luxury (Philips). As audiences dwindle, the cinema as a space of collective memory formation risks becoming a memory in itself. Just a few streets from Atlas Cinema is The Ritzy, one of London’s oldest cinemas, where a ticket to Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 (2025) on a Saturday evening (at the time of writing in March 2025) costs £15.80. In comparison, Atlas Cinema’s pay-what-you-can structure, where the ticket income goes back into covering distribution costs and upkeep of the space, resists the increased inaccessibility of commercial film culture. By reinserting moving images into a social space grounded in community rather than financial profit, they carve out a cinema with the potential for solidarity.
When the lights turn on the room fills again, now with the sound of music, excited chatter, and the soft crunch of breaking bread. Emphasizing the political capacity of cinema as a collective experience, Solanas and Getino write that a “cinema of the masses…provokes with each showing…a revolutionary military incursion, a liberated space, a decolonized territory (Solanas and Getino, 8).” Here, film is not just a projected image but a lived experience, shaped by the bodies present and the conversations it sparks beyond the screen. It is about cinema as a tool for community building which extends past the time-based duration of the moving image to reimagine the relationships we have to others and the world outside it. It is, as Abiba Coulibaly reflects, about “conjuring beginnings with no ends (Coulibaly, 25).”
Bibliography
Coulibaly, Abiba . Kinopolitics. New York, NY: Montez Press, 2024.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27.
Gabriel, Teshome. “Third Cinema Updated: Exploration of Nomadic Aesthetics and Narrative Communities.” www.teshomegabriel.net. Accessed March 24, 2025. https://www.teshomegabriel.net/third-cinema-updated/.
Lee, Benjamin. “No Other Land Directors Criticise US as They Accept Documentary Oscar: ‘US Foreign Policy Is Helping Block the Path’ to Peace.” The Guardian, March 3, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/mar/03/no-other-land-wins-best-documentary-feature-oscar.
Maeve, Saffron. “Picture House: On Esther Kinsky’s ‘Seeing Further.’” Cleveland Review of Books, November 12, 2024. https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/estherkinsky-seeingfurther
Phillips, Scott. “Is the Death of Movie Theaters upon Us?” Forbes, June 14, 2024. https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottphillips/2024/06/14/is-the-death-of-movie-theaters-upon-us/.
Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. “Toward a Third Cinema.” Cinéaste 4, no. 3 (1970): 1–10. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41685716.
Photo source for thumbnail photo, Atlas Cinema
