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Column: Getting ready to celebrate the Indie’s 10th birthday

Beth Mairs, the founder and lead programmer of the Sudbury Independent Cinema Co-op, shares some of the history of the Northeast’s only arthouse theatre as its 10th year dawns
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In January, to celebrate Sudbury Indie Cinema’s decade-in-the-making, we’re running a 2013 Retrospective each Saturday night at 7 p.m., featuring four films selected by me and local film-lovers Julie Beare, Nicholas Ntaganda and Jennifer Trainor, who were invited as guest programmers. 

Here’s what we’re showing as part of that special presentation:

  • Jan. 7: The Hunt – Set in a small Danish village around Christmas, a man (Mads Mikkelsen) becomes the target of mass hysteria after being wrongly accused of sexually abusing a child in his kindergarten class. 
  • Jan. 14: Frances Ha – Frances (Greta Gerwig) goes from apartment to apartment in Brooklyn as she looks for a job and a stable partner.
  • Jan. 21: Stories We Tell – Through a series of revealing interviews, filmmaker Sarah Polley investigates the truth about her family history.
  • Jan. 28: Drug War – After he's taken into custody, a drug lord (Louis Koo) must help the police bust his former associates or else face the death penalty.

What’s so important about 2013 for the Indie Cinema? Well, it was back in the late summer of that year that the much-beloved Rainbow Cinemas announced they’d be pulling out of Sudbury because of the requirement for theatres to digitize fully after studios ended a transition period where they still made physical prints.  

Converting an existing cinema from 35mm reels to digital projectors was estimated to cost close to $250,000 per screen, and with six screens to convert, the expense didn’t make economic sense at the time. 

An important part of the downtown cultural eco-system, Rainbow Cinemas had generated a lot of goodwill in Sudbury over the years.  It was a filmmaker friendly venue for private screenings and community events that offered deeply discounted ticket prices, ran art films on a regular basis and had friendly, accommodating staff. 

To lose this theatre, the only one remaining downtown, was very concerning to the community, prompting a broad coalition of citizens to explore alternate solutions. 

The idea of a not-for-profit co-operative cinema gained momentum and negotiations to sign a lease with the Rainbow Centre mall (now known as Elm Place) and to acquire the Rainbow Cinema assets was underway. 

That’s how the idea for Sudbury Indie Cinema Co-op began. The path forward, however, had many unanticipated twists and turns over the next five years. Early in 2014, the lease proposal to mall management stalled so we decided to look elsewhere.

Scouting empty but interesting spaces downtown eventually led us to the gymnasium at Louis De Gonzague School at 162 Mackenzie St. We found a willing and eager landlord in Autumnwood Mature Lifestyles, which operates Red Oak Villas next door. 

Having firmly secured a future venue, we could move forward with a feasibility study and renovation plans to convert this space to a state-of-the-art, fully digital, single-screen cinema. 

In the meantime, we continued running regular film events, which we’d started in 2013 with two weekend film festivals: The Female Eye-Sudbury and Best of Hot Docs-Sudbury. 

As time went on, Sudbury Indie Cinema organized larger annual events and launched some monthly film series. We programmed pop-up style, renting spaces with screens as diverse as Open Studio on Cedar, the basement of the main branch of the Greater Sudbury Public Library, Sudbury Secondary School, Imagine Cinemas, St. Andrew’s United Church, the McEwen School of Architecture, and even the Ernie Checkeris Theatre at Thorneloe University. 

Back in 2013, we looked with envy at the releases of arthouse titles in Toronto and had a hunch there would be a market for a year-round independent cinema in Sudbury. 

Every other city across Canada that supported a major film festival also had an arthouse movie theatre as part of their year-round media arts landscape. Sudburians had acquired a sophisticated palate for cinema, thanks largely to the annual Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival, yet the rest of the year was a wasteland for cinephiles.

From its very humble beginnings, the Indie now runs 900 screenings per year at its permanent location on Mackenzie Street, which opened in February 2019. 

If a top film is opening at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Light Box or The Film Forum in New York, it’s probably also opening in Sudbury at The Indie. 

Thanks to 1,300 lifetime co-op members and broader public support, this seed of a dream 10 years back is now a reality. With vision and perseverance, we made it happen, Sudbury. It’s time to celebrate!

Beth Mairs is the founder, lead programmer and chief bottle washer of the Sudbury Independent Cinema Co-op, northeastern Ontario’s first not-for-profit independent cinema. See what’s playing at the Indie by clicking here.


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