Saying it’s struggling financially, Sudbury Indie Cinema has applied to the Greater Sudbury Development Corporation for a $200,000 bridging grant over three years.
Beth Mairs, lead programmer and former executive director for the Sudbury Independent Cinema Co-op, said between chronic underfunding of the arts sector, rising costs and the impact of COVID-19, “it’s sort of like a perfect storm.”
“We want to stay open,” she said, adding that she has her “fingers crossed” for GSDC to make a “positive decision” on the issue when they next meet on Dec. 9.
She said she laid out the current situation to the Sudbury Indie Cinema’s membership Nov. 20 during the AGM. “The board and myself have been quietly trying to resolve this issue as we could with funding and various other things,” Mairs said.
The roots of Sudbury Indie Cinema actually go back a decade, when the former Rainbow Cinemas in the downtown mall shut down, and a group of Sudburians decided to look into creating an arthouse cinema there.
While that plan eventually fell through, the cinema finally opened in a permanent space in the former École Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague in 2019.
Renovations to the space cost $650,000, and while partly funded by the owners of the venue, government grants and fundraising also went toward the total.
The cinema's 2019 opening, of course, was the year before the pandemic hit, an unfortunate occurrence, given Sudbury Indie Cinema was only still getting on its feet in the new location.
The cinema was closed for about five months in both 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, and when they were open, there were capacity restrictions, and audiences were even slow to come back in 2022.
Mairs said the cinema has been “smashing it” in 2023 between rentals, membership and ticket sales, although that’s based on the standards of an art house cinema, not a mainstream cinema showing blockbuster films.
But fixed costs are up in some cases by 30 per cent, and pandemic government supports have dried up at this point. “There is definitely a shortfall,” she said.
While Sudbury Indie Cinema does receive yearly arts and culture grants from the City of Greater Sudbury, Mairs said the amount they receive is small compared to other groups that receive operational funding
In a column for Sudbury.com this week, Mairs explains how the city’s arts funding works, and points out the amount in that envelope has been unchanged since 2016 and ignores the impact COVID-19 had on local arts organizations.
One way the city funds arts organizations is through operative funding. Groups can apply to receive a significant amount of funding in order to keep the doors open and the lights on. But as Mairs points out, the arts funding envelope has been unchanged for almost eight years, so each time a new organization is granted operative funding, less funding is available for other artists and groups, which leaves groups like the Indie competing for the limited amount of leftover funding.
The Art Gallery of Sudbury, for example, has its own funding line in the city budget, representing 23 per cent of its operating expenses, she said.
City support for the cinema currently covers about five per cent of its costs. She said there are some organizations in the city that don’t have a brick-and-mortar location they’re trying to keep open who receive more.
“My point has been that the city needs a more comprehensive framework where they're going to consider like organizations in a like manner,” Mairs said.
Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s assistant editor. She also covers education and the arts scene.
