Edinburgh's Filmhouse cinema one year on: 'We're very lucky to be here'

“When I started this job last February, we were in the middle of a commercial refurbishment of the building and constantly troubleshooting,” he said. “It was difficult to imagine one year on, because all of the focus was just on getting the doors open.”

Now, the much-loved independent cinema, which reopened last June after a two and a half-year closure, a near-£2 million refurbishment and an extraordinary grassroots campaign to save it from closing for good, is hosting a major celebration to mark 12 months since its reopening.

The cinema, on Edinburgh’s Lothian Road, closed in October 2022 when its parent company, Centre for the Moving Image (CMI), went into administration.

The venue was later saved after a campaign backed by celebrities including actors Brian Cox and Jack Lowden. A new charity created by a group of staff to try to bring the Filmhouse back to life secured £1.5m from the UK government’s Community Ownership Fund, which was created to help groups secure the future of assets at risk of being lost. Meanwhile, a crowdfunder raised more than £324,000 towards the costs.

Mr Simpson said: “We’ve carried on in that very much ‘in the moment’ spirit, so a lot of it has been dealing with what is right in front of us, but this is the moment we we finally get to step back and celebrate what we’ve done.”

He said the venue is planning a series of birthday events in June, including a showing of Cinema Paradiso, its opening film in June last year, which it now plans to screen on its birthday every year as the story which "embodies" the spirit of the Filmhouse.

“There will be cake, a lot of cake,” he said. “We’re going to be throwing a big birthday party with live music and celebrate with our friends and supporters that we’re here.

“We’re very much an organisation that is looking forward, but part of our story is that we weren’t here for a long time and it was much more likely that we wouldn’t be here, so we’re just bearing in mind that we’re very lucky to be doing what we’re doing in Edinburgh and enjoy it.”

He described Giuseppe Tornatore’s Italian-French drama Cinema Paradiso, a classic 1980s hit about a young boy’s love for cinema, as a “touchstone film”.

“It says so much about what we do and why we love what we do and that is the perfect film to celebrate Filmhouse with the audience,” he said.

The cinema has surpassed expectations for audience numbers in its first year, welcoming 125,000 people through its doors - with visitors during the winter months exceeding pre-closure levels.

Author Ian Rankin is to appear among a series of Q&A events to be held at the Filmhouse as part of the birthday celebrations.

Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 2001 A Space Odyssey will screen from 5 June in 70mm film alongside new cinematic visions screening in June including new feature The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford, which stars Peter Mullan.

Meanwhile, on 3 July, Filmhouse is to present a special screening of Nic Roeg’s film Don’t Look Now followed by novelist Mr Rankin in conversation with writer Justin John Doherty to discuss Mr Doherty’s new book, described as a “literary love letter” to the film.

Projection box tours will run through the month, while films selected by Filmhouse staff will also play a major part in the celebrations as well as titles chosen from the We’ve Got a Cinema and We’re Not Afraid to Use It strand, which sees Filmhouse members vote on classic films that they are most excited to see on the big screen.

“We just want to throw the doors open to the city, whether that be the people who regularly come, or to tell people who haven’t visited the Filmhouse yet that we’re here and what we do,” said Mr Simpson, who says the venue wants to bring major film programmes and retrospectives to the venue, as well as more community engagement initiatives in the coming months.

He described the Filmhouse as, financially, “more stable than it has been for years”. It relies on public funding - it receives support from Screen Scotland, Creative Scotland and the City of Edinburgh Council - but over 80 per cent of the money it survives on is self-generated through ticket and bar sales and donations.

“We’ve had a really successful first year with an extraordinary number of audience members compared to what we planned and budgeted for,” he said. “We know we benefited from a huge amount of fanfare and publicity when we reopened, which undoubtedly gave us a boost, but we’ve just got to try to keep that up.”

While the three main screens opened a year ago, it was a few weeks later when the “bijou” Screen Four was launched with 24 seats. It has been a huge success.

“We speculate it might be the most sold-out cinema screen in the UK at this point, because it’s a lovely boutique 24 seat screen, but it’s been enormously popular, it’s almost always full,” he said.

“We’re using it for a lot of left-field more weird programming, stuff we want to experiment with, but we don’t know how large an audience it has, so we can throw it at the wall and see if it sticks.”

The organisation is still fundraising for around £100,000 to £200,000 to finish some behind-the-scenes upgrades such as air conditioning in Screen One, which it plans to install this summer.

He said: “There’s a lot of money we want to invest that secures the future of the future of the organisation,” Mr Simpson said. And we’re going out to try and find the money to support that work.”