ARTS
Cinematic Universe
Darrow Montgomery
Avalon Theatre, Suns Cinema, and AFI Silver are brimming with films you can stream from home. They could use your support.
By Ella Feldman @EllaMFeld It took about a day for Avalon Theatre’s director of programming Andrew Mencher to begin transforming the Chevy Chase independent art house cinema on Connecticut Avenue NW into a virtual theater. On Friday, March 13, the Avalon began showing the indie comedy Saint Frances. The
next day, Mencher and his team decided to close the theater in light of the novel coronavirus pandemic, and he was immediately on the phone with a member of the distribution company—the people in charge of releasing and marketing a film—for Saint Frances. By the following Tuesday, they had figured out a way to offer the film virtually. “I didn’t want to lose the opportunity of having just opened up a terrific little independent
16 august 14, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com
film, and I understood that we could be able to find a way to do this, to really rescue that film,” Mencher says. “I was definitely looking more at that one film in particular initially.” But Mencher’s thinking changed rapidly, as it became clearer minute by minute that movie theaters (which, of course, have built their entire business model around packing dozens of strangers into an indoor space, a nightmare by today’s public health standards) might be
closed for a very long time. He wasn’t alone. Throughout that week, film distributors and independent theaters across the country began figuring out how to bring their movies into people’s living rooms. Their solution: En masse, small movie theaters have transformed their websites into virtual cinemas, where viewers can browse through a list of movies being shown, choose a film, then click a link. That link will take them to an external streaming site like Vimeo or Eventive, where they can pay $12 or so directly to the film’s distributor and access the movie for a number of days. The move to streaming films in this way has presented a mixed bag of advantages and challenges to independent theaters in the District, such as the Avalon, Mount Pleasant’s quaint and beloved Suns Cinema, which is in a rowhouse and doubles as a bar, and the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring. Virtual cinemas allow theaters to screen more films at once, keep them showing for a longer time, and bring them to audiences who might not be able to make it to their physical establishments. But the pool of films programmers can choose from has changed considerably, making it harder for them to uphold their ethos in their selections. And financially, the switch has changed their business models entirely, and made them a lot less money. David Cabrera co-founded Suns Cinema with business partner Ryan Hunter Mitchell in 2016, housing it in a Mount Pleasant Street NW property that used to be a cellphone store. In the four years since, the art house theater has become a neighborhood favorite for grabbing a drink and watching its eclectic lineup of films, which are organized into monthly themes such as “Outrageous and Unacceptable”—that lineup included the Kenyan drama Rafiki and cult favorite Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. The space at Suns is small, and feels more like a living room than a traditional theater. “Our business model was packing people into a really small room, and that was very novel,” says Cabrera, who serves as program director. “It’s terrifying now.” Since going virtual, the pool of movies Cabrera can choose from to put together Suns’ lineup has changed entirely, and shrunken greatly. Like almost everyone else in the industry, he’s limited to the films that distribution companies themselves choose to stream, rather than being able to curate a unique program and secure screening rights independently. “We prided ourselves on doing these themed months, where we would try to run the gamut very broadly of what we were showing— from old stuff to new stuff, weird stuff, stuff everyone knows,” Cabrera says. “Right now, we get to pick and choose from what’s available to us and to everyone, which is not quite the same as the broad spectrum of cinema that we were allowed to put out before.” Some of what makes Suns unique has been lost with those limits, Cabrera says, but the new system has also allowed them to become
