Time for the BIG screen.
After pop-up restaurants and stores, we now have The Nomad,the UK’s first “roaming pop-up cinema.”
It uses inflatable screens of up to 60 square metres, shows up at unusual places across England and encourages you to watch their films in costume.
It’s outdoors and this is Britain, so if it rains, tough luck, the show will go on. They encourage patrons to dress warmly and to bring a picnic, a flashlight, an umbrella, a blanket and a sense of humour.
Where will they be located? In some pretty crazy places. Some venues are site-specific so The Fight Club will be shown in an East End boxing ring, and The Adventures of Priscilla will be shown in a circus club. Others will take place in castles, ballrooms and churches as well as Holland Park and Dulwich Park.
It’s also charitable. They support The Sustainability Institute in rural Stellenbosch, South Africa. It is a sustainable living and learning centre that improves the quality of life for families in the village. They show short films before the main feature to educate people about it.
Then there’s Portavillion, the floating cinema that will drift down the canals of the east end of London this summer, showing films on the walls of the waterways in the vicinity of the 2012 Olympics.
And The Vintage Mobile Cinema; a renovated bus built in the ’60’s to tour the country, promoting modern production techniques to British industry. Now it seats 22 and comes to neighbourhoods and museums, showing old and new art films.
One can’t mention portable cinema without noting Sol Cinema, the world’s smallest solar cinema. Using a 120W solar panel to collect energy, the former 1960’s trailer has been turned into a lavish, and adorable, mini film house. It was reconstructed from a 1972 Euro-Camper, and much of the interior was made from re cycled materials. They use an LED projector and 4 lithium batteries to store the sun’s energy to power the cinema throughout the day and evening.
