As Hot Docs recalibrated its operations, the Toronto Outdoor Picture Show made an urgent call for more public funding, and the Revue Cinema got embroiled in tense lease negotiations, 2024 proved to be a momentous year in the long, storied history of Toronto film exhibition. One can trace these problems back to the pandemic, but in a sense that experience exposed many underlying issues that had been simmering for some time.

On March 14, 2020, I stood on stage at the Revue Cinema, introducing a screening of The Exorcist. I was also announcing the cinema’s temporary closure due to COVID-19. That same day, other film organizations like TIFF and Hot Docs made similar announcements ahead of the first government-mandated shutdown on March 16. I’d been the program- ming director at the Revue, Toronto’s oldest operating cinema, for five years. William Friedkin’s horror film was the last title I introduced there, because by the time the cinema re- opened in late 2021, I had moved on to a new job with a much bigger organization, the CBC.

The human factor

I’m not the only one who made a career change. The pandemic exposed the unsustainability of being an arts worker in the film world. The hours. The pressure from non-profit board directors. The non-stop stress of finding funding. And all of a sudden, due to COVID-19, we were faced with a genuine existential crisis. Many colleagues also moved on.

Richelle Charkot is now the distribution manager at Game Theory Films, the distributor behind festival favourites like Humanist Vampire Seeking Consensual Suicidal Person. From 2016 to 2020, Charkot was the programming director at The Royal Theatre on College Street. The venerable theatre, which opened in 1939 and once operated as an Italian movie house, was by 2020 known as the home for monthly screening series like Neon Dreams, Ladies of Burlesque, Royal Stompbox and Charkot’s own Retropath. Charkot left the job at the onset of the pandemic, shortly before the Royal’s owners announced it would not reopen as a regular movie theatre (many of these series moved to other theatres).

The Royal then leased its vast lobby to Bar Volo’s Bottega, a bottle shop. Given the Revue’s rather modest lobby space, I was always envious of the Royal’s lobby, with its generous square footage for pre-show events. Charkot decided to visit Bottega as a healing experience. “This was a space I had spent so much time in. For it to be completely different, to have someone behind the counter look at me like a complete stranger — I never went back. Maybe it’s a product of living in a city like Toronto where these institutions are constantly changing. There’s a dull heartache about living here sometimes.”

Charkot has been working at Game Theory since 2021. “I enjoy being on the creative side of distribution now. We read a lot of scripts and I get to offer notes and feedback to filmmakers.” There’s also less stress. “It’s really hard to keep an independent business running in Toronto, to come up with 30 grand in ticket sales every month.”

The funding gap

“Once the pandemic started, it was very clear that our sector was going to be in a lot of trouble,” says Emily Reid, executive director and founder of the Toronto Outdoor Picture Show, which has programmed free public summer screenings in various city parks since 2012. “We’re a sector that is routinely undervalued, underfunded, and there’s always an attitude that people will work for passion. And some organizations took advantage of that. Being chronically underfunded has led to these problems.” Earlier this summer Reid sounded the alarm bells that the future of the popular outdoor festival was in doubt because of a $70,000 shortfall of its annual $570,000 operating budget.

“What the sector needs is less precarious funding. It needs stable funding that organizations can count on year over year, so that they don’t have to spend nearly as much of their time trying to raise money through little piecemeal grants.” More importantly, adds Reid, arts organizations need operating funding, not project-based grants, as has long been the norm. “The grants that are out there are very specific about the expenses they will fund, and those requirements are increasing. None of the granting bodies want to pay for the wheels to turn.”

Keeping the projectors rolling has been a challenge for many independent cinemas throughout Canada. The Network of Independent Cinema Exhibitors, founded at the onset of the pandemic, is the brainchild of independent-cinema advocate Sonya William. “During the shut-downs, cinema operators had a bit more time to work together, and we learned of our common struggles.” The nationwide organization now consists of 350 organizations, which include hard-top cinemas, drive-ins, art galleries, and museums.

The flickering light

“One of the positive trends coming out of the pandemic is that audiences developed a deeper appreciation of the indie cinema’s importance. There has been a major repertory revival,” notes William. In 2019, my last full year booking films at the Revue, Sony Pictures’ repertory division — which handles older titles from the Sony and Columbia vaults — booked 8,500 titles to North American theatres. “By April, 2024, they were al- ready at 10,000,” notes William.

That trend is visible on Toronto’s streetscapes. While I was used to busy weekends and sell-out shows amidst the flurry of second-run Hollywood fare and community rentals at the Revue, the programming of my successor, Serena Whitney, has shifted to more repertory events. I live near the cinema, and I often do a double-take as I walk by on a Monday night and see a crowd lining up around the block for a film I would have never taken a risk on back in 2017. It’s a genuinely beautiful thing to see.

The Paradise Theatre on Bloor Street, which opened four months before the pandemic, has also found its footing in this new marketplace. Weird Alice, who programs the Evil Women, Drag Me To the Movies, and Sleaze Factory series (the latter paying homage to the Paradise’s past as an adult cinema), recently curated a John Waters retrospective. “We screened John’s filmography and I brought him to town. He did a live commentary over a screen- ing of Pecker,” says Weird Alice. That screening, and most of the retrospective, was sold out.

“To my mind there’s better stuff screening in the city, now more than ever,” says freelance film critic and journalist Corey Atad, noting a younger audience experiencing 35mm projections for the first time, or new trends in how people are engaging with film. Letterboxd, the cinephile’s favourite social-media app, is exposing moviegoers to new things. “Something will screen in New York City, a hundred people log it, and the reaction in Toronto is: I want to see that movie.” Andy Willick, who owns the Fox Theatre in Toronto’s east end, says he’s used Letterboxd to gauge the level of interest when booking revival and repertory films.

While the indie cinemas in the city are thriving, so too are the mi- cro-cinemas — the underdogs of the city’s moviegoing scene, nestled in the back rooms of video rental stores, bars, and people’s very own living rooms.

Ryan Krahn launched the New Circle of Cinema in 2022, a collective organizing backyard projections throughout the summer, and bar screenings during the less summery months. Krahn began the series as a means of breaking away from the streaming parties people were hosting during the lockdown days, calling it the Streamless Summer Programme. ”The rep houses and institutions like TIFF are limited in a way that I’m not,” notes Krahn, on a micro-cinema’s nimbleness. “The stakes are also lower,” he adds. “If nobody shows up, it’s me and a couple friends.” Despite that, he counted nearly 60 heads in his backyard for a Claire Denis screening earlier this summer.

It took a while to feel comfortable in a cinema after leaving the Revue. When you’re running an indie cinema, you’re always waiting for something to go wrong — the debit machine goes down, film encryption keys haven’t unlocked, the basement is flooding, FedEx can’t find your 35mm print, a distributor pulls a film from your calendar, someone left a Loblaws BBQ chicken carcass under a seat. There’s always something. And despite the excitement and challenges of having returned to journalism, those first two years not booking films every Monday were strange. Seeing a film at the Revue was alienating. The instinct to adjust the curtain by the screen or close the lobby door just as the trailers started was still there. As Charkot put it when we talked: “There’s a grieving process.”

But time has fixed that. Sitting in the audience now brings a smile to my face, the same way it did when the Revue reopened as a not-for-profit in 2007. And as I look around, what’s clear to me is that the city’s cinema workers have found ways to adapt, to find new audiences, to advocate, to organize, and, despite ongoing challenges — erratic government funding, Cineplex’s control of the marketplace, misguided landlords — to maintain a thriving sense of optimism in the future of cinema as a communal experience.

This article was originally published by Spacing Magazine, issue 68, 2024.