In June 2025, a trio of practitioner/academics organised a radical research retreat in a rural, semi-intentional community in the North Pennines, to bring together people and projects that have long been experimenting with and researching alternative film exhibition practice in the UK. Christo Wallers (Good Cave Projects, Star and Shadow Cinema, Teesside University), Rachel Johnson (Director of World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, University of Leeds, Leeds Cineforum) and Sarah Feinstein (University of Leeds) wanted to create a different type of setting for asking questions and deliberating over concepts, outside and free from the weight, formality and denaturalised ambience of the institution. We needed a space to try out embodied, participatory research methods: walking research, dining as convivial and affective research, and narrative inquiry.
We principally wanted to do four things. We wanted to discuss our practice and research with like-minded or similarly experienced practitioners, and so we invited people we knew and respected and had already some relationship with: Mosa Mpetha (Cinema Africa!, Black Cinema Project, Scalarama Leeds), Helen De Witt (Highbury Film Project and ex Head of Cinemas at BFI), Michael Pierce and Monika Rodriguez (Cinema Nation, Liverpool), María Vélez-Serna (University of Stirling and author of Ephemeral Cinema Spaces), Abiba Choulibaly (Brixton Community Cinema, Atlas Cinema) and Diwas Dewan, Peter Dodd and David Hopkinson (Cube Cinema, Bristol). We wanted to collaboratively form questions about ‘cinema-making’ - could this term begin to account for the ways and means that cinephiles, film programmers, curators and cinema activists create relational environments for sharing in cinema. We also wanted to share our commonalities and research interests around exhibition, cinephilia, equitable film cultures, and arts management and policy and to explore the potentialities of building, and funding, a UK network. Lastly, we wanted to create a mutually-caring space where bonds could form between us as a group in an organic way, and that this could provide respite for us all - give us time to breathe.
Together, we discussed what it might mean to identify with a term like ‘maker’ in times of precarity and neoliberal appropriation, as well as what we might, collectively, be making (cinema spaces? social practices? alternative infrastructures of care?). Rather than settling on a final definition of cinema-making, our conversations attuned us to the exceptional fluidity of the term - a necessary fluidity to hold the diversity of practices and ways of thinking-feeling-doing that they are both informed by and inspire.
Good Cave Projects is developing a mode of integrated practice - connecting the making and showing of films with education in both practical technique and media literacy/history, and also academic research. Currently, GCP is building towards a significant research bid around the concept of cinema-making with film scholar Rachel Johnson and cultural industries scholar Sarah Feinstein at Leeds university on a Radical Research Retreat. This was supported by the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research institute (LAHRI)
