On 24 November, City of Edinburgh Council announced it would contribute £60,000 towards the charity that aims to reopen Edinburgh Filmhouse.
Filmhouse, which was home to the Edinburgh International Film Festival, was closed permanently in October 2022 after its parent company, Centre of the Moving Image, went into administration.
The building was subsequently sold to Caledonian Heritable in April this year.
In late December 2022, four former Filmhouse employees founded ‘Filmhouse (Edinburgh) Limited’, a charity aiming to reopen the doors of Filmhouse.
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Caledonian Heritable has agreed a six month lease of the building with the charity which aims to raise £1.25m until February 2024 to open the cinema later that year.
The funds will be raised from several sources, including a Crowdfunding campaign called ‘Open the Doors!’, which has already raised £190,000 towards its target of £250,000.
Over the past months, Filmhouse (Edinburgh) Limited has also been working together with City of Edinburgh Council and Screen Scotland.
The latter awarded the charity £299,000 in early November, and now City of Edinburgh Council has announced its own contribution of £60,000.
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If the overall target can be met, the charity will enter a 21-year lease with Caledonian Heritable to independently run the cinema. The plan is to renew and open Filmhouse along with a café to provide financial sustainability.
The Filmhouse charity explained:
“The funds are needed for a full refurbishment of the cinemas and public areas, including the much-loved café-bar.”
Councillor Val Walker, Culture and Communities Convener, said:
“We’re delighted to see the progress of the fundraising campaign and to be in a position to contribute as a Council.
“We’re committed to having a home for cultural cinema in the heart of the city and for the wider sector going forward.
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“Edinburgh is rightly one of the great cultural cities of the world and cultural cinema is a key part of this landscape.”
The Directors of Filmhouse (Edinburgh) Limited stated:
“Filmhouse, as a cultural institution that celebrated the art of film alongside other artforms supported in Edinburgh, aims to re-open as soon as the total necessary funds have been raised.”
“We plan to provide the broad range of cultural cinema that the city is lacking just now, as well as to host the diverse group of specialist and community film festivals which have been missing their long standing home on Lothian Road.”
Image via Lara van Vorst.