Edinburgh's Filmhouse cinema: Campaigners call for accountability and transparency over future

Protest outside boarded-up, much-loved Edinburgh venue

The future of Edinburgh’s Filmhouse cinema must be decided with accountability and transparency, campaigners have demanded.

Speakers at a weekend protest outside the boarded-up building in Lothian Road called for its cultural role to be preserved rather than it being handed over to commercial use and urged the Scottish Government to take a stance on its future. The art house cinema closed in October last year when the charity which ran it, the Centre for the Moving Image, went into administration. The administrators are rumoured to be close to a deal with a hospitality operator to take over the premises.

One film-maker told the crowd: “This building has been my life for decades, this luminous place, this place of discovery. I didn’t have the confidence to be a film-maker except because of this place.” He said he had gone from “shock to anger” after hearing it was closing.

Protesters gathered outside the boarded-up cinema on Sunday to call for the Filmhouse to be saved and not sold for a pub. Picture: Annabelle Gauntlett.

And he called for transparency over its future. “This is not just a private space, this is a semi-public asset, semi-funded by us, the people of this country and this city. That means the decision about its future cannot only be made at a private, behind-the-scenes place. There has to be accountability and there has to be transparency.”

He noted substantial public sector bids had been made for the building. “The Cabinet Secretary for Culture and other senior people in our society need to take a view on this. If we have cultural bids as well as purely commercial bids and the difference is not all that big, we are not Las Vegas, we are not Singapore. In this country and this city we have cultural policies and principles and targets and strategies, and so whatever is decided here has to be filtered and refracted through those.”

Others spoke of how much the building meant to them. One woman said: “It’s really moving to see so many people here. I have been living in Scotland for eight years. The Filmhouse is the first ever cultural organisation I visited in the country. At that time I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t have a community.”

And another film-maker said it could become a place for ideas and debate as well as film. He said: “When I was here in the last few months, going to this wonderful place, this place of dreams, which we all need, it was nearly always empty and it was people of my age and older. So it would be wonderful to hear from some of the young people how this place could be protected for the future. I think perhaps the saving of this building also goes with the ideas of how we can make it a place where people want to come again.

Speakers at the protest called for accountability and transparency over decisions on the building's future. Picture: Annabelle Gauntlett.

"This beautiful place in the middle of this wonderful city, once called the Athens of the North, has been reduced to administrators offering this as first choice to that bar whose spokesperson said her dream for this place was to turn it into a speakeasy, to turn it into a themed bar where there would be memorabilia. Is that what has happened to our capital city? What a disgrace. What philistines. This is what happens when we leave our culture to the bean counters.”

He said he hoped the building could in future become “not just a place of culture and film but also a place of debate about how we live” with debates once a month, bringing in academics, rappers, musicians and dancers so the place was “buzzing”.

Signature Pub Group, which runs several venues in the Capital, recently pulled out of its bid for the Filmhouse which envisaged turning it into a bar-restaurant. And on Friday, the Evening News reported that Edinburgh businessman John Alexander was working with a group of former senior Filmhouse staff and was in talks with the Scottish Government, Screen Scotland and the city council over a revival of the cinema, but his bid could be blocked by the administrators if they have another deal.