The popcorn machine is the Manor’s. When Charlotte’s last art house cinema closed in May 2020, the Charlotte Film Society salvaged it, and it now pops in the lobby of the theater the society built to replace what the city had lost.
For this, The Independent Picture House opened on Raleigh Street north of NoDa on June 24, 2022. It is a nonprofit, it has three screens, and it is the only cinema in Charlotte that exists specifically to show the films the chains will not.
It started as a film society
The Charlotte Film Society was founded in 1982, and for four decades it brought independent and foreign films to the city by renting other people’s screens, according to its nonprofit profile. It ran a Back Alley Film Series at C3 Lab in South End and one off screenings wherever it could. In 2020 it acquired the Charlotte Film Festival, which it now hosts each September.
The idea of a cinema of its own is about ten years old, and Brad Ritter, the society’s president, has described the false starts. The first serious attempt was a small space in a Plaza Midwood strip mall, next to Bistro La Bon, and each round of architectural drawings shrank it until only a single 40 seat screen fit. Too small. A couple of years later the society looked at Camp North End, ran the numbers, and decided it could not afford the neighborhood. Too expensive.
The Manor’s closing changed the urgency. Charlotte had once had as many as thirteen art house screens across three theaters, according to the Cinema Treasures database, and in May 2020 it had none. The society launched a capital campaign with a $2 million goal, backed by the Foundation for the Carolinas, and a Take a Seat fund that put donors’ names in the lobby and on screen. By March 2022 it had raised $590,000, Ritter told Axios, and the theater opened three months later.
The people behind it
Ritter is the society’s executive director and the person who tells its story. Jay Morong, a professor of theater and film studies at UNC Charlotte, is the creative director who programs it, and he has described the two years of building as a labor of love. Art matters, he told the university’s news service. It is what teaches us to be human.
The building is a converted warehouse in what its developer calls the Trailhead Arts District, a block from the Blue Line’s Sugar Creek station, behind a long closed multiplex. The society chose it after the other two sites fell through, and the lobby it built there is a carpeted lounge with sofas and movie posters, a bar, and free parking outside, which no other cinema this close to Uptown offers.
What you actually see
The three screens hold 105, 77 and 17 seats, the smallest with recliners for the quietest films, and the programming runs independent, foreign, documentary and repertory titles, with filmmaker talks after selected screenings. The opening week included Memoria, a Tilda Swinton drama set in the Colombian jungle, which is the kind of film the theater exists for. Ritter has said the films are the type you watch and then go out to the lobby to talk about with your neighbors.
Membership starts at $40 a year with $3 off tickets, and students of any age join free with a valid ID. The theater hosts a monthly filmmakers’ meetup called the Carolina Independent Film Collective, rents its screens for private and public events, and in 2024 announced a fourth auditorium of about 145 seats in the neighboring space, its largest, for film and for poetry, theater, music and comedy.
The Take a Seat campaign is still visible in the theater. Donors’ names appear in the lobby and on screen before films, and the reserved seat that came with a gift is a small permanent thank you in a building the community paid for. The developer of the surrounding district, an architecture alumnus of UNC Charlotte named Tony Kuhn, has been building out the blocks around the Sugar Creek station, and Morong has described the cinema as an extension of the university’s campus, sitting between the main campus and its center city building.
The society’s timing was also its argument. Charlotte had gone from thirteen art house screens to none in a generation, and the Manor’s closing in the first weeks of the pandemic could have been the end of the story. Instead the society used the popcorn machine, the momentum and the money to open a theater that has since expanded, and the Charlotte Film Festival it acquired in 2020 now has a permanent home for its September run.
Why it matters
A city of nearly a million people had no art house cinema for two years, and the people who fixed that were a volunteer society that had spent forty years renting screens. They failed twice to find a building, raised the money from the community in the middle of a pandemic, and opened with the Manor’s popcorn machine as a promise that the city’s film culture had survived.
The Charlotte Film Festival runs here each September. The rest of the year, the Independent Picture House is where the films go that the multiplexes never carried, and where the people who want them go to argue about them afterward in the lobby.