In the 18 months that Denver Film's Sie FilmCenter was closed during the pandemic, they kept busy. From March 2020 to the Sie's reopening in November 2021, Denver Film kept on rolling with a drive-in movies series at Red Rocks and a virtual cinema platform.
Throughout all of this, Sie FilmCenter Artistic Director Keith Garcia started to consider how Denver Film might improve the Sie's programming for when they could finally host in-person screenings again.
He said the way theaters exhibit films has been sort of "stuck in a rut" for decades, but that programmers have struggled to find the time and space to build different exhibition models.
"It was kind of like, the bus is already moving," he said. "It's hard to figure out how you're going to jump out or change an aspect of the bus while it's in motion."
He said that as awful as the pandemic has been, it stopped that bus in its tracks, posing an opportunity to do things differently at the Sie.
"Something that I think has happened for everyone during the pandemic, but me especially as an artistic director and film programmer, is just trying to reinvent the way we do things," Garcia said. "I think it made a lot of people think about what really mattered, and also what they can do to sort of do their dream idea."
And that dream idea, one he'd been pondering for years, was a massive expansion of the Sie FilmCenter's programming.
"I was like, 'What Is something I've always wanted to do for the Sie?' And that thing was create a true culture of film," he said. "To offer film every single day that was diverse and different."
Garcia decided to launch the Sie's expanded programming in March 2022, now that pandemic conditions are improving and people are beginning to feel more comfortable returning to theaters.
Starting this month, filmgoers can drop in and catch an interesting film at virtually any time of day. The idea is to plan out a whole calendar of highly curated special film screenings each month, mapping out short series and themed offerings that provide opportunities to experience cinema beyond the larger, newer films you might expect to see at a theater.
Garcia said the model is based on the kinds of cinematic experiences he had growing up. Arthouse theatres he visited as a kid frequently offered a calendar of repertory programs, or films that are past their theatrical run. That includes classic films, but also films that premiered in theaters just a few months before.
Garcia wanted to revisit that old way of showing films, "But to be able to program it in a way where we put these films in context, where we can pay tribute to actors and filmmakers, and themes and countries and concepts," he said. "Basically, things that we do a lot during the film festival, but exploded out into 365 days a year."
Denver Film team plans to present repertory films in context by shooting video introductions to each film to play at the start of its screening, as well as hosting community conversations, Q&As and panels.
"I think it's the most attractive way to re-present film to audiences," Garcia said. "I mean, classic film, we have a backlog of well over a century of it. The challenge here is to look at that catalog of a century's worth of film and be like, 'How do we put this out? How do we bring this back and present it to audiences so that they can kind of firm up their own film education on the older stuff and the stuff that they should see? What fills the holes in their cinematic lexicon?'"
Garcia said when people think of arthouse cinema or a film center, they might perceive it as being kind of "stodgy." He wants to make classic film programming more accessible by selecting films thematically pegged to current events or pop culture trends.
"We have something for everybody," he said.
For example, Denver Film plans to present a screening of Barb Wire, a Pamela Anderson film that opened after news broke of her sex tape with Tommy Lee, a story people are freshly interested in thanks to the recent miniseries Pam & Tommy. The Sie will also screen a series of films that are not Ghostbusters by Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, who passed away earlier this year; a Werner Herzog restoration series; a screening of The Breakfast Club on March 24 (the date the characters met within the film) paired with Weird Science, another John Hughes film from that year; a retrospective dedicated to the actress Michelle Yeoh, who has an immense body of work spanning decades and is now finally getting her own starring role in the upcoming film Everything Everywhere All At Once; and a series called Pandem-O-Rama, which highlights films that had their big screening moments stolen by the pandemic.
Garcia said he also welcomes ideas for future screenings from filmgoers.
"Now that we can see each other again, let's see each other. Let's talk," Garcia said. "I want to know what movies people want to see as well."
Garcia said he wants filmgoers to have the option to see something interesting whenever they get the itch to experience film.
"I want to make it worth it to people," Garcia said. "Like, now the Film Center's open and they're showing 85,000 films this month. Great. Now I have an opportunity to catch up on all those days that I missed because they were closed, "
Garcia likes the idea of people "living" at the FilmCenter. He's wanted to help kickstart a more communal film culture in Denver since he started programming about 20 years ago. Through the Sie's expanded programing, Garcia hopes to help facilitate the kind of connection between strangers that cinema can foster - the kind that emerges from sitting in the dark together, sharing in the same story and emotional pathways -and the kinds of conversations that happen after that shared experience.
"The real thing of why we do all this was to be back in the dark, watching movies with other people, and having conversations," he said. "The shared cinematic experience of the movie theater is something that really can't be replicated."
In the pandemic, Garcia said, we lost all of that in "a blink of an eye." He said it made the need for that communal experience even more vital.
"While we have the lights on at our movie theater, we should be using it to its fullest extent, creating an environment for people to watch movies all the time. To literally be a film center," Garcia said. "And I want to make sure that while things are good, and we're open, that people get that opportunity."
You can find showtimes for all Sie FilmCenter screenings on Denver Film's website.
