“These Models Have Existed” (Podcast Extra)
The Luminal Theater’s Curtis Caesar John Reflects on Independent Exhibition
As a supplement to last week’s Distribution Advocates Presents podcast episode on exhibition, Distribution Advocates spoke with Curtis Caesar John, founder and executive director of the Luminal Theater, a nomadic microcinema that brings Black indie cinema directly to Black audiences and highlights the legacy of Black filmmakers and those from the African diaspora. Founded on the belief that cinema is best utilized as a shared audience experience, the Luminal Theater brings together Black filmmakers and the diverse community for which their films are made for conversation and inspiration in neighborhood spaces.
During our discussion, which has been edited for length and clarity, Curtis spoke about his career in exhibition, what it means to be nomadic, creative ways of reaching audiences, and the importance of sharing experiences and knowledge within a community. Distribution Advocates Presents episodes return next week with our finale, “The Truth About Distribution.”
Distribution Advocates: Tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to be interested in exhibition.
Curtis Caesar John: I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. I’m a lifelong cinephile. I’ve always been absorbed by media and how it communicates with us and how we find ourselves or don’t find ourselves within that.
Once I realized that’s what I wanted to do, I dedicated my life to starting off as a filmmaker. I studied film in college. I worked in the industry for a while between TV and film and other forms of media.
Then in 2008 I was listening to an interview that a friend of mine was doing with Black filmmaker Dennis Dortch. It was a fantastic interview, so I hit up the filmmaker myself to ask when his film was coming to New York. He said it wasn’t, that his distributor had no plans for that.
I was working with some guys who showed short films locally in Brooklyn, so I asked if they would be interested in trying to get this film in a theater, just a one-night-only thing. They were a little cautious just because it’s a big undertaking to exhibit a feature film, but we all decided we would do it. We rented out Cobble Hill Cinemas in Brooklyn and ended up selling out the theater. The owner even offered to let us take over the theater next door, and we packed out that other theater, too. We flew up the filmmaker, and he connected with fantastic audiences in New York. The screening was successful for all of us, and we got a lot of attention. A few months later we grew this model and gave it an actual name, New Voices in Black Cinema, at BAM. Then within two years it had developed into a film festival at BAM.
That’s how I got into exhibition. I was still trying to be a filmmaker but realizing slowly that this was taking over my life. Even though I wanted to be a filmmaker, it made sense that my life ended up being in exhibition because seeing how things connect with audiences was always the most important thing to me, even though I didn’t really understand it as being a profession but as a way of doing things.
Distribution Advocates: How did the Luminal Theater come about?
Curtis Caesar John: I headed up the New Voices festival for a couple years and then wanted to branch out on my own, and so that’s how the Luminal was formed. We chose to have a pop-up space in Bed-Stuy because outside of Harlem, Bed-Stuy is the mecca of Black arts in Brooklyn. So we were like, let’s start this right here because the one thing in the arts that this community really doesn’t connect with is film because there’s no regular space for it. We had that pop-up space for a few months, and even though we wanted to extend, it just didn’t happen. We kept looking for another space, but then just decided to go nomadic because we wanted to see what we could continue doing in Bed-Stuy, and in other neighborhoods, too. And so we became nomadic. We became a traveling exhibition organization.
Thankfully, we worked that out very intentionally and around 2019 expanded that along the Eastern Seaboard, concentrating on bringing Black films to Black neighborhoods, mostly independent films that audiences might have missed. We wanted to provide access and make sure that the films that are made for these folks can be seen by them—that folks know who these artists are and can meet them and spread the word about them.
Distribution Advocates: What are the logistics of nomadic cinema?
Curtis Caesar John: That’s the beautiful thing about it. They can be almost anything you want it to be. But we wanted to be very intentional about connecting with spaces that we knew had a similar type of deal that Black film has. One of the problems I would say with how audiences experience Black indie cinema is that they don’t always realize that a lot of these films are made for them—especially a lot of the ones that are in film festivals because festivals can be kind of scary to some audiences. They just feel like they’re not for them, unfortunately. Even though there are multiple Black festivals, the everyday Black person just doesn’t know—unless they have a friend or a family member who works in film—that this entire experience is for them.
So we focus on bringing that opportunity right to the neighborhood and doing it regularly, too, with deeper films that we can talk about. We have conversations around the films as often as possible, whether that’s before or after the screening or sometimes both. We look for places that speak to our audience and also speak to shared ideals of nomadic cinema and Black cinema. Outside space has always been very important to me, so we began to connect with community gardens in Bed-Stuy to hold our Cinema Garden Party screenings. Those screenings were really successful because not only were we partnering with community gardens to bring programming there, we were making sure that the community knew those spaces were for them as well.
That was alongside doing the Caribbean Film Series at BAM, helping the Weeksville Heritage Center put together their first ever film festival, and having community conversations with filmmakers in our series called Beyond the Cut where we featured filmmakers like Shaka King who directed Judas and the Black Messiah and Nikyatu Jusu who directed Nanny. We’re trying to connect these filmmakers and audiences directly. We’re focusing on making sure that audiences can spread the word about these filmmakers’ fantastic work. Honestly, there’s a little ego in five years down the line being able to say, as an audience member, that I went to a screening and conversation with someone like Shaka King, and now his film has been nominated for an Academy Award, not that the Academy Awards are the pinnacle, but at least we’ve heard of those.
Distribution Advocates: And how did you begin to expand beyond the Brooklyn area?
Curtis Caesar John: I’ve been accumulating contacts over the years through my travels. Wherever we are, we film geeks always have to check out a local independent cinema and see what it’s like. I always introduce myself and say, hey, maybe we can work together sometime in the future. And then in 2019, I started going to Art House Convergence and meeting so many fellow exhibitors and also some distributors. Many I’d only corresponded with by email, so finally getting the chance to meet in person opened up a lot of doors to be able to do things in different places or even know how to figure out how to do them in different places. Having that community around Black cinema—around all cinemas—and sharing our experiences is so important. There’s a danger in just holding on to something and feeling like it’s just for you. I keep coming back to this word “community,” but it’s all about community efforts. We want to get these films out there and connect with audiences and share knowledge with one another. As an organization, my Luminal team members and I make sure we attend many different meetings and stay in the loop so that we understand what we’re doing and what we can do together or how we can just create better opportunities for each other.
Distribution Advocates: In terms of marketing or outreach, how do you let audiences know about an upcoming event or screening?
Curtis Caesar John: The marketing is definitely the hardest part. Being nomadic means we obviously don’t have one central place for people to go. We’ll do a press release to try to get some type of local coverage, and sometimes we do paid ads. But I would say partnering is the primary way that we try to get the word out, having an ambassador to help spread the word about what we’re doing. Naturally those partners are aligned with our mission and interests so their community is interested in our program.
You have to find creative ways to reach the audience, and that changes depending on where you are. If you don’t know the region first-hand, your local partners can be really helpful in figuring out how to reach audiences. When we’re starting to work with new partners, once we know they’re down to do this, the second part of conversation is always about how we are going to reach audiences and make sure that this screening is successful.
Social media is one way, like Facebook events, but there are so many other ways. Our first event in Columbia, South Carolina was actually during the pandemic. We decided to do an outdoor drive-in cinema, and partnered with a movie theater which was actually partnered with a nearby church, so there was all that cross-pollination. In driving cultures, maybe get a digital billboard or have yard signs. You have to think outside of digital to figure out different ways to reach audiences. In New York, on the other hand, you could put up flyers outside the subway.
And the conversation has to consider what success means in terms of audience because it means different things to people in different cities and organizations. Some community spaces just don’t have a large capacity.
Distribution Advocates: What are your thoughts on virtual exhibition spaces?
Curtis Caesar John: We were making plans to introduce virtual exhibition to our audiences in September 2020. I saw it as just one more way to communicate with audiences. I’m a techie, so it was always important to me to figure out how to exhibit virtually. When the pandemic hit, we moved up our plans. The Fresh Black Film Series was the first thing we did virtually, in May 2020. It’s more difficult to do now, but we feel it’s still important to have an aspect of that within our organization. Our Luminal Film Club is all virtual. It’s a different way for us to connect with audiences all around the country.
Distribution Advocates: How do you support these efforts—fundraising, grants?
Curtis Caesar John: We do fundraising and grant applications. We have a good system down for all of that, and I’m continuously cultivating our list of donors and maintaining ties with people who donated in the past. Honestly, I spend the lion’s share of my time on fundraising and maintaining communication with all those players, whether they’re granting organizations or individual donors. We haven’t had so much luck with sponsors, even though we’ve gotten a few over the years. A lot of businesses are suffering in this economy, too, so it’s just a reality of the landscape.
Distribution Advocates: You mentioned the Luminal team. What’s the composition of your organization?
Curtis Caesar John: We’re a small organization, but the work that we do is very much a team effort. We have two full-time staffers—myself as executive director and Jacqui K. Brown, who started with us as a programmer and now leads special projects and heads up our film club. Outside of that, we have team members who are independent contractors who work on different aspects of things like grant writing, social media management, blogging, graphic design and video.
Distribution Advocates: You’re doing such innovative work, and we’re delighted that you were willing to speak with us because we can share your model in hopes of sparking conversation and inspiring our larger community to think about exhibition and audience connection and just maybe, inch by inch, change how the mainstream system works.
Curtis Caesar John: I truly believe so. One last thing—this reminds me of an old magazine article published in 1983, that I read only recently, about Warrington Hudlin, who did House Party along with his brother Reginald Hudlin, who is a very good filmmaker and community-minded person.
I read about some community screenings that Warrington did in 1983 that was exactly like what we did in Bed-Stuy. I’m bringing it up to make the point that it, the system, does change inch by inch.
At Luminal, we never thought that we were the first people to be doing community independent cinema or nomadic cinema—we’re totally not, and definitely not the first even to be doing that around Black film. But I just think it’s important for people to understand that there’s a history behind the work that we all do, even if we’re not fully aware of it. It’s about understanding that these models have existed, and it’s up to us to be able to carry them on and introduce other people to how they work so they can do it in their communities. We can’t get everywhere, and that’s fine. That’s why we make sure we speak to different people about these things because it’s like: You can do this. You can replicate this.
Distribution Advocates: Any parting words you’d like to put out there for our readers?
Curtis Caesar John: We’re always looking for more help—volunteers as well as individual and organizational donors to help us carry forth our mission of introducing audiences to these films and to the work of the fantastic filmmakers out there. Even if you don’t support the Luminal, make sure you support independent film and independent film exhibitors.
It’s very difficult work, but it’s really fulfilling and I’m grateful every day that this is what I can do, and this is how I can reach people. I say that for our team members as well. We’re looking forward to how our work can grow and how we can help enhance and change the landscape out there.