What does it take to keep a town’s film culture alive? In Luton, the answer may lie in looking back as much as looking forward – from the grand old art deco picture houses that once drew crowds into the town centre to the independent festivals and community screenings keeping the big screen accessible today.
And now, one initiative called Spotlight Luton has been building on this heritage with its aim to make cinema and the arts more accessible through affordable collaboration with grassroots creators, while also helping local groups organise their own screenings and bring films to people who might otherwise struggle to access them.
Since its launch in summer, the project has been delivered by The Orange Picture Club, Bute Street Festival, with support from the British Film Institute’s (BFI) Film Audience Network through National Lottery funding.
Jasbir Nangla, an award-winning Luton filmmaker and one of the directors of The Orange Picture Club, said the ambition goes beyond putting on individual film nights, which OPC continue to do regularly at Luton Library Theatre, for the family friendly ticket price of £4.
Spotlight Luton organisers are hoping to use storytelling to spark conversations about social issues and create welcoming spaces where people from different backgrounds can meet, connect and share ideas.
“The whole purpose of it is to basically support and grow community cinemas in Luton,” Nangla said.
Nangla said the approach had been informed by a previous Spotlight programme in Peterborough, where three years of work between 2023 and 2026 helped establish a network of community groups running their own screenings that have taken place in parks, libraries, community gardens, churches, museums and other familiar community spaces, rather than relying solely on conventional cinema venues.
It also helped create more opportunities to see UK and international independent films that aren’t usually shown in mainstream cinema complexes.
The approach has already produced measurable results in Peterborough, where The Independent Cinema Office reported that 12 community groups delivered 220 screenings for 12,669 people during the programme’s second year. The BFI also reported that 60 per cent of the partners it supported in Peterborough would not have put on screenings otherwise.
The project’s legacy includes the Peterborough Film Network, a quarterly forum where organisations involved in community cinema can share information, discuss funding and work together to promote screenings.
For Luton, Nangla said: “It’s not just about showing films but teaching these community groups and individuals how to do their own screenings and how to apply for their own funds and self-sustainable.
“We are looking to bring cinema, especially non-mainstream cinema, to as many people as possible, and that includes those people that are underrepresented,” said Nangla.
Whether that’s reaching audiences including minority ethnic communities, disabled people and older residents, it can also mean taking cinema to people, rather than expecting everyone to travel to a traditional venue.
Nangla gave the example of The Orange Picture Club working with a dementia charity whose members had previously attended screenings at a theatre. When the theatre was unavailable, the organisation took its equipment to the charity’s own meeting space.
The change meant more people could attend, including those who had found the theatre difficult to access because of its layout.
Nangla said: “It’s trying to bring cinema to those people that can’t always get it.”
For him, the value of community cinema is also in the opportunity to encounter films and stories that audiences might not otherwise discover. And the idea builds on a heritage of film exhibition in Luton that Nangla said was not always widely recognised.
“This town had an appetite for cinema,” he said. “Then people forgot that we had this history to begin with.”
The former ABC cinema on George Street remains a reminder of that story and a striking example of that changing cinema landscape in the town. Once a 1,892-seat venue that opened as the Savoy in 1938 and was later converted into a three-screen cinema. It was renamed Cannon in 1980s before becoming the ABC again after the opening of Cineworld’s multiplex in 1998 on Bridge Street.
The ABC cinema finally closed in November 2000 and its art deco exterior had remained a familiar feature of George Street, even as the building itself has stood empty for 26 years, though the building was given an external glow-up last year with a colourful 1930s-inspired mural by artist Sarah Hodgkins.
But Luton’s cinema story does not have one plot line. In the 1970s, there was a regular film programme at Luton Library Theatre, which was briefly renamed Luton Film Theatre – screening 35mm and 16mm films, including arthouse productions, foreign-language films and classics. By 1980 it was operating as one of the BFI’s regional theatres.
Luton’s independent film culture continued into the new millennium with Filmstock, which was launched by Lutonians Neil Fox and Justin Doherty in 2000, The film festival ran annually until 2009, bringing independent cinema and visiting filmmakers to the town, before returning for a special one-off four-day event in 2019.
More recently, Bute Street Film and Art Festival has provided a platform for local and international film, art and performance. Although the festival is in the middle of a planned two-year hiatus following, its organisers remain involved in activity through Spotlight Luton.
And talking up the town has been a focal point of Nangla’s work. As part of Two Side Studios, the independent production company he formed with his brother and fellow The Orange Picture Club director, Jaspal, and their award-winning documentaries The Tipping Point and The Orange Weekend, have presented positive sides to Luton.
And for almost two years now, The Orange Picture Club has also been running regular film screenings at Luton Library Theatre, offering audiences another way to experience cinema locally – and for the family friendly ticket prices of £4, compared to the rising cost of a trip to Cineworld, just a few hundred yards away.
Spotlight Luton is intended to build on all of these existing strands of activity by giving community groups the skills and confidence to develop screenings of their own, helping to make cinema a more accessible and sustainable part of the town’s cultural life.
The project’s forthcoming events include a screening of psychological thriller Obsession at Luton Library Theatre on Sunday, 25 October, from 6.30pm.
On Friday, 30 October, they will present Otto Preminger’s 1954 musical Carmen Jones at the Hat Factory Arts Centre in partneship with SOUL:CINÉ, a bi-monthly cinema club, that basks in the glow and wonder of Black Cinema The film reworks Bizet’s opera with an all-Black cast led by Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte.
Aside from Spotlight Luton, The Orange Picture Club has a wider programme of film screenings at Luton Library Theatre, including for the remainder of this year, Corpse Bride, They Shall Not Grow Old, The Bridge on the River Kwai and a Christmas double bill of Elf and Die Hard.
Full details of screenings and ticket bookings are available on The Orange Picture Club website.
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