From the Light House...To the Light House
Film Ireland turns a spotlight on Dublin’s newest cinema. Light House photos by Aniz Duran.

On 9th May a new four-screen Light House Cinema will open on Smithfield Plaza in Dublin. Here Neil Connolly and Maretta Dillon, who jointly ran the old Light House Cinema, explain to Michael Open how their dream came to be realised...

It begins with the end: the closure of the original Light House Cinema in Middle Abbey Street in 1996. The closure wasn’t a voluntary one. The building was owned by Arnotts, the department store, and they had development plans so it was reasonable for them to take it back. However, we never stopped wanting to re-emerge phoenix-like from the ashes of the old Light House. In truth, the original cinema had probably served its purpose anyway – it was a particular venue that served a particular purpose at a particular time in Dublin. But it was probably never going to have long-term sustainability.

The challenge was that we had to have a Light House cinema for the 21st Century and it had to have at least three or four screens. In the UK there is an organisation called City Screen which has been very successful operating arthouse style cinemas (and still is). This, to some extent was the model we were thinking of. It had to have good social space and a café bar where people could meet and feel part of something bigger than just an old-fashioned cinema. The trouble was that to produce something like that was never going to be easy – mostly because of the economics of it. The economics of any arthouse cinema is always going to be fragile. Any notion that venture capitalism would be interested in building this ‘field of dreams’ was never going to be a runner. Venture capitalists are looking for future profits at a high level and arthouse cinemas are largely showing films that have been defined as ‘minority interest’.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 122.