Create a 10-word scroll-stopping headline for: A New Durham Theater, a Cinema Community to Fill It | Vibe NC

About 300,000 people. Maybe two dozen screens.

That’s the moviegoing situation in Durham, where 17 of those screens carry mainstream fare at AMC Southpoint and three focus on first-run indies at the Carolina Theatre. You can eke out a few more by including the likes of Duke University’s Griffith Film Theater or the former Full Frame Theater now operated by Fullsteam Brewery.

Of the latter, Fullsteam owner Sean Lilly Wilson told the INDY he hopes to open the brewery’s new American Tobacco Campus location by Labor Day and wants to keep the small theater available as a local resource. In January, it hosted the Black Trans Short Film Festival, with a screening by the tipsy Durham Instagram account Two Beer Cinema Club coming up on June 27.

It’s vital cinematic real estate now that the plentiful days of Durham multiplexes like Wynnsong, Willowdaile, and Northgate are long gone, to say nothing of arthouse attrition everywhere.

“It’s like bowling alleys—nobody’s ever going to build a multiplex again,” predicted Jim Haverkamp, a filmmaker, video editor, and Duke film professor. But Haverkamp and Alex Maness, a photographer and theater tech, are preparing to increase the local screen tally by one when they open Skin and Bones Theater downtown in a few months.

The new microcinema’s curator council includes Penelope Bartlett, formerly the Criterion Channel’s director of programming, among other prestigious film jobs.

Bartlett is also the creative director of Film Durham, a nonprofit founded in 2024 that aims to become the hub of cinematic activity in the Bull City. Dedicated to cultivating local industry and talent, it has also started to program screenings and is long-range-planning a festival.

Though separately conceived, the theater and the nonprofit have strikingly aligned values. Both see cinema less as commercial content than as a vibrant form of civic life.

Both emphasize accessibility, inclusivity, and local identity over top-down curation from larger markets. Both want to hold spaces where all kinds of cinephiles and filmmakers can build a sustainable scene that fits an eclectic city like Durham.

“I give a lot of workshops about the future of film,” said Alece Oxendine, Film Durham’s executive director, “and my crystal ball says the future is going to be regional.”

Alece Oxendine fell in love with classic cinema when she saw 12 Angry Men on TV as a preteen. “I was locked in,” she said. “It’s holding my attention, and it’s only one room. There’s no action. There’s no boom, all these crazy effects. But it was the story. It was the acting. I said, ‘Whatever this is, I want to do…