The Park reopened

Cineplex closed the Park Theatre on Cambie in October last year. The building opened in 1941 as an Odeon, ran for years under Festival Cinemas, and had been a chain house since 2013. A closed single-screen cinema in Vancouver in 2025 is not usually a story with a second act.

The takeover was announced the next day. Corinne Lea, who runs the Rio on East Broadway, put together a group that included the filmmakers Chris Ferguson, Osgood Perkins, Mike Flanagan and Sean Baker, and they took the lease. The stated intention was to return it to being the cultural hub of Cambie Village. It reopened with 4K laser projection, and it's currently running The Odyssey in 70mm.

I like this story more than I can entirely justify. A chain decided a neighbourhood cinema wasn't viable, and an independent operator with working directors behind her decided it was. Both parties looked at the same building. One of them was running a portfolio and the other was running a room.

Vancouver has more of these than people assume. The Cinematheque on Howe has a noir series on through late August and a Japanese trilogy running alongside it. The VIFF Centre on Seymour is doing a nineties season, with the forty-fifth festival in the first week of October. The Rio has been showing Heat and Escape from New York this month. The Hollywood on West Broadway has become a mixed room, mostly music with film scattered through it. None of these are nostalgia operations. They're all programming for people who are alive now.

What a repertory house does that a streaming library can't is decide. The whole appeal of the library is that everything is available, and the whole problem with it is the same fact. I've spent evenings choosing rather than watching, and the choosing produced nothing. A cinema says: this film, this Tuesday, this print. The constraint is the service. You either go or you don't, and going means seeing something you wouldn't have selected, which is where most of my favourite films have come from.

The other thing is the room. I don't want to overstate this, because a lot of writing about cinemas becomes sentimental very quickly, and I've sat through plenty of screenings where someone's phone was the brightest thing in the building. But watching something with strangers changes it. A joke lands differently when eighty people get it at once. A long silence is harder to sit through, and being unable to leave is part of what the film is using. At home I pause. I've never once paused a film and come back to it as the same film.

Seventy millimetre is a related argument. Nobody needs it. The film is legible in any format, and most people watching The Odyssey will see it on a laptop and understand the plot perfectly. But the format is a claim about how much attention the thing deserves, and claims like that are self-fulfilling. You sit differently in front of something that took effort to present.

I think that's what the Park's new owners actually bought. Not a building on Cambie, which by the chain's own analysis wasn't worth keeping, but the proposition that a specific film at a specific time in a specific room is worth leaving the house for. That proposition has been declared dead roughly every eight years since television arrived.

The cinema is open. It's a reasonable walk from a lot of the city, and there's a film on tonight that somebody chose on purpose.

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