Cultural center in downtown Bucharest announces program of arthouse films

Cultural center Apollo111, located in downtown Bucharest’s Universul Palace, has announced the program of arthouse films Apollo111 Cinema.

The performance venue of Apollo 111 has been refurbished and endowed for professional film screenings. It will run a weekly program of contemporary and classic auteur films, meetings with filmmakers, and an experimental area, meant to “explore the boundaries of cinema.”

The cinema will open in December. It will add to the program of Apollo 111, which will continue to produce theater performances and host parties.

Bucharest, a city of some 2 million residents, currently counts only five functional arthouse cinema venues. Budapest has 11 arthouse cinemas showing films in 30 halls. Paris has 38 arthouse cinemas with approximately 100 halls, according to data provided by Apollo 111.

Overall, Romania had 108 cinema halls last year, 11 of which were arthouse cinemas, according to data from the National Cinema Center (CNC).

Apollo 111 opened in November 2016 in the historical building of Universul Palace, near Cișmigiu. The center consists of a multifunctional performance venue and a club.

Since its opening, Apollo 111 has produced more than 20 theater performances, among them Medea’s Boys, directed by Andrei Măjeri; Psycho, directed by Iris Spiridon; and The Seven Deaths of Mihaela Runceanu, directed by Cătinca Drăgănescu.

In addition to theater performances, the venue also hosted concerts, conferences, parties, and a variety of other events.

“As with everything Apollo 111 built so far, the cinema will be a place to experiment. We aim to screen auteur films from the current portfolio of local distributors, productions by young Romanian directors, and retrospectives of established personalities, while also exploring the boundaries of cinema in terms of subject, genre, or form. The Bucharest public needs to know that, beginning December, at Apollo 111 they will be able to see films from Thursday to Sunday, in a venue that many of them know, but now adds a new direction,” Ioan Maxim, manager of Apollo 111 Cinema, explained.

(Photo: Apollo 111)