The Mockingbird Cinema is a single screen 100 seated cinema in Digbeth, an area just outside of central Birmingham in a development area of the city.
The knowledge gained from attending the festival has been vital to the development of our cinema. For example I visited the KINO Cinema in Rotterdam, this has a lot of parallels with the Mockingbird, being away from the centre in a residential area, the cinema had a design and way of operating that I have not experienced before.
The presentation of films I experienced has given me ideas on how to further develop the Mockingbird, the programming was unique and gave me confidence that we can broaden our own program long term which we have already started to develop based on their program.
I closely observed the front of house operations and aesthetics of the cinema, I have taken a wide range of ideas from how they operate to interrogate into the Mockingbird. This ranges from simple atmospheric ideas such as types of music playing pre-film to delivery of food/drink/POS and how to further engage with audiences to give them the best possible and diverse experience at the Mockingbird.
I can not express how invaluable this experience has been to the development of the Mockingbird Cinema.
