The Brooklyn Rail

In late 2021, Abiba Coulibaly returned to London after finishing her master’s and joined the team at Magnum Photos, where we first met. We became close soon after. Both of us had entered the photography cooperative through a traineeship intended to diversify the workforce of London’s cultural institutions. During our lunch breaks, we talked about the limits of such initiatives and tried to make sense of an internal culture that could be toxic and chaotic, often questioning Magnum’s place in a Western photojournalistic tradition shaped by an imperial gaze.

Abiba’s later decision to establish Brixton Community Cinema (BCC)—a volunteer-run film club bringing affordable screenings to Lambeth—grew from questions she had been asking long before she left Magnum: who gets to make and show photographs and films, where they are encountered, and who can afford to see them.

I sat down with Abiba to discuss why she has decided to close Brixton Community Cinema after four years, and what it has taken to sustain a film club built around accessible ticketing and screenings in spaces not necessarily deemed for cinema. We talked about the relationships that formed around those screenings, the limits she has come to see in cinema’s capacity to change the world beyond the screen, and her hopes for the BCC’s final season, When the Stars Meet the Ocean.

Bayryam Bayryamali (Rail): You’ve mentioned the film clubs and screenings you learned about through people who had been in the Lambeth area for decades. How did you begin organizing screenings yourself? What were you hoping to change about where films were shown, how they were framed, or who could see them?

Abiba Coulibaly: Actually, rather than think about change, I always think about how amazing it is to have grown up in an area with two historic and longstanding cinemas. Until my late teens, I grew up in Streatham, so the Streatham Odeon and Brixton Ritzy were mainstays for cinema trips as a child. The Odeon opened in 1930, and the Ritzy in 1911, initially as a silent theater house. While there are stalwarts, of course, some things do change; through working in film I’ve made really precious friendships with older women like Suzy Gillett and June Givanni, who have also lived in the area for decades and will mention former film clubs and screenings that I had no idea existed, and today I see a lot of pop-up events like Lambeth Mutual Aid’s screenings.

At university I thought I wanted to work for a humanitarian or environmental NGO as it felt like the most worthwhile area to pursue, but I was always so disturbed by how these organizations depicted the Global South in the imagery they put out. I became obsessed with how the same formats, photography and film, could be used to correct or subvert those ideas or at least be utilized by people occupying different kinds of positionality. However, I really didn’t know curation was a thing at that point, and I still have my gripes with the term and what it represents. During the pandemic I was living in Paris, and I would send a film to my mum back home in London every night that we’d watch and discuss the next day, and I really think this was how I started “curating” without really knowing it. Growing up in London and being at university in the city center, I had such great access to a whole variety of films. It’s not necessarily that I saw gaps in curatorial choices, but perhaps more in how the films were being framed, where they were being shown, and, above all, how much the price of a ticket cost; my subsequent work had more been around addressing the financial and spatial barriers to accessing film.

Rail: How do you see the current cinema landscape in London in terms of class, access, and cultural capital? Who gets to feel that cinema is “for them,” and who still encounters barriers to participating in it?

Coulibaly: I think we’re at an interesting point in time when even the middle classes are relatively broke and access to culture is becoming more of a luxury. I think many of the people who make London interesting will end up leaving because the overlap of people doing the truly boundary-pushing work and making decent money is slim. Of the film programmers I admire most, one has moved to Dubai and the other has become a personal trainer, which pretty much sums it up to me. I think cinema is historically a popular medium (compared to, say, theater, opera, ballet, exhibitions, etc.) and there aren’t so many barriers to participating in it broadly because pretty much anyone is up for watching a film like Obsession. Barriers are more around accessing a breadth of non-commercial and slightly more niche cinema which isn’t always programmed in a way that feels welcoming to those less familiar with it. Back to the question of class and access, I do find it particularly bizarre and frustrating how much programming focuses on radical/decolonial/marginalized/militant/whatever cinema, but is sold at a price point that means the audience will mostly consist of a demographic who are consuming rather than identifying with that experience.

Rail: You’ve spoken about the cost of attending screenings. How do you think class, institutional networks, education, and access to funding shape whose taste, knowledge, and cultural references are given authority?

Coulibaly: Let’s differentiate between “curate” and make a living curating. I like to think that anyone has the authority to curate cinema—that’s what my project Atlas Cinema was about. But jobs in the field are few and far between and poorly paid. I have been unemployed for almost four years actually. I could not do this if I was not living at home. There are more and more MA film curating courses which I think are a scam—you’re better off studying geopolitics or social sciences to have an informed take on cinema. In a way, cinematic education is highly accessible through the internet and pirate sharing sites like Solidarity Cinema and rarefilmm.com, but when it comes to translating this into a job, working for free or very little is so often the expectation and a privilege that has a very palpable influence on which kind of people can hang in long enough to make it to more stable and secure positions.

Rail: You’ve said you could not have continued this work without living at home, and a project like BCC involves a huge amount of work that audiences rarely see: programming, licensing, fundraising, producing, hosting, and building relationships. What has sustaining the cinema actually required from you?

Coulibaly: I really can’t count the hours, sweat, or tears (no blood thankfully, though I’ve definitely got some bruises from maneuvering projectors) that I’ve put in. It’s really everything you’ve listed: unnecessary admin back and forth spent finding spaces, hunting down film licenses, and scheduling. I also take a lot of care with all the copy and visuals (designed by the incredibly talented Em—Dash) so that the project has a distinct and personal feel. It has also given me a lot. I always joke that I would still be a virgin if it wasn’t for running a film club. Enduring friendships. A sense of accomplishment and being capable. Knowing I can build spaces—physical ones—with the help of my friends is particularly rewarding.

Rail: BCC is now coming to an end at a moment when many small cultural organizations are struggling with rising costs and increasingly competitive funding. What made you decide that this should be the final season?

Coulibaly: Pay-what-you-can is quite an idiotic business model, so I never intended to keep it going that long. I was ready to stop at about eight months, but then we got a commission from the London Festival of Architecture in 2023 to design, build, and program an outdoor cinema, which really blew the project up in terms of visibility and followers, so I kept going off of that momentum.

I think watching films educates and inspires but also allows us to be passive and indulgent when we need to be active and disruptive, razing the system to the ground to the best of our abilities. Watching images of a genocide day in day out didn’t have an immediate and effective consequence in ceasing inexcusable suffering, so I want to rethink my conviction in the actual use of lens-based technologies in society. A friend, Elhum Shakerifar, said that we need to think about cinema “beyond empathy,” and now I’m thinking, what about beyond that? What about towards complete reconfiguration of the offscreen world? Is that possible, or is cinema not the thing to look towards for this end? I can only be interested in the screen as far as it can materially impact the offscreen world.

Rail: The farewell program, When the Stars Meet the Ocean, looks across the shores of the Indian Ocean and brings different cinematic histories into conversation. Why did you want this to be the final curatorial statement of Brixton Community Cinema?

Coulibaly: It’s a really interesting region for transnational exchange, specifically exchange that historically has not centered in the West. The other day I was talking to a friend about how few films that deal with interracial relationships talk about couples in which neither partner is white. Similarly when we think about migration we almost always think about from the Global South to the West rather than within the Global South, and I think that part of the world has such an interesting history of dialogue between Africa, the Arab world, and South and Southeast Asia. London has this specific sensibility of everyone in your classroom or bus carriage being from everywhere; in one of the films being shown, tabla player Talvin Singh describes it like growing up in the ocean. I loved this analogy, as I often find the language around multiculturalism can be so tired, and this is partially what inspired the season title. It was also linked to my own personal interest in Francophone cinema, after having watched a Madagascan film, When the Stars Meet the Sea by Raymond Rajaonarivelo and realizing a lot of my viewing habits were oriented towards West Africa and wanting to explore other regions of the continent.

Also, I kind of had this M.I.A lyric in the back of my head the whole time: “Cherokee Indian, Iraqi and Indians / Girls and me girls when they come to the fellas and / Japanese, Moroccan, Caribbean, African.” Brown skin is so beautiful on film, especially glinting in the moonlight or covered in saltwater. Cinema should be a space of desire and lust, too.

Rail: Looking back at four years of BCC, what do you hope remains after the cinema closes? And what would you want larger institutions, funders, and future independent programmers to learn from the project?

Coulibaly: As I’ve struggled with my understanding of the effectiveness and use of cinema, I’ve realized that one of the ways running a film club has been useful is it’s allowed me to experiment with creating the kinds of social relations I want to see reflected in the wider world, beyond/regardless of the sphere of culture. I hope, through my work, that I’ve conveyed the sense that things absolutely don’t have to be the way we’re told they are. A bus stop can be a cinema. Gossip Girl can be cinema. If you don’t like what you see, build the alternative. Through the models of ticketing and programming, I’ve been able to build models that are needs-based and reciprocal, elements I hope other people incorporate into their cultural initiatives even if they feel at odds with how we’re taught things should be run, when culture is a commodity.

I am not interested in teaching larger institutions lessons; often they are slow to show desire to change and are leeches.