From youtube.com / © Anıt Film
Well, this is depressing news.
It was announced on August 19th that The Projector, Singapore’s alternative cinema, was closing its doors – immediately. As of August 20th, The Projector would no longer exist. A statement on the cinema’s Facebook page blamed “rising operational costs, shifting audience habits, and the global decline in cinema attendance,” factors that “have made sustaining an independent model in Singapore especially challenging.”
Aghast film fans who went to The Projector’s premises on the top floors of the Cineleisure shopping mall, just off Orchard Road, on the afternoon of the announcement found staff-members clearing the place out. Reportedly, those fans were allowed to take old posters, brochures and other merch home with them as bittersweet mementoes.
The Projector was really the only place in Singapore where you could get to see, on a big screen, movies that weren’t the blockbuster fare of the multiplexes (though it found time to show blockbusters too). In other words, you could watch independent and arthouse films, ones not made in the handful of big international languages, ones focused on minorities, ones that were generally offbeat. It was also a rare venue where older movies got outings on the big screen – I remember it showing movies by Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa and the recently-departed David Lynch. On top of that, it provided an important space for other types of cultural events, like as poetry readings, book launches, charity fundraisers and vintage markets. And, if you just wanted to chill out with a beer, it had an agreeable bar.
My partner and I visited The Projector on a number of occasions and one feature of it we liked was that we could watch films there surrounded by people who actually seemed to appreciate films – and behaved accordingly. We knew that in The Projector we had a good chance of being able to watch a movie without getting annoyed by folk around us chomping and masticating noisily on snacks, or chatting, or farting around on their unmuted phones, a frequent hazard of filmgoing in the multiplexes. We knew we’d probably be allowed to fully focus on, and enjoy, what was happening on the screen. Which is what the cinematic experience should be about.
Indeed, The Projector had a stringent policy on phones. It preceded each showing with a short film warning patrons to keep their devices silent and refrain from using them. This film consisted of a scene from the notorious Turkish science-fiction movie Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam or The Man Who Saves the World – though it’s best known internationally as Turkish Star Wars – which was such a blatant rip-off of George Lucas’s Star Wars that it used uncredited space / special-effects footage and music from the 1977 classic. “It was,” its Wikipedia entry informs me, “panned by film critics and has often been considered to be one of the worst films ever made.”
The scene used by The Projector was one in which ‘Turkish Luke Skywalker’ trained for battle by smashing his big fists repeatedly against a desert boulder. You were warned that if you violated the cinema’s etiquette about phones, you would suffer punishment similar to that being inflicted on the rock.
Anyway, that’s all over now. My partner and I had visited The Projector three times this year – two of the three films we saw, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) and Robert Eggars’ Nosferatu (2024), I’ve reviewed on this blog – but now, I wish we gone there more often. Too many times, we’d planned to go and see something but had called it off at the last minute because we were ‘too tired’ or had ‘too much to do’.
The Projector’s sad demise is yet another unwelcome reminder that these days we live in a cutthroat hyper-capitalist world that seems to know the price of everything but the value of nothing – and if you cherish a venue, a business, a service, and don’t want to lose it, then you absolutely have to use it.
From facebook.com / © The Projector