The year is 2018. The BlacKkKlansman has just been released in cinemas, but no cinema operators will be showing it. None, except The Projector. Perhaps it was the zany yet rich, racially-charged politics that was spun all through Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, or the oddness of the university friend group whom I went to one of its screenings with. Yet there was no forgetting the day I watched it. After all, it was my first visit to the indie cinema, and the night I felt something unshackle from within. Like a part of me had found the means to re-see and relearn my surroundings; this independent, dimly-lit cinema holding my hand through the darker alleys of a world of rigour—the only one I had ever known growing up in Singapore. It was raw and rare, and teeming with a deathly cool vibe. I might not have realised it then, but The Projector had made me curious again. With its retro charm and snarky humour, that first evening felt formative for a jaded arts university student who was feeling suffocated by the books on her walls, and the lines on her books.
So it has been a wistful week for us all, this once-jaded-student-now-journalist included. When the beloved indie cinema at Golden Mile Tower announced its sudden shuttering of its doors earlier this week, disbelief reverberated all through my group chats. It was the same for me; recalling the days of the pandemic when (albeit now, perhaps a little gullibly) we thought we could sustain the independent cinema on virtual quiz nights and film rentals.
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Speculation was rife, but most of all, it has been an outpouring of anecdotes from one friend to the next. We’re all reminiscing the good times—speaking worlds of the indie space we lived and breathed joy in. Of film festival back-to-back runs, throwing spoons at the screen during The Room, of dropping it down low on Kampong Boogie nights. Or the nights when we huddled in the RedRum for panel discussions right after a film. It wasn’t just a cinema that carried a torch for local, queer and indie cinema, it was also a third place where people could feel most like themselves—and meet others who understood them too.
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On the other hand, there has also been plenty of rhetoric going around. Did we deserve a place like The Projector? A self-made place that cradled us in its bummy loft after a long day; shone its guiding neon lights on us as we bypassed its walls; or cheered us up with plasters of vintage movie posters when we were crying in its bathroom stalls? Did we deserve the one place that carved out a roof for every single one of us—even when the odds were stacked against them? Did we deserve the locus of our culture and community; the backbone of our most trying conversations; the two words that land on every native artist’s tongue when they think of our country’s creative spaces?
The truth is that it is heartbreaking. To see neon lights that burned so bright—suddenly go dark. A tiny voice asks: could we have done more (and can we do more)? Perhaps. But the productive thing to do is this: mourn its loss. Feel it in your bones. Know—and truly know—the weight of what really happens to our artists, creatives, LGBTQIA+ communities, when an indie space such as The Projector bites the dust.
Anger fuels, nostalgia stirs, and courage takes time. The Projector may have gone dark, but may the force always be with you, Turkish Luke Skywalker.
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