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It’s one of the 10 best cinemas in the UK and Ireland and is already justifiably renowned as the home of the best singalongs, repertory screenings and cheap tickets in town. But now London’s Prince Charles Cinema is to star in its own feature film.
The brainchild of film school graduate Fil Freitas, The Regulars is a workplace comedy – shot, like its inspirational text Clerks, in gritty black and white – inspired by the filmmaker’s real-life experiences. ‘It’s not a documentary,’ he says, ‘but it’s close enough’. Freitas says the PCC changed his life, ‘mostly for the better’, but eventually programming, watching and sharing films wasn’t enough – he needed to make one of his own. ‘It was a slow realisation to put these problems together.’
Partly funded by an IndieGoGo campaign that raised £5,000, The Regulars explores a day in the life of the iconic cinema. Shot with a mix of amateur and professional actors – and actual employees – over 15 gruelling nights, the film was finally completed in late 2024. And as if having its world premiere at the PCC itself wasn’t ‘meta’ enough, Freitas himself stars as one of the hapless counter jockeys, dealing with everything from spilled popcorn to spoiled customers, and the sheer ennui of being a wage slave in a picture palace – so close to cinephile heaven, yet so far from Hollywood.
But The Regulars has competition: on August 15, another crowdfunded indie set in a cinema – writer-director Mas Bouzidi’s Concessions, in which employees, outcasts and oddballs cross paths on the last day of the closing Royal Alamo Cinema – comes to the UK, featuring The Walking Dead’s Steven Ogg, Eighth Grade’s Josh Hamilton, and one of the last performances by Michael Madsen.
According to Bouzidi, ‘Concessions is about the people working the concession stands, running the projection booth, taking your tickets, cleaning the bathrooms, and changing the marquees. It’s also about the everyday people who walk through those doors to go to the movies, partaking in one of our greatest communal traditions.’
The Regulars is in UK cinemas on August 22. Concessions gets its world premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival on August 15.
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