Mobile Cinema and Grassroots Screenings: Beyond the Twin Cities

Twenty years before the Neighborhood Media Project’s first screening in 1979, the Cuban government ran a similar project with the goal of improving education and quality of life for people living in the rural Cuban countryside. Following the 1959 Revolution, the newly stated Cuban government rolled out a series of social service projects. Most notable was the Cuban Literacy Campaign, which worked to end illiteracy in Cuba. Among these programs was the establishment of a Department of Film Dissemination, responsible for deploying educational and entertaining mobile cinemas to rural communities. These mobile cinemas—vans, trucks, boats, and mule-drawn carts equipped with 16mm projectors—would travel throughout the country screening newsreels, instructional documentaries, cartoons, and Cuban films from the country’s emerging independent filmmakers. Before 1959, the content shown by the mobile cinemas could ordinarily only be consumed by individuals privileged with access to the institutions (cinemas, museums, etc.) and education (film and art appreciation) based in city centers, leaving little opportunity for rural Cubans to enjoy and learn from this content. Consistent with the government’s Marxist policies, the mobile cinemas confronted this discrepancy by decentralizing the institutions that granted access to this content, taking the films out of the museums and cinemas and bringing them to the rest of the country. This move for equity in education lessened the urban and rural cultural divide and provided an expanded platform for the country’s burgeoning filmmakers.

Unsurprisingly, the Neighborhood Media Project showed a series of Cuban films during its tenure. Its organizers were drawn to revolutionary Cuban cinema, as its makers were able to explore their leftist politics and reflect them in both the form and content of their films. Cuban cinema presented a chance for these beliefs to be presented not as an alternative to dominant culture but rather as the culture and politics of the nation itself—a truly exciting concept for a grassroots leftist community group. The Neighborhood Media Project was not alone in its radical use of films for community building. This Cuban connection is certainly apropos to the current showing of Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950 at the Walker Art Center, but it is important to point out that the Cuban project came a decade before the Neighborhood Media project and was inspired by similar projects in China and Russia. It connects to 1970s and 1980s trends surrounding radical media that developed with the advent of cheaper video technology which made production more accessible, sparking an era of exploratory video-making with political and DIY themes.  

This excitement around the video medium took hold in the Twin Cities,  inspiring the founding and growth of a number of community organizations focused on community-based media-making, like the Minneapolis Television Network (MTN) and the Saint Paul Neighborhood Network (SPNN). Neil Sieling, co-founder of the Neighborhood Media Project, describes the spirit of collaboration that brought these organizations together: “So Neighborhood Media Project was kind of agnostic and would hop around to all these different groups that were really trying to do the right thing, connect to people, and get young folk in all these different communities cross-pollinating and seeing how they could learn education at Sheryl’s [Mousley, Senior Curator of the Walker Moving Image Department] program at Film in the Cities so they could have their own show on MTN or St. Paul cable. Something like that—that would all be possible.” This commitment to collaboration underscores the Neighborhood Media Project’s message of inclusion and community-building in the aim of creating a media resource network for the cultural groups that the project served.