Imperfect Cinema is a socio-participatory venue for film, sound and the moving image, founded by film-makers Allister Gall and Dan Paolantonio in 2010 and taking its’ name and central inspiration from Julio Garcia Espinosa’s seminal text / cinematic call-to-arms, For An Imperfect Cinema (1969).
Imperfect Cinema have produced and facilitated the creation of new film works (over 700 thus far), micro-cinema events, film festivals, symposia, and screenings. We have also facilitated participatory filmmaking workshops at music and arts festivals (Supersonic, Birmingham), in galleries, (Interstate Gallery, NYC), at conferences and symposia (Situated Cinemas, Austria) and more recently within the community of Stonehouse (Plymouth) as part of our residency there.
The project has developed work with a focus on engaging with local audiences and supporting new voices. Our methods encourage engagement through social and collective screenings, film-making, workshops and performances, including sound/screen work, recontextualising existing films for new experiences, new (and established) filmmakers screening their work in shared screening environments, and facilitating critically constructive debates in a wide variety of fora.
Since the beginning of the project, Imperfect Cinema have utilised an open and inclusive methodology. This is largely realised through an anyone-can-participate framework, drawing from the non-hierarchical ideas of DIY culture and punk rock. This methodology aims to instigate producers and provide a venue for film participation, using accessible technologies and convivial spaces and in doing so, celebrating the diversity of cinema as the art of the moving image.
We celebrate the short form film, organise film challenges, explore analogue and digital technologies, environmental issues, media obsolescence, and also organise live sound-screen performances. Harnessing the magic, kitsch, audience involvement and carnivalesque atmosphere of early cinema, we aim to inspire, innovate and create an environment in which participants play with possibilities!
Beginning as a micro-cinema event, we have since expanded the project to include workshops, symposia and international events. Between 2019 and 2024 Imperfect Cinema ran their Home of Movies project, which explored the incredible and largely forgotten Film & Cinema heritage of Plymouth’s iconic Union Street. This project aimed to enable inter-generational and inter-cultural dialogues through shared creative activities and to reactivate forgotten histories for the benefit of the Stonehouse community.
Imperfect Cinema produced twenty Home of Movies events during the five years of the project which commenced with a small public lecture at Stonehouse Memories Group and which concluded with the large-scale Awakening screening event at the former Gaumont Palace Cinema (now the Millennium Building) in Plymouth’s Union Street. During the Home of Movies Project, Imperfect Cinema also produced and facilitated exhibitions, film screenings, live sound-screen performance events, guided interactive history walks, guest lectures and filmmaking workshops. 139 new films were produced in response to this project.
Since our inception Imperfect Cinema have directly inspired a number of other projects such as Imperfect Orchestra (originally Imperfect Cinema Orchestra), Imperfect VR and Imperfect iDocs.
