(Still from ‘Home of Movies’ a film by Allister Gall & Rachel Gipetti, produced in 2018 inspired our project of the same name)

Home of Movies was a socio-participatory film project led by Imperfect Cinema, which ran from 2019-2024 and which explored the largely forgotten (and truly remarkable) film & cinema heritage of Plymouth’s iconic Union Street. The project sought to use our historical research to inspire and catalyse film-making, participation, and community engagement, with a specific aim of enabling and empowering inter-cultural and inter-generational dialogues.

Imperfect Cinema produced twenty  Home of Movies events during the five years of the project which commenced with a public lecture at Stonehouse Memories Group and which concluded with the Awakening screening event at the former Gaumont Palace Cinema (now the Millennium Building) in Plymouth’s iconic 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, all of which aimed to enable inter-cultural and inter-generational dialogues through shared creative practice and the reactivation of forgotten histories. 139 new films were produced in response to this project.

Background

Union Street is a large Victorian boulevard which was constructed between 1812-1820 to link the three towns of Plymouth, East Stonehouse and Devonport, and which has been home to a surprisingly large amount of cinemas (spread over ten separate sites). Union Street is also notable as being the first place in which film screenings happened in the city of Plymouth (St James’ Hall Electric Theatre, (AKA ‘Home of Movies’), in October 1896), the venue of the UK’s Premiere screening of Shoulder Arms, (directed by Charlie Chaplin in 1918) the location in which Oscar-winner Gary Oldman made his debut feature film appearance (Remembrance, 1982), in addition to being the final place that Hollywood screen legends Laurel and Hardy made their final bow as a double-act (New Palace Theatre, 1954).

The project not only aimed to consolidate and extend historical research of Union Street’s Cinema heritage but also explore the transformative potential of DIY filmmaking and other approaches to culture-making, through engagement with the local community, particularly in the Stonehouse ward.

Stonehouse is the Plymouth ward which perhaps faces the biggest challenges, with unemployment, poverty and social exclusion particularly prevalent in the area. School-age children achieve less well than in all other Plymouth wards, and creeping gentrification is real pressure on the local community.

Aims

The Home of Movies Project sought to re-engage the community with aspects of its history, to enable inter-cultural and inter-generational  dialogues through creativity, and to bring cultural capital, new value and creative opportunities and experiences to the area.