Inside The Arzner, the UK’s first dedicated…

Walk­ing to Bermond­sey from Lon­don Bridge, you pass through a long tun­nel. ​“Am I going the right way?” you might think to your­self, but you forge on, even­tu­al­ly emerg­ing from the dark­ness, out into the open. The same prin­ci­ple can be applied to your des­ti­na­tion at the oth­er end: The Arzn­er. As the UK’s first LGBTQ-focused cin­e­ma, The Arzn­er pro­vides a ded­i­cat­ed space for queer rep­re­sen­ta­tion on screen, a dark screen­ing room in which greater under­stand­ing of your­self and oth­ers can come to light.

An invit­ing pres­ence in the cen­tre of Bermond­sey Square, The Arzn­er opened its doors in April. Through its floor-to-ceil­ing win­dows, a styl­ish, spa­cious and home­ly bar area can be seen, and it’s evi­dent at first glance that they’re proud to be so vis­i­ble. This build­ing has a long his­to­ry as a cin­e­ma space, and part of the site con­di­tions is that it remains one. ​“I live around the cor­ner, and I used to come here when it was a cin­e­ma before” says co-founder Simon Burke, whose back­ground is in hos­pi­tal­i­ty. Piers Green­lees, the oth­er half of the equa­tion, comes from the film world. On the fes­ti­val cir­cuit over the years, he would see great LGBTQ+ films debut and res­onate with audi­ences, and yet they’d fail to fil­ter down to gen­er­al audi­ences. ​“Queer films will always strug­gle to get onto the big screen, because stu­dios don’t believe that there’ll be an audi­ence for them,” reflects Green­lees. ​“They’ve got to be packed with big names or mas­sive sto­ries – they can’t just be sim­ple, relat­able sto­ries that a lot of audi­ences can con­nect to”.

The pair’s first ven­ture – near­by queer-focused pub and events space The Ris­ing – opened last year to warm recep­tion. When the oppor­tu­ni­ty to do some­thing with the Bermond­sey Square cin­e­ma site came up, it was a no-brain­er. ​“Film is a tough busi­ness, but the added focus on this being a cock­tail bar makes it a more com­mer­cial­ly viable space, which I think is what the pre­vi­ous man­age­ment strug­gled with.” says Burke. Along­side the expect­ed sta­ples, The Arzn­er serves up a for­mi­da­ble selec­tion of charm­ing­ly-themed cock­tails, each named after impor­tant fig­ures in LGBTQ+ cin­e­ma his­to­ry, rang­ing from Mar­lene Diet­rich to Wong Kar-wai.

The Arzn­er – both the house cock­tail and the venue – are named after Dorothy Arzn­er, a sem­i­nal fig­ure who from 1927 to 1943 was the only female direc­tor in Hol­ly­wood. The deci­sion to chris­ten the venue after her came after a lot of thought and con­sid­er­a­tion. ​“It was impor­tant for us to have a les­bian voice,” says Burke. ​“No queer cin­e­ma is wide­ly dis­trib­uted enough, but les­bian films haven’t been as cel­e­brat­ed as those focus­ing on the gay male expe­ri­ence. Dorothy Arzn­er was pub­licly out for her entire career, and that was impor­tant to me, along with how much of an impact she had”.

Green­lees and Burke haven’t come across a sim­i­lar­ly LGBTQ-ded­i­cat­ed cin­e­ma venue any­where in the UK, or even in the US, and no one that they’ve spo­ken to knows of an equiv­a­lent space either. ​“In the same way as you have a ded­i­cat­ed French cin­e­ma in Lon­don in the Insti­tut Français, you have us for queer cin­e­ma” says Greenlees. 

Col­lab­o­ra­tion and con­ver­sa­tion are at the core of what the Arzn­er team is build­ing, hav­ing already fos­tered strong rela­tion­ships with dis­trib­u­tors that focus on queer titles such as Pec­ca­dil­lo, Out­play, and TLA – and they’ve begun dia­logues with London’s coterie of queer cin­e­ma spe­cial­ists about future pos­si­bil­i­ties. The key to The Arzner’s dream, and the like­li­hood of their suc­cess, is that they don’t want to sup­plant what’s already been built in the cap­i­tal by film clubs such as Pink Palace, Bar Trash, and Funer­al Parade, but instead to pro­vide a home for queer cin­e­ma that exists year-round.