For film lovers who love luxury
The tiny cinema offers 30 luxurious leather armchairs, perfect for lounging. There are side tables where patrons can place their champagne or cocktail, and nibbles, even oysters and caviar. The screen is close and the ceiling low. The atmosphere is intimate and elegant.
The theatre, Cinker, is not a typical Beijing movie house — cavernous, packed multiplexes that offer Hollywood franchise films with ear-splitting battle scenes or car chases. China’s government importers and censors prefer those box office hits for the quota of 34 foreign movies allowed into the country each year.
Tucked away on the third floor of a building in an upscale area, Cinker was envisioned by its three partners as a place for movie lovers who want to revisit Hollywood classics, European art house films and vintage Chinese favourites.
Some recent showings: The Godfather and Love on Lushan Mountain, along with early Woody Allen and Agnès Varda.
Amanda Zhang, a former criminal lawyer and a partner in the venture, is around most nights schmoozing with regular diners in the clubby restaurant and presiding over the 1930s-style brass-accented bar.
Zhang’s glamour — she may wear red silky shorts and a flowing top, or a black evening suit, or a formfitting emerald green sheath, always with skyscraper heels — is meant to recall the splendour of Hollywood’s golden age.
Cinker emerged six months ago, an experiment in offering an alternative to Beijing’s standard commercial theatres and a couple of out-of-the-way screening rooms that show old films. The founders invented the name Cinker as shorthand for Cinema Maker.
“We don’t have an independent cinema in China,” said Yan Yixin, a founder. “We thought, ‘How can we make an independent cinema?’ ”
A place with an eclectic schedule (by Beijing standards) and a beckoning atmosphere offered a good start, he said. Shanghai has always been considered the movie home of China — the big production studios opened there after 1949, and most of them remain there. Opening a jewel box cinema in the political capital was considered a brave move, a challenge to the conventional nod to Shanghai as the centre of style. Cinker is a contemporary twist on a turn-ofthe-20th-century movie hall, the Electric, in the London neighbourhood Notting Hill Gate, where the audience sits on plush sofas, armchairs — even beds — and movies are shown on a stage dominated by a gilded ornate proscenium.
Yan recalls going to the Electric with his girlfriend. “It is a vintage cinema, you could lie down on a sofa, have a cocktail from the bar, watch a movie — an amazing experience.”
By locating in Sanlitun, Yan and Zhang, and Lin Fan, an owner of one of Beijing’s fancy restaurants and a producer of Chinese movies, are appealing to habitués of the premier axis of the city’s all-enveloping consumer culture. They are also exploiting changes in movie-going habits.
Audiences have become more sophisticated, and more fickle. And more moviegoers are watching videos provided by online streaming services.