WITH STATE-OF-THE-ART HOME, DIGITAL GYM CINEMA STARTS NEW CHAPTER
A new era begins today for Media Arts Center San Diego and its Digital Gym Cinema. The 30-year-old organization, previously housed in North Park, reopens in a new East Village location: UC San Diego @ Park & Market.
“We’ve been working with Mary Walshok from UCSD Extension for the past 2½ on this idea of having a cinema in their new four-story space,” said Media Arts Center’s executive director, Ethan Van Thillo. “She’s known us as an organization for the past 30 years because of the San Diego Latino Film Festival. They (UCSD) felt it was a perfect fit.
“I can already see the wonderful benefits of having a partner where everything is top-notch. Not only the projection space that we’re in, but the concession items and the supplies and the equipment they brought in.”
The Digital Gym Cinema will be on the building’s second floor. The first screening, today at 1, 4 and 7 p.m., will be of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2021 film “Memoria,” starring Tilda Swinton as a Scottish woman living in Colombia who is haunted by a booming sound.
“To me, it’s such a perfect film to open the theater with,” Van Thillo said. “It shows the direction we want to take in terms of screening independent foreign films on a large screen. We also want people to have this communal experience again, to come out and see the movies.”
Media Arts Center’s new home also will have offices on the third floor and classroom space for educational programs. That’s quite the step up from the organization’s old digs in what had once been an auto parts store.
“It was a little rough around the edges,” Van Thillo recalled with a laugh. digitalgym.org