One of the most successful movements to come out of the Nordics is Restaurant Day – or the quarterly event where anyone can open up a pop-up restaurant on the street corner to sell whatever dishes you’ve been dying to make. When it first started in May of 2011 there were 45 restaurants in 13 cities but today it’s grown to 2,017 restaurants in 30 countries. It’s become a “big deal” in its native Helsinki.
The concept works because people love food, and people want to show off their taste in food. The same thing might work with movies, which is the concept around Cinetopia, a Restaurant-Day-for-Movies concept that’s getting kicked off between November 14-22.
How it works is if you’ve got an event venue, cafe, or living room, you can choose from more than 100 films from around the world through Cinetopia, start selling tickets, and then the income is split between the host and filmmaker. To set some sort of bar, the filmmaker chooses what the minimum price of the ticket can be.
While the list of films is limited to what Cinetopia can negotiate with filmmakers, it’s a cool to see a democratic film festival to build a sense of community among film buffs, while still benefiting filmmakers.
The project is put on by Fabel Kommunikation, the folks behind the Truly Digital conference, Lunch Beat, and CrowdCulture, a crowdfunding platform for public art. It’s still possible to host a movie, if you’re interested!
