Illustration by Nina Bachmann.
“We must develop film co-operatives by making and screening more films. We must help each other sincerely, by creating new standards of social awareness.”
These are the first words of Report to Mother [Amma Ariyan] (1986), a film by the Malayalam director John Abraham. They are spoken in voiceover even before the first image shows up on the screen. The film follows a group of young activists traveling across the southwestern state of Kerala to inform the mother of a comrade of his suicide. It is a road movie structured around grief, solidarity, and the question of what political community actually means in practice. In its final moments, the camera turns away from the screen to show the community watching the film together, the same people who helped make it, now its audience. In May this year, a new 4K restoration was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, the world’s most prestigious and best-funded film event, a place built on glamour and industry, where the red carpet, the film market, and the award ceremony form a circuit of value that operates at a considerable distance from the communities most films claim to speak for. Report to Mother was part of the Cannes Classics section, 40 years after it was made and never commercially released. It received a standing ovation. That the film exists at all is something of an accident: No original negative survived, and the restoration had to be built painstakingly from two damaged prints. What makes that moment worth pausing on is that Report to Mother was never part of any distribution system at all. The Odessa Collective funded the film by traveling through Kerala asking people directly for money, collecting small amounts, village by village. The finished film was then shown for free in these same villages, outside any commercial structure. Even if Abraham himself understood his movies as his own, the model the Odessa Collective built around Report to Mother—how it was funded, how it was shown, who it was made with—is best described not as independent cinema or even political cinema, but by a word borrowed from a different tradition entirely: commoning.
The term comes from the feminist theorist Silvia Federici, who uses it to describe the collective creation and management of shared resources outside market logic. A commons is not simply a public good; it is something actively produced and maintained by a community, for a community. The classic examples are land and water: resources that were once collectively managed, then enclosed and privatized. But Federici’s argument is not really about land. It is about what happens to social life when the things that sustain it, like the spaces, the knowledge, the practices of care and culture, are progressively handed over to the market in an ongoing process of enclosure. It is about what happens every time a community loses access to a resource it once held in common, every time a shared space becomes a private one, every time the logic of profit replaces the logic of participation. What commoning names, then, is the counter-movement: the active, collective practice of building and defending shared resources against that enclosure. Not a utopia or a finished state, but a verb, an action by many. Something that people do, together, continuously.
Cinema seems like an unlikely commons. It is expensive to make, expensive to distribute and historically entangled with capital from its very beginnings. The Lumière brothers were industrialists, after all, and the Hollywood studio system was built on vertical integration long before streaming platforms relied on the algorithm to determine what gets watched. And yet the commercial form of cinema was never the only possibility. Nor has it gone unchallenged through history. In the Weimar Republic, Social Democrats, Communists, and independent leftists founded the Volksfilmverband as an explicit response to the monopolization of the commercial film industry: a membership organization that created its own screening network, using union halls, pub backrooms, and workers’ meeting spaces to build a counter-public sphere around cinema. It declared itself the property of the working class as a whole and was promptly contested by both parties involved, each wanting to use it as a vehicle for their own politics. What the Volksfilmverband shows is that shared spaces can also be contested ones. Who decides what gets shown, who gets to speak from the front of the room, whose politics frame the discussion? These questions don’t disappear just because the space has been removed from the market. If anything, they become more urgent. The Newsreel Collective in the United States ran into the same problem from a different direction. From 1967, they made and distributed 16mm films directly to civil rights organizations, trade unions, and community groups, explicitly describing themselves as the “propaganda arm of the New Left.” The language was honest, if uncomfortable: They knew they were making arguments, not documentaries in any neutral sense. But the collective’s own composition told another story. In 1973, African American, Latino, and Asian members confronted the group over its failure to represent communities of color, not just on screen, but in the room where decisions were made. They took over the New York chapter and renamed it Third World Newsreel. The lesson holds: The question of who gets to speak, and for whom, is not a problem to be solved but a practice to be sustained. It’s one that requires constant negotiation, and a genuine commitment to making participation as wide as possible. The history of cinema as commons is also, inevitably, a history of that negotiation failing, and being resumed.
It is therefore all the more striking that the same impulse keeps returning and that the newest iterations seem more alert to that question than their predecessors were. SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, run by the collective bi’bak, has been operating in Berlin since 2020 and is now based in Wedding, one of the city’s most densely postmigrant neighborhoods. Its name draws on migration researcher Erol Yıldız’s concept of “transtopia”: a place shaped by everywhere its community comes from, not just where it is located. Therefore the cinema is not a neutral container for content. Who is in the room, whose cultural memory is being tended to, whose gaze is being decentered: These are, first and foremost, political decisions. SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA is a place where postmigrant, transnational communities gather to define what a public can look like—in practice through an internationally drawn curatorial team, a program shaped partly by audience vote, and a communal space that extends beyond the screening itself. They are not alone. Kavaklıdere Cinema in Ankara, Turkey, sat empty for sixteen years before reopening in 2023 as Kült Kavaklıdere, a collectively run arts center that opens its spaces free of charge to nonprofit groups and theatre collectives, sustaining a public function without public funding. In Rwanda’s capital of Kigali, Imitana Productions revived Cine Mayaka, the oldest surviving cinema in the country, and regularly takes its screenings out of the building entirely, into public squares and open streets. Across different cities and very different contexts, the same basic claim repeats: that a room, a screen, and an audience are worth protecting. And that claim deserves more attention than it usually gets.
A cinema as commons is not simply a different way of programming films. It is a different kind of social proposition altogether. What happens when a community gathers to watch a film it has chosen together, in a space it has collectively claimed, cannot be replicated by watching the same film alone. The film becomes a shared reference point, a starting place for conversation, a way of recognizing something in each other. The room produces a temporary public, and that public, however briefly, understands itself as one. People sit in the same room, encounter the same thing, and agree or disagree about what it means. That is very close to what democratic culture requires in order to function.
It is also worth asking what those spaces are fighting against, or rather, what kind of relationship to cinema they are refusing. The dominant model of moving-image consumption today is not simply commercial; it is algorithmic. A small number of platforms now control not just distribution but also the conditions under which films get made, the data that determines what gets commissioned, the interface through which most people on earth encounter moving images. The logic is one of personalization: Every scroll, every pause, every abandoned film feeds a system designed to predict and preempt your next choice. What gets optimized, in the end, is your continued individual engagement with the platform. This is a form of enclosure of attention, of taste, of the very capacity to be surprised by something you didn’t already know you wanted. What gets lost is the condition of watching together in a room, with strangers and friends. This is why gathering matters. Streaming has made watching films easier, cheaper, and more solitary than at any point in cinema’s history. It has also made the act of gathering to watch something together feel, quietly, like a choice, one that requires a little more intention than it used to. But what the history of cinema as commons suggests is that this gathering was never incidental, that the room has always been part of the argument, as much as the film inside it.
That idea is worth holding onto: a cinema that refuses to offer a service and insists on building a commons, and a public that understands itself as such. The cinemas carrying this impulse forward today are not simply alternatives to the multiplex but a response to a specific moment. It is not a coincidence that they are multiplying now, in a moment when public space is contracting, when political life feels increasingly managed from above, when the simple act of gathering together has started to feel like a position in itself. What these cinemas insist on, each in its own way, is that cinema can be more than entertainment delivered to an audience, that the room, and who fills it, and what happens after the lights come up, are themselves political questions worth taking seriously, and that those questions don’t resolve themselves once and for all. They have to be asked again and again, by every community. The cinema has always had the potential to function as a commons. In certain moments of political urgency, people have insisted on it. This is one of those moments.