DIY cinema is a mode of film exhibition, marked by a commitment to spectatorship as a collective participatory practice; an attitude of everyday utopianism, where working practices and relationships to people, place and capital are experimented with to find more favourable alternatives; and ironic and poetic strategies to de-familiarise and subvert the neo-liberal ‘spectacle’ that conventional cinema is so expert at supporting.

There are a bunch in the UK (Cube Cinema, Scalarama, Horse Hospital, Imperfect Cinema, Deptford Cinema) and a whole lot more inspired by similar ideas in Europe (kino Climates) and America (microcinema).

It carries on an impulse found in 90's underground film projects like Exploding Cinema, Brighton Cinematheque, Club Rhombus, Little Stabs at Happiness, OMSK and David Leister's Kino Club.  That impulse was articulated previously in the workshop movement, the federation of workers film societies, the avant-garde film clubs in European cities in the 1920's etc. etc.  always pulling cinema away from its predominantly consumerist home in the leisure industries towards something more emancipatory.

Star and Shadow is a member of the Kino Climates network of alternative screening spaces in Europe and a member of the Radical Film Network.