That’s brilliant, that’s exactly what was so successful about The Side Cinema.

Well, I curated a number of strategic programmes there, if you like, that might be useful to discuss. Shall we give you a little overview of how the Side Cinema began?

It was quite an organic process really. There were a few groups of people, who were either already programming or wanting to programme film and video projects at the Side Cinema. The Side Cinema was owned by Amber [www.amber-online.com], a long-standing Newcastle based independent film collective.

There were two groups initially who proposed to Amber to run film screenings. There was the Radical Side group, which then were just called The Tyneside Radical Film Festival. Their intention was to find a new method of communicating information to people in order to inspire them to take direct action. The other group was Cine Side organised by Mat Fleming and me. Our initial idea was to start running a film club in a pub or something because it’s hard to see films. And when we were researching the local film scene we came across Amber and the cinema. It was through seeing the space that we actually thought, 'oh my God, this place has to be open'. From thinking of running a film club in a pub, it was suddenly like, let’s run a cinema, but on a voluntary basis like a film club whereby people would pay £25 and get tickets for a season. Almost at exactly the same time as we started our film programme, Radical Side started a film programme on a fortnightly basis.

No. Mat and me were probably more like, ‘that would fit really well into our programme’, and they were more, ‘what are those people doing?’ I think they were suspicious of us.

We started with a free film festival. It was a week of shorts and features trying to be as broad as possible. It started with Launch (10mins, 1973, UK) a film by Amber and L’Atalante (1934, France) by Jean Vigo and finished with Songs from the Second Floor (2000, Sweden) by Roy Andersson. It was trying to be a cross-section of cinema. When we did our first programme we were just thinking of feature films. But we’d gone to Little Stabs of Happiness at the ICA a few times and got to know of the existence of this other type of cinema which we hadn’t really seen before. Also we knew Mark Webber, so we were thinking ‘wouldn’t it be nice to see some of this material’. So in the spring we started with our first history of avant-garde cinema. Which was a programme basically donated by Mark. We just asked him to recommend some good films, and he sent us a list of fourteen film programmes of about an hour and a half each. So it was a bit like pick and choose. It was so nice of him, we might have given him £50 or something paltry, so it was really nice of him to do that.

At the same time in that spring season Julie [Ballands] arrived and was interested in programming films specifically for the lesbian and gay community in Newcastle. So she did a couple of screenings, one was a travelling filmmaker, an experimental filmmaker called Karen Everett from San Francisco. As the Side Cinema was open, it provided an opportunity for Julie to invite this person. In the early days of the cinema opportunities like this kept cropping up. We were often taking touring filmmakers like Bill Brown from America, and Jack Stevenson an independent film distributor from Denmark who would show his curated programmes. We very quickly started a relationship with Brighton Cinemateque and Cube in Bristol. Basically if you were programming something then, we’d probably take it. That spring and summer season was probably the most developed and exciting.

I got involved during the shift from people just doing their own thing, to actually saying, hang on a minute, we’re actually running a venue here, we’re not just programming a night. I’d been curating in an art gallery and increasingly working with artist, film and video. In fact one of the recent exhibitions was Anti-Prophey by Sarah Tripp which we built a cinema in the gallery for, complete with raked seating and curtains and everything. And I thought ‘what am I doing? Why don’t I just show this in a cinema?’

I was kind of frustrated with how poorly a lot of artists' film and video was shown in galleries and how galleries were programming essentially cinema-based work. I thought it would be really good to try and show some of that work in a cinema. I was also looking at more and more politicised areas of art practice and obviously film and video is one of them. So I researched a programme in that summer and got in touch with Matt and Christo and with Allen and talked to them about that programme. For me, my programme was quite strategic, I wanted to show how artists' work brought what Matt and Christo were showing in Cine Side together with the kinds of work that the Tyneside Radical Film Festival were showing. To put it simplistically the Radical Film Festival was political, and the Cine Side programme was more formal and aesthetic. So I was interested in work deconstructed the medium in different ways.

Cine Side did have an interest in more oppositional filmmakers though, in alternative cultural distribution and cultural production as well.

There was a link. I wanted my programme to unpick that link, or unpick that relationship from both directions really. I researched a programme that I thought would do that. It started off with the Situationist Guy Debord’s film – and then ended up with Johan Grimonprez’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (68mins, 1997, Belgium). It included all sorts of really quirky programming, like putting together bits of news footage with artists' film and mixing things around. That was at the point we became The Side Cinema with four sides; Cine Side, The Radical Side, The Other Side the gay and lesbian strand and A Side which was artists film and video.

We were also conscious that we were going for funding separately. We’d got £800 from the Arts Council early on to do this film festival. Initially we were under the impression that after the festival that’d be the last ever piece of funding we’d get or need. We thought we’d be raking it in with the punters any day soon. The first programme we did at Cine Side we sold enough memberships to pay for the next season. Radical Side had such cheap costs because of the films that they were getting, whereas our costs were higher, film society prices.

And my costs were even higher as they were gallery prices. It would cost Radical Side about £20 to put on a night, it would cost Cine Side maybe a £100 to £150, and it would cost me with A Side about £250 to put on a night.

Radical Side were very keen on the idea that the audience runs the cinema, that the whole structure be participatory and led by the people taking part. With Cine Side, that wasn’t our concern to begin with, although we were easily won over to that argument. So that summer we were starting to talk about federating and becoming The Side Cinema and setting up a committee and a constitution which represented all of our four programme areas as well as applying for joint funding, producing one piece of publicity and runing it like a single venue. We then negotiated that with Amber Films, because up until then we’d been paying them about £50 a night. And now we wanted to pay them X thousand pounds a year.

When we started, Northern Film and Media were just setting up. We were a guinea pig organisation for them. There was an unclear area with artist film and video and whether the Arts Council or Northern Film and Media should fund it. And we were in danger of neither of them funding it and what we really wanted was both, which was what happened eventually.

The first funding application I did was directly to the Arts Council specifically for artist film and video as part of the Side Cinema programme, and they were really happy with that. But they weren’t happy with funding a cinema because Northern Film and Media really should be funding it. But as it turns out Northern Film and Media don’t have very much money, and so after one or two years we agreed that the Arts Council would fund the visual arts aspect of the programme with a contribution to the overheads of the cinema. Northern Film and Media put funding directly into the running of the cinema as a venue for exhibition, for exhibiting film.