This large empty space – at various times a church and a food bank – is gradually assuming the form of a movie theater.
Cicada Cinema, Bloomington’s independent pop-up movie theater, is opening a permanent location on North Fairview. It’s scheduled to open late this summer.
Volunteers including Nathan Brewer are erecting new walls and assembling new seating.
“A lot of us had to, in sweaty 90 degrees heat, move chairs out of here, chairs back in, set up scaffolding,” Brewer said. “It's been an enormous amount of physical work, and there's a lot more to come.”
Their vision is not just a theater capable of high-quality screenings but a community space on the near west side for lovers of film.
“The theme we're using for our decoration is Pee-wee Deco, to kind of capture the fun of Pee-wee's Playhouse with sort of a classic Art Deco movie house vibe,” Brewer said.
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The nonprofit group began screening films 10 years ago. Since 2018, it has hosted pop-up shows at parks and bars. Co-founder and manager Josh Brewer said he’s been hoping for a space of its own for years.
“We knew we wanted to grow, to be able to bring more programming to the community and a more consistent schedule, and also to be able to bring more family movies, art house movies, to the Bloomington audiences,” Josh said.
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With a matching $50,000 grant from the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority and a fundraising campaign underway, Cicada Cinema settled on a spot adjacent to the future site of the Friendly Beasts Cidery and the B-Line Trail.
The theater will seat 70 when completed, with chairs and fixtures salvaged from Wolf Theatres in Greensburg. Programming chair Derek Navardauskas hopes a permanent space will allow more options for screening times and films.
“We're looking to move from around one or two screenings a week to about six,” he said.
A light- and sound-controlled space means the cinema can offer matinees for kids, and privacy allows it to screen longer and more serious films than it could show at a bar.
“We think the quality of the screenings, the quality of our sound and projection really will be able to do justice to the art itself,” Josh said.
Cicada is largely dropping the pop-up model, but some things won’t change. It plans to continue outdoor screenings with the Bloomington Parks Department as well as its Cicada Underground and New Queer Cinema series.
The public will get its first look inside the theater at an open house on June 27.
“We're not trying to hide the fact that this is a construction zone,” Navardauskas said. “I actually think it's kind of novel for the community to see that happen.”
