Incorporated in early 2014, Sudbury Indie Cinema is a mission-driven, membership-owned co-op arts organization intentionally located in downtown Sudbury, offering film programming unique to NE Ontario. Because of Indie Cinema, Sudbury residents and visitors now have year-round access to the best, new independent films being made in Canada and the world today.  Since moving into our own single screen theatre, we host and organize more than 800 public screenings per year, run 4 annual regional film festivals, and curate various film series with many with value-added components such as filmmaker Q & As and panel discussions. We screen new independent local, Canadian and  foreign films and documentaries, along with classic art films, interactive events and cult favourites. Every year Indie Cinema has dozens of community partners working to create community and raise awareness toward a myriad of local issues. Sudbury Indie Cinema, is a member-owned, community-oriented organization, with 1500 lifetime members.

Since incorporating in 2014, Sudbury Indie Cinema had the goal of opening a dedicated independent movie house in downtown Sudbury. Programming unique series and festivals pop-up style for our first 5 years, we were finally able to bring all the funding and partners together to re-purpose a defunct school gym into a state-of-the-art fully digital, single screen cinema. Since opening late February 2019, we have ramped up from 60 screenings per year to 60 series per month, nearly 750 in our first full-time year of operations as a theatre – a more than ten-fold increase to our public offerings.

Our space at 162 Mackenzie St., increasingly and affectionately referred to as “the Indie”, has a multi-arts function. We are committed to sharing our home with other local arts groups and not-for-profit organizations to help forward their programming and to assist them to gain a friendly and affordable community performance space to interface with the public. To this end, we actively seek partnerships and collaborations with local groups, community causes, local presenters, and emerging arts organizations who are unhoused or under-housed. Public programming has only increased from that point, as well as diversifying into a multi-disciplinary arts and community space, hosting events as diverse as slam poetry, to improv, social dances, cabarets, to quartets and concerts. 

Sudbury is one of the smaller communities among the list of cities with independent, not-for-profit, mission-driven arthouse cinemas like Sudbury Indie Cinema. As a member of NICE (Network of Canadian Exhibitors), we stay connected to colleagues from similar cinemas. We, like all the other media arts organizations, are unique. Independent arthouses reflect their own communities, and Sudbury Indie Cinema is uniquely programmed to meet the needs of the many communities-of-interest that we serve.