Mammoth – A Climate Action Cinema
A hub for sharing ideas on how we can all help create a better, fairer, and greener future - focused around film
Interview with Patrick Hort and Raffa Baldo, written by Andy Barrett
Nottingham has one of the smallest cinemas in the country, just across the street from Broadway; and for nearly three years it’s been home to Mammoth, a self-proclaimed ‘climate action cinema’ and a ‘hub for sharing ideas about how we can all contribute towards a better, fairer, and greener future - focused around film’. I went to talk to Patrick Hort, the founder and owner of Mammoth, and Raffa Baldo, the cinema manager.
As with many of these articles there are lots of links for you to explore, including trailers for many of the films that are mentioned. So do give yourself time to dig into everything here.
So Patrick, how did this all begin?
It all began at school I suppose, in that one of my classmates was James Collington, who was from a long line of cinema owners and went on to run Savoy Cinemas (‘eight cinema sites in the middle and north of England’). I’m a computer programmer and around 2006 we set up a company Savoy Systems together creating and running software for cinemas; to run the online booking, popcorn orders and that sort of thing. He’s not involved now but we’ve grown into a company that has about 10 staff and over 100 customers. Most are cinemas, but we also work with theatres like Nottingham Arts Theatre and the Lace Market. We're basically the little software guys for independent theatres and cinemas.
Around 2000 I started to clock the climate crisis and the fact that there was something going on that I should be aware of. I’d done my degree in Physics and because what was happening was being couched in quite technical language it spoke to me as somebody who prefers numbers to stories to get my information. Then I saw the films The Age of Stupid and An Inconvenient Truth and they made a big impact on me, and showed me what cinematic storytelling could do. I was under the impression that everybody's just going to get this. It's really clear. We’d managed to come together to face the challenge to the ozone layer and I assumed there would be this orderly and relatively low impact transition to a sustainable future. I made changes in my own life, and in 2015 the Paris Climate Agreement seemed like a really positive step forward. But then things started to go in the wrong direction and I became more depressed about the whole thing.
And then in 2017, this building became available and my team and I thought wouldn’t it be fun, as we're already working in the industry, to have our own cinema. We all knew that it's been a cinema forever. It was a porn cinema in the 70s and was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's smallest cinema for a couple of years. There have been marriage proposals in here, they’ve had screenings on Christmas Day, and although it didn't really make any financial sense because it only has 22 seats, we really wanted to make sure the building remained as a cinema.
We didn’t realise that the building was actually available to buy and because I’d been living in London the cost was much lower than I had anticipated. It turned out that we could afford a mortgage and take the whole building over: the office, the cinema, and a couple of one-bedroom flats above. It suddenly made perfect sense because we could have security of tenure, and invest in the building and the long term without the risk of being thrown out by a landlord.
Did the building need a lot of work?
It did; and that took a while partly because I like to do things my own way and by myself. There were leaks all over the place; there was no heating. In the end I have to say that the building itself isn’t a good example of sustainable practice but we were able to refurbish the building to make the cinema viable again.
We bought the screen, projector, speakers, and seats from Screen 22 who were the immediate predecessors here. We don't have the ability to project 35mm film, all of the films are digitally projected; but they had put in an amazing sound system: Dolby 5.1 surround sound, with a subwoofer, speakers in the screen, speakers on the wall. The building may have been falling apart but the cinematic experience was in really good shape. It took around five years, what with COVID and keeping the business going, to make the money to pay for everything and sort out the licenses; but on August 6th 2022 we were finally able to open.
Was it always going to be focussing on environmental issues?
Yes; and we always wanted it to be a community cinema. I had been becoming much more engaged in environmental activism, and had been drawn to Extinction Rebellion because it seemed to me that finally there was a group acknowledging the severity and the immediacy of the threat and how it was already affecting people all over the world. But I definitely didn't want to make the cinema an Extinction Rebellion cinema. I think it's really important to have a breadth of activism and approaches to what is happening.
There were two key aims. Firstly, to make the cinema really focus on the climate crisis, which is why we took the decision to call it ‘Mammoth, a Climate Action Cinema’, so that anybody who walks past or sees a cinema listing will understand the purpose of the cinema. And secondly to tread a kind of politically neutral line. Obviously, party politics overlap with the climate crisis but we’re trying to get people in the room who can have conversations. They might disagree, but disagree civilly and reach a position where we understand each other and can hopefully move forward.
Many of our films are documentaries, probably because I'm a bit literal minded, but we do also have feature films here as well. And we always have a conversation after the film which I think is vital in creating connections. The audience does tend to be within the ‘bubble’ so it's very exciting when somebody comes along who doesn’t fully agree with what we’re saying or showing. The goal is to use film to draw other people in, people who maybe don't share my political views but want to create a fairer and more sustainable society. What's been really fascinating is the number of people who have come to us, especially academics from Nottingham Trent and the University of Nottingham, alongside activists and all sorts of interesting people, to say ‘can we do something together?’ It's been wonderful; we have this amazing network of people and I know so many people in Nottingham now as a result.
How easy, or difficult, is it to run a cinema?
It turns out it’s really hard work. I found that getting hold of films was really time-consuming. You've got to negotiate a deal; you’ve got to get the film. Then when I proudly put on the first film as part of a six-week programme and only three people turned up, I realised that the work was only just beginning; that the bigger job was to market the films and the cinema and to get people along. So, it was really hard work but very, very rewarding. The conversations that we were having after the films were really uplifting, even if there were only five people in the room; although we tend to have more like twenty these days. I came away feeling rejuvenated and encouraged by what was happening here in this tiny little space. But it became unsustainable for me to run both a business and a little cinema, and I needed help.
Which is where you come in Raffa …
I’ve been here now for about eighteen months. I've been very worried about the climate emergency since I was young, and as an illustrator I have a strong feeling about the power of art to tell stories and connect people. I’m from Bologna and had come to Trent to study Illustration and I was fascinated with this place as a kind of environmental hub; and how the conversations after the films were the connective space where people could share their ideas, their knowledge and expertise, and ideas for what solutions there might be.
Because it's work that we have to do together; none of us has all the resources or all the ideas or all the solutions to the problem, and I guess this place aims to get people together to work on a solution together.
The Lobby
The Bar
How many environmentally themed films are out there? Who is making them and where do you find them? How are those films financed?
To start with it felt quite difficult to find the films because I (Patrick) didn't have really any kind of network. I was really just Googling ‘environmental film festivals’, and seeing what I might spot in the paper. I would say, and I think this is objectively true and not just my lack of experience then, that in the last two and a half years the number of films that are coming out has absolutely exploded.
We've also helped to set up the UK Green Film Network (‘to share ideas around Environmental film programming, and to reduce the amount of work required to screen inspiring films in the face of the Climate Crisis’) with Felicity Beckett, who works at Picturehouse Cinemas, and have ten cinemas currently working together through that. We have realised the importance of storytelling; that the science and the numbers and the graphs are one thing but we need to connect with people emotionally. As I said I connect to numbers, but most people don't. They like individual stories; they like characters. I also think that filmmakers are pulling their punches less than they used to. If you watch Ocean by David Attenborough you can really see that. And as well as the number of films increasing the quality and power of them is increasing. Some you might question in terms of greenwashing; others you might not agree with their scientific credentials, but they're often incredibly well done and informative.
In terms of where the money is coming from that is right across the board. Don't Look Up, was a big-name Hollywood film, and at the other end there's crowdfunding. You can make films quite cheaply, a lot are self-shot, and there are philanthropic organizations that put money into projects. The Doc Society, funds documentaries all over the world and has a climate strand. I put a little bit of money into a film about Just Stop Oil recently, because I really wanted to see it made. There's a huge range of sources of funding.
We’ve shown some wonderful short films made on a very low budget, which can be really powerful. But we mainly tend to show full length films, because it's hard work to reach out to ten people to get ten shorts; although the power of storytelling across a shorter span does often give a film real immediacy and allow for more experimentation. Audiences also seem to like them because across one evening you can watch six or seven stories that can be very different.
So how does it work financially with so few seats? Presumably filmmakers are hoping for, or need, some kind of economic recompense from their films being shown?
We approach them very honestly and explain that we have 22 seats. Sometimes you're communicating with the distributors of bigger films and they say the fee is £200 and we have to say OK we can't afford it. But most of the time they will work with you on your budget. We have built up a reputation now. People can see the archive of films we have shown and sometimes we have filmmakers that are happy for us to screen their work for free.
So, who is your audience? And how do you get new people in?
We don't do social media on principle because I honestly think that’s part of the problem in terms of myths and disinformation, so we rely on the mailing list which we’ve built up to over a thousand. (You can subscribe to that here to receive regular updates on films and activities that are taking place.) There's a lot of word of mouth but also a huge number of people who don't even know we exist.
What is striking is that when we put on films that are a little more mainstream, perhaps feature films, stories, rather than climate change documentaries, or films which have a less obvious environmental focus, we tend to have fewer people turning up. We've cultivated an audience that knows what we usually do and we need to try harder to promote those other films. For example we recently screened this beautiful film about this incredible woman called Megan Boyd who was one of the world's best makers of fishing flies; an absolute genius who was revered throughout the fishing community, and we only had five people in. But we were all blown away by it.
How do you find out about a film like that? And what is the decision-making process about whether to screen it?
I think that one came through the UK Green Film Network. And in terms of how we decide to program, Raffa and I just discuss it and take a punt. We’d never spend more than about £100 on a license so the worst case is we could lose £100. Sometimes we watch a trailer and think it looks amazing; sometimes we ask them for a screener (an advance or promotional copy of a film). We get a lot of recommendations; we scan a lot of festivals for their programming. The UK Green Film Network is going to have a database of films which will crucially be tagged with the distribution details and the person to get in touch with. We're hoping that once it’s up and running properly, filmmakers will come to us and say, please stick my film on your website. Hopefully we can be that online hub that connects filmmakers with cinemas and the general public and to persuade cinemas there's a market for this work.
Do you notice issues becoming more prevalent whilst others start to fade away?
Things do go in waves a little bit. A year or so ago everybody was into fungi when Web of Life came out; and there was a lot of interest in soil. Recently there’s a lot of interest in farming, and of the impact of livestock farming and if this can be sustainable. Fashion is another one that's popped up. I'm sure there's so much more that can and will come out. And whilst there are lots of independent films being made cheaply there are lots of mainstream actors and film makers who are engaged with the issue. You’ve got the success of films like Flow, and even though making big budget films is incredibly risky production companies are putting material out because they know people have an interest in nature.
Make My Money Matter is a really interesting project. Richard Curtis, (Four Weddings and a Funeral) has been through what he claims are three iterations of trying to make the world a better place. He co-founded Comic Relief which was based on the idea of charity. Then he moved into trying to influence government policy with the Robin Hood Tax campaign. Now he’s focussing on corporations and the absolutely colossal amount of money that is invested in pensions which can be funding all sorts of things which are utterly antithetical to the person whose money is being invested. So, he’s been making high quality short films about pensions with A-list stars; Olivia Colman talking about the oil industry in ‘Oblivia Coalmine’; Benedict Cumberbatch talking about de-forestation in ‘Benedict Lumberjack’. The campaign has only recently closed, but all of the films can be downloaded now and used by anyone.
We’re definitely an activist hub but I just worry that word activist will put people off, so we’re always looking to engage with the community. We hosted a Nottingham Film Festival last year, a three-day festival of short films, which had both an environmental strand and a local strand. We made sure that the impact of the festival was very low, nobody flew in, but it wasn't an environmentally themed festival. Just before Christmas we had a live piano accompaniment to an old Buster Keaton film, which was just amazing. And periodically we have a mending workshop here in the office.
In terms of networking for every screening we try to have someone local, whether it is an expert, a scientist, an organization, or activist group related to the theme of the film, to come as part of a Q&A. That enriches the conversations we can have and also gives a chance to explore what is happening on the local level; so that people can connect with each other and interrogate what they are doing. We recently had a film called The Beaver Believers, a very funny American film about the power of beavers and their ability to recreate or rejuvenate natural habitats. And we had Janice from the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust, who has been responsible for the beaver reintroduction in the Idle Valley here in Nottinghamshire. It was great to have her validate the film because we're watching it as amateurs and she's the beaver expert. We might sometimes watch films that come from across the world and not be able to immediately connect them to what's happening here, so when we can do, it’s precious. It can take a lot of work but it really adds to the value of what we’re doing and it obviously makes it a bit easier to sell the event.
The statistics are that over seventy percent of people in this country have concerns about the environment, but many don't know that they are part of such a large number. (Here are some interesting statistics about public opinion in climate change in the UK). The more people stick their head above the parapet, the more people will realize that it’s alright to engage with this issue, and to find a way to engage with it rather than just being anxious and feeling overwhelmed.
There must be times when only having 22 seats feels very limiting.
We’ve done a few collaborations; with the Bonington Theatre and Broadway. They told us they wanted to screen Wilding and we said we’d put a panel together. We did the same with The Nettle Dress, a fascinating film about a guy who spent seven years harvesting nettles, from which he made a dress. The filmmaker brought the dress for people to have a look at and we had to move the film from screen three to screen two because it was so popular.
There is a need for small spaces because this is basically a big living room. Guests feel more comfortable speaking by the time the film's finished, because they've already had a chat with everyone upstairs in the bar. When we have a Q&A it always feels more of a conversation within the whole group.
How does the pricing structure work? It looks like a pay what you want scheme?
We have five prices and people decide which they will pay; from £2 up to £10. Every now and then we'll do something that means we'll up the price a bit but it averages out at almost £6; so, we just budget that’s what we’re getting, which after paying VAT, is essentially £5. That means if we sell out we make £110 to put towards the film.
That doesn’t sound financially sustainable. Are you able to get grants from anywhere?
We probably could if we tried but they might come with strings attached. Occasionally we'll do private hires, sometimes with the universities, and we make a bit of cash out of that which goes towards funding other things. The software business subsidizes it but it’s not as much as you might think, especially in terms of what I feel we're able to do even as a pretty small entity.
And have you any favourite films to recommend?
There’s a film called It'll Never Work which is about this amazing Scotsman called Hans Unkles and his attempt to build the UK’s first Carbon Zero, solar-powered fishing boat. The hoops he has to jump through to make this happen in terms of the regulatory framework is amazing. It's just incredibly inspiring. You can stream it or wait until we show it again, which we probably will.
There's also Wild Coast Warriors which we’ve recently shown about the indigenous coastal communities of South Africa taking Shell to court for trying to exploit their ancestral lands to extract oil; the communities won, which is just extremely hopeful. A lot of the films that we screen are quite tough, there's no hiding away from it; but you do need that element of hope, of seeing that action and protest can be successful when people work together. We need these positive visions of the future.