New Single-Screen Cinema Eclipse To Open in an Old Collingwood Football Factory

For the past few months, the street-facing windows of a former Sherrin football factory on Wellington Street, Collingwood have – for no apparent reason – been displaying movie posters for Poor Things, Bottoms and See How They Run.

At last, the mystery is solved: at the end of August, the building will open as Eclipse Cinema, a 64-seat single-screen theatre with a focus on local, international, indie and avant-garde cinema.

Eclipse – named for a early 20th-century silent cinema that was once at 20 Smith Street, Collingwood – is the work of Mark Walker, a co-founder of Geelong’s Pivotonian Cinema.

Walker plans to run new releases “peppered with retro content”. Programming will centre films he says “might not make any money” but “need to be seen on screen”. He hopes Eclipse will be a reliable place for small distributors and a theatre where filmmakers can screen “riskier”, niche content.

“Those are the films that I’m always looking for, because they’re the ones that are often overlooked,” he says. Early screenings will include second runs of Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour and Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language. There’ll also be Almodovar Wednesdays, spotlighting Walker’s favourite director, Pedro Almodovar (The Room Next Door, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown).

Before opening, Walker hopes to raise $25,000 through a crowdfunding campaign on Pozible. “The money is essentially for the startup cash flow situation. Having the security of a buffer to pay for film hire and to pay my staff,” he says. The campaign offers rewards to backers in the form of discounted memberships (and on-screen credit prior to every screening) for a pledge of $100, reduced rates on private screenings for $500 and discounted packages for advertisers.

Eclipse Cinema is expected to open at 32 Wellington Street, Collingwood in August.