The Thornbury Picture House’s New Brunswick Cinema Opens Next Month

At its best, going to the movies is a communal event that’s as much about gathering and experiencing something with a community as it is about the feature playing. Gus and Lou Berger’s single-screen cinema Thornbury Picture House, which they opened in 2018, exemplifies this. The 57-seat theatre on the corner of High and Pender streets is something of a community hub where you can drop in for drinks whether or not you’re seeing a film.

Next month, the Bergers will open a new single-screen cinema, Brunswick Picture House. Gus, who also made the 2022 documentary The Lost City of Melbourne, says the building was once a Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus Company stables and, most recently, a Greek social pub. He spent the past 18 months renovating it.

There’ll be a bar, which will have the basics including popcorn and drinks for now. But in future the Bergers hope to team up with local restaurants, such as the neighbouring Tiba’s, on small plates and share plates.

But when the cinema opens next month, Gus says the focus will be on getting the programming right. “It takes a while to work out where your audience fits, and what sort of films resonate. A lot of the fun of programming is putting on different types of films and seeing how they work. It’ll be interesting to put some more obscure films, potentially some bigger, more indie films in there, and picking out some classic films and cult films that work at Thornbury and see if they also work in Brunswick.” (He has a hunch the two crowds will have similar tastes.)

The cinema is bigger than its Thornbury counterpart, with a six-and-a-half-metre screen (compared to Thornbury’s six-metre one) and 80 seats. “They’ve got these curves on them that lend themselves to that sort of Golden Age of Hollywood feel,” says Gus, who adds that they were inspired by ones he saw at UK cinema chain Everyman.

Brunswick Picture House is expected to open at 510–512 Sydney Road,
Brunswick in mid-November.

brunswickpicturehouse.com.au
@brunswick_picturehouse