Jam Jar Cinema is one of the north’s leading community cinema’s based in the heart of Whitley Bay.
The venue is an independent community cinema offering a foyer bar and exhibition space, all the while screening the latest blockbusters, classics and best of British and independent cinema.
Lasty ear the cinema successfully raised finance and installed Digital Cinema Initiative compliant equipment. As a result of this audience numbers have increased to 19,000 visitors (Sept 15 – Sept 16) with an estimated 70,000 people coming through the venue in that time.
We’ve spoken to Dan Ellis, founder of Jam Jar Cinema about the business winning the Leisure and Tourism Award at the North Tyneside Business Awards 2016 and the cinema’s plans for 2017.
Dan, how do you feel about winning the North Tyneside Leisure and Tourism Award 2016?
It was a great achievement and testament to the hard work that’s gone into the venue. More than that it has really helped demonstrate how well loved this place is. We are proud to be a social enterprise so serving our community and reinvesting in it is really important to us. It actually is helping to drive us on to try and bring in more funding for projects so watch this space.
What’s going on for Jam Jar Cinema in 2017?
As I have mentioned we are exploring how we can bring in more funding, we are also going to be touring regularly to a few different venues across the borough under the guise of ‘Jam Jar Cinema @‘. A lot of people who come to the venue will know the stairs are a bit of a problem, so we are exploring how we can more frequently get out of the building on tour and are actively looking for places where we could either move to or take over. The idea is that we can bring the same great cinema experience to more places and people who might find getting here a struggle.
That sounds great Dan, how are you going to keep up with all of the demand in 2017?
We are having our busiest ever season and we are delighted to be doing as well. We always say that the hardest part of the job here is to keep doing well.
For us it’s about trying to get the best films as soon as we can and continue to serve the community of North Tyneside.
The current awards season is proving very popular. La La Land is now our best performing film since we opened. We’re really looking forward to some quality films coming up: Their Finest, Beauty and The Beast… Even Transformers 5 – which was shot here in the North East.
