A passion project celebrating the diversity of cinema gets going next week in Nicosia

My name is Theo, and I’m an old-movie-holic. I’ve waited years to confess this addiction, hoping in vain for a suitable support group to emerge – and now, finally, we have Styx Film Encounters.

This is big news for classic-film buffs, and film buffs in general. Styx, simply put, is a film club presenting weekly screenings of older movies, kicking off on Wednesday, November 6. Its schedule for the month is all top-tier classics: Vertigo (1958), Breathless (1960), L’Avventura (1960), In the Mood for Love (2000) and The Wizard of Oz (1939), all introduced by local film experts.

All this is fine, and exciting, in itself – but in fact there’s more. Here, in handy bullet-point form, are five reasons why Styx (if it succeeds, and we hope it will) sounds like the film community we hopeless addicts have been waiting years for.

Films will be shown with both English and Greek subtitles.

Entrance is free, at least for the initial launch period.

The inaugural screening (Vertigo) is on Wednesday at 8.30pm – but in fact that’s a one-off. All future screenings are being planned for Saturday at 5.30pm, at the Pantheon Cinema in the heart of Nicosia, making it ideal as a way to kick-start your Saturday evening with a movie before going on to dinner or drinks or whatever.

The people in charge – uniquely, at least for Cyprus – are young millennials in their 20s and 30s, which perhaps explains the idealism behind the whole project.

The most important reason (but the hardest to articulate): Styx gives the impression of a passion project, stemming from a true love of cinema. “I want us to be a home for people who want to watch films,” says 30-year-old Christina Pari. “I’m not that interested if it ‘succeeds’ or not, in the sense of how many will come. I don’t really care about the numbers.”        

Christina, the brains (or soul) behind Styx, is a neuroscientist by profession – but also a film buff from way back, from the days when she and her dad used to go to the DVD club every couple of days to rent movies.

In the Mood for Love

“One of my first films was Amélie,” she recalls, “and Pan’s Labyrinth… But I was watching them alone,” adds Christina. “I started alone.”

The caveat seems a little unnecessary – didn’t most teenagers watch DVDs alone? – but the point is that Styx isn’t just about watching movies. Not only does it aim to recapture the big-screen experience, it also hopes to foster a community.

“What we care about,” she says, “is for cinema to become accessible again.” She’d like for Styx to appeal to everyone, from hardcore buffs to people “who just want an outing”, trusting in the power of movies to enthrall them all.

Film societies, even occasional film festivals, already exist in Cyprus – but they all come with a slight edge of highbrow. Styx has a different vision, “to celebrate the diversity of cinema” as Christina puts it; to bridge the divide between multiplex and film club, new and old, genre and arthouse – and also to attract younger people, who tend to be more omnivorous and enthusiastic anyway.

To be honest, it sounds a bit quixotic. Even the audience for new films is shrinking, let alone oldies. Younger generations seem especially hard to court; they have so many other distractions, and everything’s (allegedly) on YouTube anyway – not to mention that classics can seem dated. Not everyone is open to the ‘diversity of cinema’. In fact, hardly anyone is.

Yes, Geekotopos (our “nerd media” aggregator) gets packed screenings for the likes of Star Wars and Back to the Future – but how many of those viewers would sit still for a Douglas Sirk melodrama, or a Rohmer talkfest? (Christina cites the French director’s The Green Ray as her closest thing to a ‘favourite film’.) Conversely, how many fans of old-school European cinema would go for a splatter masterpiece like George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead?

Christina and her fellow Styx-ers don’t care – or they obviously do care but they’re going ahead anyway, even without any funding. At the moment, the cash for buying film rights and renting the Pantheon is coming out of their own pockets.

“It’s not cheap,” she admits. “I had no idea before I started it.” Still, she affirms, it’s an investment, adding that she and her friends are “playing a long game”. She’s not entirely sure what they’ll be showing (they’re limited by what’s available from distributors anyway) – but everything is possible, the entirety of the medium, and she also hopes they can organise lectures, podcasts, filmmaker interviews. “I know,” she smiles. “It’s going to take years…”  

Styx, for a hard-bitten cynic like myself, is inspirational – an initiative that arrives with an open heart, unbounded optimism, and a faith that can move mountains. Not to mention filling that late-afternoon dead spot on a winter Saturday, when it’s already dark and you’re home cleaning the cat box or watching TV.

Best of all, it reflects the fact (which I didn’t know) that there is apparently a sub-culture of cinephile youngsters in Cyprus. Old films, it turns out, have gone the way of vinyl records, reconnecting – and becoming trendy again – with a new generation who talk and write about them on Facebook, not just watching films, as Christina puts it, but “engaging with films, thinking about films”. Fellow addicts! A support group, at last.