By Jonathan Goldsbie

The Bloor Cinema is a fun place for a party. Perhaps that goes without saying, as certain screenings regularly generate a festive atmosphere. But in this case, we’re talking about parties in and of themselves, without the pretense of a movie component, at least not in the traditional sense. Put simply, the Bloor is a fun place to drink and hang out, and the sound system—while not great for movies—is perfectly awesome for the purpose of blasting music, which can be juxtaposed with projected montages in brilliantly demented fashion. One of our fondest memories of the past year is seeing the closing hoedown of Zatôichi, and a dozen of the other greatest dance numbers from movie history, scored with MuchDance 1997.
Of course, these events have just been private birthday parties and the like held by staff on occasion. But Saturday night, those same staff will be opening up the theatre for a public shindig, starting at 11:00 (not long after the apparently-excellent Man on Wire gets out), a fundraiser their new project, Runaway Cinema. A feature-length film written and directed by Bloor shift manager and blogTO portraitist Robin Sharp, about an adolescent boy secretly taking up residence in the theatre’s backspaces, it’s in some ways a less campy follow-up to his Bloor-set Popcorn Trilogy of shorts that played before movies shown at the theatre last summer (the third part of which can be seen above).
Cover is $5, and the Facebook event says to expect it to go on until 5 a.m.—coincidentally the same time that Robin and his crew started shooting every day during Runaway Cinema‘s principal photography, in order to squeeze in a day’s filming before matinées.