London will lose a widely admired independent film forum next month when Brixton Community Cinema stages its final screenings. The roving, pay-what-you-can project that Abiba Coulibaly launched in 2022 will close after a run that expanded faster than one person could manage, she said.
Coulibaly built the BCC around international repertory and arthouse titles, programming films such as The First World Festival of Negro Arts by William Greaves, Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Faute à Voltaire, and Sarah Gomez’s One Way or Another. Pop-up shows moved from small non-arts spaces in Brixton to venues including London’s Cinema Museum, and audiences grew into a regular, engaged community.
Coulibaly framed the closure as a planned pause rather than an end. “The closure of Brixton Community Cinema is not to give up and abandon either, just to recalibrate,” she wrote on Instagram. Speaking ahead of the final programme, she told Axis Signal the main obstacle was scale. “The project had grown more than I ever expected,” she said, adding that formalising the venture required registering as a CIC, opening a business bank account, buying domains and managing a level of administration she could not sustain alone. She said those demands cost her time and money.
Coulibaly also said larger, longer-term institutional backing never materialised. She described occasional approaches for one-off fees, around £500, but no sustained partnerships. For the final season a friend secured £2,500 from WeTransfer, which Coulibaly identified as the cinema’s only major collaboration.
Programmers and supporters praised the project’s curatorial reach; Criterion’s Ashley Clark called Coulibaly “fantastic” earlier this year. Coulibaly said audiences sought cinema that reflected and interrogated current realities rather than pure escape, and she attempted at times to programme in response to events that began in late 2023.
The BCC’s final season includes Margarida Cardoso’s Kuxa Kanema: The Birth of Cinema (2003), Sanaz Sohrabi’s An Incomplete Calendar (2026), and a discussion with John Akomfrah alongside Ish filmmaker Imran Perretta. The last screening is scheduled for October 6. Coulibaly framed the shutdown as a moment to reassess how to sustain community-driven film programming at scale without compromising values.
