Cinema coming back to Kilcullen after 47 years

Enjoying a show at Kilcullen Town Hall Theatre, with (insets) the logo for the new cinema project, and the late Pat Dunlea in 2000 after he'd had Volvo seats installed.

A screening of The Fabelmans, the Stephen Spielberg movie loosely based on the film-maker's own early years, will bring back cinema to Kilcullen this month after an absence of some 47 years, writes Brian Byrne. 

A project of the Kilcullen Lions Club, 'Kilcullen Bridge Cinema' will open its doors to monthly movies on Wednesday 27 September. A celebratory reception will precede the 8pm screening, for which tickets at €7 will be available on Eventbrite and can be bought directly from Woodbine Books. 

The Kilcullen Town Hall venue is the only such in the world where the 110 seats are leather ones made for Volvo S80 cars — it opened in the year 2000. The seating came about when local Volvo dealer, the late Pat Dunlea, went to Gothenburg for the launch of the luxury Volvo S80, and saw that a theatre set up for the car’s presentation was using brand-new S80 driver’s seats. He managed to twist Volvo’s arm to donate the 'used' seats to Kilcullen’s newly refurbished Town Hall Theatre when the launch programme was over.

The latest move by the local Lions Club is reviving a use of the Town Hall that has been dormant since the mid-1970s. Prior to that it had been a successful cinema from 1941. The Club recently succeeded in its application for membership of Access Cinema, a resource organisation for regional cultural cinema exhibition in Ireland, funded by the Arts Council. Access Cinema negotiates with film distributors, and provides to its members lists of commercial and cultural films and documentaries available for screening at reasonable costs.

The organisers are planning to build on an evident resurgence of interest in cinema attendance since the end of the pandemic, saying there is 'something special about enjoying a movie in a large venue and experiencing the collective energy of the audience'.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, Kilcullen Town Hall Cinema was widely regarded as the most go-ahead village cinema in Leinster, its management able to get first-run blockbuster movies of the time almost as quickly as the country's major city movie palaces.

To facilitate the project, improvements have been made to the digital projection equipment in the Town Hall Theatre, which is also the home of Kilcullen Drama Group.

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