Scala!!!

London’s legendary Scala cinema is the focus of this entertaining and informative documentary, a must-see for cinephiles of a certain stripe, directed by Ali Catterall and former Scala programmer Jane Giles. As the film’s unimpeachable title signals, the Scala was a cinema that showed films from the margins, giving prominence to genres that were at the time underseen or underappreciated, such as horror, wuxia, films of LGBTQIA+ interest, experimental, and arthouse cinema. Its eclectic approach drew an audience who devoured all manner of filmic oddities, with many attendees who, inspired by what they saw unfurl on the screen, moved into filmmaking or other artistic endeavours themselves. Told in an appropriately manic style, this is a fitting tribute to a venue whose influence endures even thirty years after its closure following an unauthorised screening of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971).