I received this letter this weekend. I don’t know the cinema, but it looks real nice. I don’t know the letter writer, but I sympathize with his plight. “Public Cinema” sounds like it was a great program and will be a shame to be lost. There are always many sides to any story, but this does sound like a tragic tale. Here’s Hope hoping for a happy ending.
Dear Mr. Hope,
I am sending this letter to you as the Founding Board Member of the Sixth Street Cinema, a very small art cinema and media arts center in the town of Mariposa, just outside Yosemite National Park. Our cinema has been a beacon for American independent film and world cinema for nearly sixteen years, and has acted as such in the most unlikely of places – a small, mostly low-income, rural community, often a three-hour drive from any similar programming. Since 1996, we have occupied the second floor of an historic Masonic Hall that we converted to screen films, and filled the very important role of being the town’s only cinema. Before 1996, there hadn’t been a cinema in Mariposa since the fifties.
