In an effort to spread the joy of cinema to the public, the Cincinnati Public Library is beginning a new series of film screenings at the library’s Downtown location.
The series will be hosted by various local film curators in the city, which library specialist and event organizer Fritz Pape said is “in the spirit of continuing to foster the incredible grassroots homegrown community of film curators we have in Cincinnati.”
Local film organization Leontine Cinema Collective, which primarily screens women-directed films focused on social issues, will helm the first screening. In the library’s south atrium, they will show the classic 1997 Southern Gothic horror film Eve’s Bayou, which follows 10-year-old Eve Batiste as she navigates the unraveling of her affluent family in 1960s Louisiana. Jurnee Smollett and Samuel L. Jackson star.
According to Pape, the screenings are an “evolution” of a similar series the library put on last year.
“Last year, they were all movies picked by library staff—those were fun, but coming in to the new year I wanted to expand the reach,” Pape said. “At the library we’re always focused on collaborating with community partners across the city, so it made sense to reach out to the plethora of film curators in town who’ve been showing films at the Esquire, Mariemont and elsewhere to pick a movie to show in our space.”
Screenings will occur on the second Thursday of every month, and will bring in film organizations from all over the city to collaborate. April will see Open Source Cinema take over the library, a local collective that screens independent or underseen films every Tuesday in Northside.
It’s even more proof that Cincinnati’s film community is exploding in popularity, with organizations like Outer Cinema Cincinnati and Secret Base Cinema regularly drawing massive crowds of people that want to watch films they’ll never see anywhere else on the big screen.
“Since reopening the Downtown Library back in 2024, we’ve been expanding our music & film programing,” Pape said. “We’re so lucky to have such a fervent community of film watchers in Cincinnati, so I’m really excited to help provide a space for that community to blossom.”