For the Love of Movies: Tilda Swinton's Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams

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Tilda Swinton with festival co-founder Mark Cousins

"It's all about good will," says Swinton. "It's not about cash. It's not about some clique moving in and appropriating the town. I don't know what the statistics are, but for all we said earlier about our international visitors, I would say around 85 percent are local."

The extent to which the locals are behind Swinton is evident from the way they've embraced her transformation of the Ballerina Ballroom. Having suffered years of neglect as a Bingo hall, the Victorian stone building, which is tucked away at the bottom of Nairn High Street, has been restored to something a little more in keeping with its illustrious heritage as a rock venue in the 60s and 70s (The Who, Pink Floyd and Cream all played here).

The thick textured wallpaper has had a glam rock makeover, with red-and-black lightening bolts criss-crossing the walls and silver stars stuck on at random. Red Chinese lanterns hang from the ceiling, casting a warm seductive glow over the room. A grand piano sits to the left of the screen in preparation for a semi-improvised live score to Ozu's silent classic I Was Born But… on Day 3 1/2. Balloons and velvet curtains line the back of the hall, gilt-edge magic mirrors adorn the corridor and beanbags and a couple of rows of deck chairs provide seating for the 135-capacity crowd.

And that's not all. Wander through the curtains on the left-hand side of this improvised screening room and you'll find a cafГ© lit up by mirror balls that make the walls shimmer like under-water effects in a cheap children's TV show. On those same walls, John Byrne, Swinton's partner and one of the UK's leading artists and dramatists, has replicated his dreamy hand-painted designs for the festival's programme. Daybeds and donated sofas draped with roughshod material found in Swinton's garage add to this endearingly ramshackle ambience. The whole thing is like walking into a Michel Gondry video.

"Well it's all hand-made," says Swinton. "There's no corporation behind this. There's no committee. It's completely personal, so that's Michel Gondry for you."

A weird kind of serendipity resulted in the festival happening here. Having long fantasized about opening a cinema, Swinton was walking past the building while out shopping, saw a rental sign above the door, called the number, had a look round and, after being told there was strong interest from someone wanting to open up a showroom for prosthetic limbs, took a year's lease on the place there and then. A week later she won the Oscar for Michael Clayton, or as Swinton puts it, "I won a prize and got a bonus from the studio, which was the same amount as a year's rent. I thought, 'Someone wants this to happen.'"

The State of Cinema
Swinton and Cousins declare a State of Cinema

There's more to this renovated space than an Oscar winner acting on a quixotic impulse, though. Swinton hates the way impersonal, out-of-town multiplexes have wrecked the cultural life of small towns. "That old idea of going to the pictures as part of your daily life has changed because there aren't really any cinemas left on the High Street. Every small town in the world, certainly in Europe and certainly in Scotland, has these cinema-shaped holes in them. There used to be two cinemas in this little town and now there's none, so it's thirty-minute drive to the nearest multiplex."

The Ballroom, then, is something of an experiment to see if it's possible to bring that idea of cinema back into people's lives. And it's not just about providing access to the films, either. This is also about creating an experience. That's why Swinton and Cousins perform a little ritual before each screening. It starts with the lights fading to black. Then, from the back of the ballroom, someone whirls a spotlight around the room, as if they're illuminating a film premiere from Hollywood's golden age. A piece of music is blasted over the speakers. As each song draws to a close, Swinton and Cousins climb to the top of a pair of stepladders positioned at either side of the screen and proceed to drop a huge red-and-blue banner in front of it. Written in gold are the words, "The State of Cinema."

"We came up with that a couple of nights ago," says Cousins, after Saturday's screening of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. "I'd been thinking about how in Russian Orthodox churches the icon is covered and is only revealed during the serious moments and I thought, what if we treated the screen as something really precious and covered it up with something. When our designer came back with a banner, Tilda and I both looked at it and immediately said this looks like a flag and almost simultaneously we decided to write 'State of Cinema' on it".

It works as a mission statement, promoting an idea of cinema as global a location that anyone can travel to, but the religious influence is also oddly fitting. Preceding Murder Most Foul, Cat Stevens' version of "Morning has Broken" results in the first spot of spontaneous audience participation, with unified swaying and singing turning the Ballroom into a mock church before laughter gets the better of everyone. In the bathroom, someone has drawn a smiling face with the words "A Happy Critic… No, Really!" scrawled beneath it. There are a lot of born-again movie lovers here.

"People have forgotten it can be like this," says Swinton. "Someone said to me yesterday that coming here reminded them of going to the cinema as a child and it occurred to me that when you're a child and you're taken to the cinema, you don't really know what it is. You haven't read reviews. You haven't followed a director's work. You just go, 'Take me and I'll see.' And that's what people are doing with us. They're like, 'We'll dress up in pyjamas and we'll bring a cake and we'll trust you to show us The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant in between All About Eve and Miss Marple.'

"And that's the great thing, it's the same audiences going to all those films."