About 300,000 people. Maybe two dozen screens.
That’s the moviegoing situation in Durham, where 17 of those screens carry mainstream fare at AMC Southpoint and three focus on first-run indies at the Carolina Theatre. You can eke out a few more by including the likes of Duke University’s Griffith Film Theater or the former Full Frame Theater now operated by Fullsteam Brewery.
Of the latter, Fullsteam owner Sean Lilly Wilson told the INDY he hopes to open the brewery’s new American Tobacco Campus location by Labor Day and wants to keep the small theater available as a local resource. In January, it hosted the Black Trans Short Film Festival, with a screening by the tipsy Durham Instagram account Two Beer Cinema Club coming up on June 27.
It’s vital cinematic real estate now that the plentiful days of Durham multiplexes like Wynnsong, Willowdaile, and Northgate are long gone, to say nothing of arthouse attrition everywhere.
“It’s like bowling alleys—nobody’s ever going to build a multiplex again,” predicted Jim Haverkamp, a filmmaker, video editor, and Duke film professor. But Haverkamp and Alex Maness, a photographer and theater tech, are preparing to increase the local screen tally by one when they open Skin and Bones Theater downtown in a few months.
The new microcinema’s curator council includes Penelope Bartlett, formerly the Criterion Channel’s director of programming, among other prestigious film jobs.
“I give a lot of workshops about the future of film, and my crystal ball says the future is going
Alece Oxendine,
to be regional.”
executive director, Film Durham
Bartlett is also the creative director of Film Durham, a nonprofit founded in 2024 that aims to become the hub of cinematic activity in the Bull City. Dedicated to cultivating local industry and talent, it has also started to program screenings and is long-range-planning a festival.
Though separately conceived, the theater and the nonprofit have strikingly aligned values. Both see cinema less as commercial content than as a vibrant form of civic life.
Both emphasize accessibility, inclusivity, and local identity over top-down curation from larger markets. Both want to hold spaces where all kinds of cinephiles and filmmakers can build a sustainable scene that fits an eclectic city like Durham.
“I give a lot of workshops about the future of film,” said Alece Oxendine, Film Durham’s executive director, “and my crystal ball says the future is going to be regional.”
Alex Maness and Jim Haverkamp first met in 1997 at the Rialto in Raleigh, which was showing a local film called The Delicate Art of the Rifle and a midnight sneak preview of David Cronenberg’s Crash. Almost 30 years of friendship later, they’re sitting behind the picture window of what’s rapidly becoming a theater of their own.
“What made this possible was the fact that we were able to find a landlord here in Durham who was sympathetic to the local art scene and was willing to rent this building to us at an extremely fair rate,” Maness said, referring to Arthur Rogers of Eno Ventures.
Skin and Bones is under construction at 118 West Parrish Street, where the street number is distinctively tiled on a blue-and-white marquee. Today it’s crammed with loose girders, the pressed tin ceiling is temporarily down, and the HVAC lies about in big foil chunks.
But by late summer or early fall, the space will transform into a single-screen digital cinema with about 75 seats, audio equipment salvaged from the old Mission Valley Cinema, and a simple concession stand. The building also has neat quirks like an old freight elevator and a hidden courtyard that you can count on these two to stick art in.
For more than a decade, Maness and Haverkamp have run Shadowbox Studio, a unique venue tucked in Ample Storage in North Durham. It’s a photography studio, and it shows films sometimes, but it’s really become the de facto home of space-starved performing artists—dancers, theater folks, poets, experimental musicians.
Skin and Bones will welcome performing artists, too, but cinema will be the theater’s central focus. The screening program will include local shorts and features, revival stuff, small festivals, and low-distribution indies. Existing Shadowbox film programming, like Movie Loft and the Transfiguration Animation Film Festival, will move to Skin and Bones, widening access beyond us weirdos who’ll drive out to a storage unit for a good time.
The theater’s curator council, in addition to Bartlett, includes people like filmmaker Chris Everett (who’ll bring BLK Docs Film Festival in October), Ike and Sandra Ntube (Two Beer Cinema Club), and Tom Whiteside (Durham Cinematheque).
Earlier this year, Skip Elsheimer, who curates 16 mm educational films as A/V Geeks, did a screening at Fullsteam’s theater as a fundraiser to upfit Skin and Bones, which is currently more than halfway to its goal in a $50,000 crowdfunding campaign.
“Creating a physical space comes with a lot of overhead,” Haverkamp said, especially when preserving a historic building. “That’s kind of how we named the joint. What have we learned from Shadowbox? Strip it down to its essentials.”
Skin and Bones and Film Durham both say they’re excited about closely collaborating. A place to showcase local talent and an environment to cultivate it—as Maness said, “You can’t have one without the other.”
Alece Oxendine fell in love with classic cinema when she saw 12 Angry Men on TV as a preteen. “I was locked in,” she said. “It’s holding my attention, and it’s only one room. There’s no action. There’s no boom, all these crazy effects. But it was the story. It was the acting. I said, ‘Whatever this is, I want to do this.’”
Soon she was directing the theatrical version at Durham School of the Arts. She went on to take film electives at Jordan High School, a year behind the Duffer brothers, and interned at Durham’s public access TV. “Durham high schools used to have specializations for each public school,” she explained, “and Jordan’s was film and media.”
After graduating college, she built a career in marketing and distribution, working with the likes of the New York Film Festival and Rooftop Films. Now she’s the programs and industry manager at the Gotham Film & Media Institute, splitting her time between New York and Durham.
After Bartlett moved to Durham in 2022, she and Oxendine soon became friends and started talking about how to channel their shared industry experience into something distinctly Durham.
“We wanted to start a film festival initially,” said Oxendine, “but we realized we wanted to build a film community first. We saw firsthand how exclusionary a lot of festivals can be. When we’re bringing films to Durham, we want to make sure it’s accessible for everybody.”
Film Durham has put on three events so far. It started with a program of playful holiday shorts last December, projected on Main Street in collaboration with Downtown Durham Inc. In February came a local Black media panel on Parrish Street—the historic Black Wall Street where Nicole Oxendine, Alece’s sister, long kept her Empower Dance Studio. And in March, Film Durham brought noted film critic A. S. Hamrah to Letters Community Bookshop.
“We want to have year-round programming that is supporting local filmmakers, like a film society, but I don’t want it to sound too buttoned-up,” Oxendine said. “I think what’s going to be important for us is our access to actors and directors. We’ve seen this time and time again—if there’s a Q and A with the director, or it’s a North Carolina premiere, there’s a higher likelihood that people will attend.”
The goal is to build a film scene that doesn’t just reflect Durham but also benefits it. Film buffs remember when Wilmington was “Hollywood East” in the 2000s, thanks to the state’s generous film-industry tax credits. When those went away, so did the industry, much of it to Georgia.
But today the North Carolina Film and Entertainment Grant offers filmmakers significant rebates, and Oxendine sees an opportunity to build something lasting in Durham.
“The challenge is we don’t want to end up like Georgia, [where] Hollywood brings their people with them. They are contributing to the local economy, but for a short period of time,” she said. “If we have our own indie ecosystem, it’s really impactful. If people can not just shoot here but also do post-production here, that adds to the economy in the state.”
Film Durham is eyeing a fall position for an annual festival. They hope to use their connections to bring in festival-circuit fare curated for Durham and include some local programming, too. But not this fall—building trust takes time.
“We want to bring actors and directors to experience the beauty that is Durham with an engaged, diverse audience,” said Oxendine. “That’s why our first priority is to cultivate our relationship with our audience. So when we launch our festival, it’s not like, ‘Who are these people?’ There’s a big push toward regionality in the industry, and there’s a special place for that small theater, like Skin and Bones, where we can show interesting things.”
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