Cinemóvil is a mobile repertory cinema that operates a state of the art digital projector and sound system out of a 2010 Ford Transit Connect, touring around Miami-Dade County to play films in unexpected outdoor community spaces. The project will serve as an essential conduit for exploring cultural permanence in Miami’s increasingly impermanent communities.

Miami is made up almost entirely of Caribbean and Latin American exiles and expatriates, and Caribbean films are seldom programmed in local cinemas for our community to discover. So for first and second generation immigrants, it becomes increasingly more difficult to come across and connect to the works of filmmakers that come from their same regions. Even now, retrospectives of Cuban, Haitian, Puerto Rican, and Mexican filmmakers are nonexistent in Miami’s regular cinematic rotation.

The answer is a mobile cinema free of barriers to entry, whose purpose is to regularly program classic and contemporary films from the places we’ve come, screened at no cost in the communities where many of us now live. Cinemóvil will serve as an essential access point to the cinematic heritage of Miami’s own citizens.

The first year of Cinemóvil screenings will be divided into four quarterly series, each of which will focus on a different community in Miami-Dade County. The films selected for each series will reflect its communities’ provenances. The project will call on fellow programmers that specialize in different areas of Caribbean and Latin American cinema to assist in curating the first year’s selection. There will also be a number of community members serving in an advisory capacity to think through accessible venues and help target specific communities that Cinemóvil can reach. In total, eight feature films will screen over the course of the first year of Cinemóvil’s program, each preceded by a local short film for the city to discover.