Worm (Rotterdam)
Address: PO BOX 25045 / 3001 HA Rotterdam / The Netherlands
Email: film at wormweb.nl
Contact: Peter Taylor
www.wormweb.nl
1 screen, 30 (car!) seats… though on occasion we’ve managed to squeeze up to sixty people in with folding seating.
Tech : 35mm, 16mm, Super 8, Betacam SP, Mini DV, DVD.
History : The WORM venue is situated in an old 17th century shipping warehouse built for the former VOC (Dutch East India Company), with views over historic Delfshaven. The venue houses a film lab, sound studio, a shop, a cinema and a concert hall.
In 2005 this listed building was, under the supervision of ‘2012 Architecten’ and with the help of more than 50 artists, converted into WORM’s home base. 90% if its interior consists of re-cycled materials with a bar made of just under a mile of re-used wood, furniture created from car tyres and re-used billboards, toilets made out of defunct industrial size water containers and a back office running on OpenSource software. We’re firmly committed to sustainable architectures.
In the adjacent street we’ve also an apartment, which is home to our moddr_ medialab and provides accommodation for guests and short and longer term residencies at WORM.
In 2011 we’ll move to a new venue (Witte de Withstraat 63) in the centre of town.
Organisational structure : It’s a stichting /charitable foundation with a voluntary board of directors.
Editorial Line : WORM.kino’s focus is upon unseen cinema: film makers and artists’ personal and often incendiary visions of film that outside of major festivals would be otherwise unavailable to Dutch audiences. Intense and up close, with film makers and special guests often present, and a once weekly, one-off programme, our mission is also to stimulate the habit of regular cinema-going as an intimate, live and one of a kind social experience.
Regularity : We’ve once weekly screenings – usually taking place on Wednesday evening, though we occasionally run additional, special screenings such as JUNK IS GOLD a weekend of screenings last September with Wilhelm Hein, Kerry Laitala and Jack Stevenson as special guests.
Other stuff : Yes, as detailed above film is just one part of WORM and we’re a workspace as well as cinema and venue. The output of WORM also manifests itself in countless concerts, performances, radio, web-projects, installations, arrays of tactile media and a 24/7 webstation which while still a little rough round the edges allows access to our archive of concerts, livecasts and filmwerkplaats films.
Publicity : WORM prints and distributes a monthly programme guide, plus a postcard more specifically listing details of the forthcoming film programme. We have a website, run weekly mailing lists and harness social networking means (particularly Facebook) to the best of our ability. There’s also a WORM iPhone app. available for your pleasure! Word of mouth still wins though and despite sometimes making it into newspaper recommended listings, in depth local, national and specialised press coverage is difficult to come by.
Audience : It’s always variable. Around 15-20 people would be average but there’s always a number of screenings per year that sell out plus inevitably a number of disappointing ones too. Very happily, last week’s screening of Rashid Nugmanov’s 1989 Kazakh masterpiece IGLA was full!
Funding : The bulk of our financial support comes from local (Rotterdam’s city council) and national arts and culture funding (currently running in four year cycles) but we sometimes additionally apply for project and programme related financial support, though have yet to do this for film programming.
Additional revenue is also generated from ticket sales, our bar and venue hire –