New venue for underground movies and local filmmakers to open in Columbia. Here’s where
A new place for underground, off-beat film screenings is set to open in a long-neglected second story office space in Five Points.
The Babylon Kino, a small conference room turned movie screening space from local filmmaker and journalist David Axe, is set to kick off its initial screenings at the beginning of February with a return of the First Friday Lowbrow Cinema Explosion, a monthly showing of an obscure movie that once screened at Main Street’s Nickelodeon theater in the 2010s.
The 1,000-square-foot space at 631 Harden St., across from New Brookland Tavern, will be able to hold around 40 people in the one-screen room. It’ll double as both a place to screen films from local, independent filmmakers and as office and storage space for Axe and other local creatives.
“All of us who are involved in this … just really love making movies and watching movies. And making and watching them in the real world with real people with all the grit and texture and smells and tastes that that entails,” Axe said.
Axe said the film screening venue, which he specified is not a movie theater, fills a void in Columbia for a place to see quirky, independent media after COVID-19 killed the Indie Grits film festival. The opening of his new venue also comes as local filmmakers have bemoaned what they see as decreased opportunities at the Nickelodeon, the city’s lone arthouse cinema, after its post-pandemic shift to showing more mainstream movies.
On top of bringing back the monthly Lowbrow Cinema Explosion event on the first Fridays of each month, The Babylon Kino is also slated to host small film festivals centered around niche genres – maybe a film festival dedicated entirely to vampire movies, or zombie ones, Axe suggested – and to afford local filmmakers the opportunity to premiere their projects.
“It’s not a huge space, so we don’t need to go nuts but that’s another niche we can fill now that Indie Grits is gone,” Axe said.
The filmmaker is among those in the area who would benefit from such a screening room. Since 2019, Axe has directed six low-budget horror films, having previously told The State that he has struggled to show those movies at the Nickelodeon.
For the handful of screenings it hosts a month, the Babylon Kino will offer popcorn concessions as well as beer and wine. Don’t expect a box office, as tickets and information about screenings will be mostly done through social media and word of mouth, Axe said.
The Babylon Kino can be found on Facebook or on Instagram at @thebabylonkino. Its first event is set for Feb. 7, 2025.
