In 2019 Geordie Flantz moved his family from Minneapolis to the East Side of St. Paul. “We fell in love with the area,” he says. “It’s historically always been very working class and very immigrant.” Flantz found "amazing energy and cool organizations doing stuff" throughout the area.
There’s one thing the East Side didn’t have, though: a movie theater.
As Flantz soon learned, that wasn’t always the case. “Back in the day there was a movie theater three blocks from my house that closed in the 1970s. There were all these little community theaters—Hamm’s, 3M, Seeger Refrigerators, all these large employers were unionized, so people had money to go out and go to the movies. There were thousands of theater seats at one point over here on the East Side.”
From that discovery sprang the idea of TriLingua Cinema, a nonprofit "traveling cinema" that hosts movies at various locations around the East Side, both inside and outdoors.
When Flantz first got the idea to show films on the East Side, he says, “I asked myself what would be the responsible way to do it that reflected the community and that was responsive to the community.”
Where the East Side's immigrants were once largely Swedes, they're now more likely to be Hmong, Karen, or Latino, with a fair mixture of white and Black residents in the area as well.
With this in mind, Flantz set about creating a "multilingual cinema." He applied for and received a Metro Regional Arts Council grant. “So I was like, well, crap, now I have to do this,” he jokes.
TriLingua launched at an inopportune time (you do remember the early days of the pandemic, right?) but in August 2020 it had its first screening: Ohiyesa: The Soul of an Indian, a documentary that was shown on the side of the East Side Freedom Library.
And Flantz, along with community engagement director Ismail Khadar and Sidney Pisano, who was hired as executive director last year, has been growing the org ever since. They've presented around 80 movies over the past five years.
This weekend, TriLingua will celebrate its fifth anniversary with an outdoor event at the East Side Sculpture Park dubbed "A Night in Saint Paulywood," where the organization's first ever youth camp will screen their work—and TriLingua will present possible designs for the brick-and-mortar theater it hopes to establish.
“That has always been the goal,” says Flantz of creating a permanent home for TriLingua. He hopes to raise enough funds to purchase an old auto-body shop called Bud and Al’s from the Dayton’s Bluff Neighborhood Housing Services. It's actually two shops connected by an office space. The plan is to turn each garage into an auditorium, while preserving space for outdoor screenings as well.
But a pair of functioning microcinemas isn't TriLingua's only goal. Flantz also envisions a "youth jobs program," where young people staff the cinema, help in programming, and learn to make their own films. This year's Summer Youth Camp was sort of a pilot for that program.
“We paid five youth to help us with our screenings this summer and we also hired a local filmmaker as a teaching artist,” Flantz says. “They learned all the different steps about making a movie. They decided as a group they wanted to work on one project together.” At the anniversary event, they'll screen the result of their collaboration, Shoreline.
"We’re also trying to put together a Midwest film circuit, where filmmakers who have some name recognition have been able to make a film but maybe have not been able to get the distribution that they want yet, can have access to a string of independent movie theaters around the Midwest," says Flantz.
Flantz believes that TriLingua has gained enough supporters to help achieve these goals. A summer screening with local Hmong filmmakers, for instance, drew 250 people.
And it's the outdoor screenings, where TriLingua provides free hot dogs and popcorn in the East Side Sculpture Park, that truly embody the organization's spirit, according to Flantz.
”You get people who are really excited to see that movie, you get people who are just walking their dog and stop by, families from the neighborhood, nobody’s shushing anybody, kids are running around playing,” he says. “They’re just fun community events that just bring a lot of people together who might not ordinarily sit next to each other.”
A Night in Saint Paulywood
When: 7:30 p.m. Sat., Sep. 13
Where: East Side Sculpture Library
Tickets: Free; more info here
