Umit Mesut is the owner of what is thought to be the last real cine shop in the Britain: Umit & Son, a small space in Clapton that’s teeming with Super 8 film reels, projectors and stray boxes of sweets. He's also the co-founder of London’s only 16mm film club, Ciné-Real, with director Liam Saint-Pierre, which normally runs each month at the Castle Cinema.
While the regular event is on hiatus, Umit and Liam have put their cineaste brains together to launch a Ciné-Real podcast, where each episode offers a deep-dive into a classic film. First up is Umit’s all time personal favourite, the 1933 stop-motion monster-flick, ‘King Kong’.
To celebrate its release, the movie-buds have decided to host a ‘virtual’ version of their event in the form of a first-of-its-kind experiment in communal viewing with BBC Together. On Thursday July 29, Ciné-Real will fire up its projector once more to play ‘King Kong’ to an empty Castle Cinema for viewers to live stream from home. There will even be a break for Umit to change the film reels. Umit and Liam have always said that film and digital can co-exist, and what could be a better testament to their message than broadcasting a classic celluloid picture into the homes of thousands of Londoners, via their laptop screens?