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Rubi Iqbal is a born and bred Camden success story. She’s also a self-confessed cinema addict. And it’s precisely that unique mix of creative career background, local community knowledge and passion for the silver screen that makes her the ideal person to be driving the plans Camdenist announced last week – to deliver an innovative new approach to cinema, cultural events and media training in the heart of Kentish Town.
Growing up in King’s Cross, Rubi was surrounded by opportunities, but not necessarily ones that felt open to someone like her. “I always wanted a creative career,” she says “but I came from a single parent household where money was tight, so despite showing an aptitude for writing in my teens – having my plays shown at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Southbank, and later invited to join at the BBC for a junior writing fellowship, I declined all that because we needed money.” Instead she focused on getting to University and focused on establishing a career in marketing and branding, “it was the closest thing I could get to a stable role that also allowed me to be creative, so I built my career around that.” Instead she focused on getting to University to study marketing, branding and communications, “it was the closest thing I could get to a stable role and be creative, so I built my career around that.”
Her early jobs revolved around creating fun feel-good experiences for people, working for brands like Unilever and Estee Lauder and Dulux, before she landed a plum job back on home turf at Google. That’s where our paths first crossed, when Camdenist ran a post-pandemic programme to upskill high street businesses in making use of digital tools. The pandemic also changed Rubi’s focus, as for the first time she was unable to deliver those fun brand experiences she specialised in, so became interested in other ways for a global player like Google to still be giving something back to the community in its neighbourhood, which just happened to be the one to which she also felt she owed everything.
“I didn’t mean to get into social impact,” she says, “but I was given the opportunity to help steer how Google gave back to its local community, which also happened to my own, and I found that people were really receptive to trying new things, too.” So last year she left to strike out on her own, setting up social impact consultancy Coley Street Consulting, and advocating for other corporations to also make a genuine difference.
At Google, Kier Starmer’s camp and the Council had already identified Rubi as a female entrepreneur who was both ethical and capable – the kind of flagbearer for a different, fresher kind of voice and representation in local business, and therefore one they were keen to connect with. She also continued to work with Camdenist as a way of scratching that experiential itch of old, bringing together our Poster Sale and cinema screenings at the infamous proposed but indefinitely unrealised community cinema space in the old Polytechnic assembly hall, which ran successfully back in November.
Then Councilor and leader, (now brand new intake MP) Georgia Gould attended, and was hugely excited to see the space finally in use, wondering what it might take to do on a more permanent basis. A fledgling plan was hatched.
Financing and delivering such an endeavour, especially in a climate when no operators would take on the small single-screen site, was never going to be easy, but Rubi put together a vision for what community cinema might be in the changed high street landscape of 2024. Taking inspiration from places like New York’s Metrograph, La Bellevilloise in Paris and Uplink Shibuya in Tokyo, a mix of creative cultural extensions to the cinema model has been taking shape ever since.
“I want this cinema to show the weirdest, quirkiest, funniest films in the world, to create experiences that bond people with their friends, and also others around them,” she says. “Unless you seek out specific experiences, like going to watch the Minions 5pm in the West End with a bunch of kids, adults don’t really have the same space where they can just be a bit silly and tap into their inner child. For me, I want to create experiences where you can come and watch a film that bonds you with other like-minded people, and just escape your world for a little bit – in my experience, a good quirky film has the power to do that. That’s why I want to introduce a new kind of cinema that offers exclusively alternative programming and I’ve christened it ‘The Poly Cinema’ – think the weird little pop-culture obsessed sister of something like the Garden Cinema.”
Admitting to having been to the cinema every week since the age of three, (“nobody knows London cinemas as well as I do – I’ve got the credit card bill to show for it!”) Rubi knows exactly what a good movie-going experience is, and what an exceptional one might be. “The sense of occasion needs to be as big as the film. If you think of big recent cinema moments, like a Marvel release or the Taylor Swift movie, it has been about much more than the act of going to the cinema. The big thing is the emotions and the hype that builds around it. Similarly, cult films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or real random ones likeThe Bob’s Burgers Movie, to really random ones like Kung Fury, they manage to cultivate a connection with people over time. It’s something a place like the Prince Charles Cinema distils beautifully. They create space for us to tap into all that joy, fun, fantasy – whenever you want to feel. And we really could do with more such spaces to play as adults, that aren’t just the usual formula of bars, venues and clubs.”
So from this passion comes the hybrid model that knits Rubi’s experiences background, social impact chops and love for Camden, together. “In a city like London, where everything is so expensive, just going out to the cinema or grabbing a bite becomes a big investment for a lot of people, so they demand the best bang for their buck. The Poly will be a multipurpose, multidirectional experience, as the entertainment businesses that have thrived post-covid have offered consumers real mix of things.”
Beyond the obvious food, themed nights and subversive edge to hopefully evoke memories of classic King’s Cross cinema The Scala, a programme of daytime events could see film production training for local young people – a pipeline for working one day in the forthcoming Camden Film Quarter nearby, or screenings for communities with special accessibility needs, or a whole range of other community uses for a hybrid cultural hub on the high street.
“Camden has such a rich history of cultivating incredible storytelling voices and creative businesses” says Rubi, “but there’s an element to cinema-going that I’ve seen elsewhere, like the amazing things they do at Clapham Grand, that I think would work amazingly here, and we currently just don’t have a space dedicated to that. We’ve got KOKO standing for music, and the Market for fashion, but I think we can bring some real magic to The Poly, create some fantastic social impact, and have a whole lot of fun doing it, too.”
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