Cine Tonalá opened in 2012 in Mexico City. It is a cultural space with cinema at its core, while also bringing together gastronomy, music, stand-up and theatre. Beyond screening films, it is involved in film production and distribution, creating a creative hub for the local community.

We spoke with its co-founder Juan Pablo Bastarrachea about the cinema’s beginnings, its economic model, the challenges it faced during COVID and  its collaborations across the region.

Could you briefly introduce Cine Tonalá and tell us a bit more about its history? I read that it was established in 2012.

Indeed, we opened in 2012. There was about a year of set-up: all the preparations – logistics, paperwork, fundraising, looking for investors, branding, and ultimately pulling the concept together. I have two founding partners, Marcela Lugo and Arturo Dib, and then we went on to look for many micro-investors, most of them linked to the film community or the wider creative community in Mexico. My two partners are more familiar with restaurants and bars. They design venues, and they already had experience opening a couple of bars. 

As for me, I started working at film festivals while I was still a university student; that was in the early 2000s. Back then, many of the films we used to screen at festivals, whether Mexican or international, could only really be seen at festivals. We do have an amazing cinémathèque, La Cineteca Nacional, which at the moment has three venues in Mexico City. The programming at La Cineteca Nacional depended a lot on who the director of the Cineteca was. It was mainly programming the great masters of cinema, but you couldn’t really find risky, edgy, experimental, independent cinema. 

So, we saw an opportunity when my two partners, who are not only partners but also very close friends, told me: there is this cultural centre in Roma Sur, and it’s going to stop operating soon. It was a very bohemian cultural centre that opened in the early 90s. At the back of the house they had a tent, a circus tent, with circus-style seating. They would host poetry readings and sell vintage furniture, but they didn’t have day-to-day programming.

How did you raise funds, and what was the original concept behind Cine Tonalá?

In Mexico, it has changed a little bit since then, but, we don’t really have funds for cinemas, for programming, for arthouse cinemas, or for opening a cultural venue. So, we did it the way we understood entrepreneurship back then. We put together a budget: what it would cost to open, and to turn the place into a cinema and a bar. And then we tried to raise that money from close friends. At the beginning, it was about giving these films a place, a space where they could be watched by a local audience. It was an amazing experience to shape a project with all the details you think should matter: as a meeting point, in terms of thinking about all the audiences that could be part of this community, in terms of the film community and the creative community, and also in terms of our workspace.

What is your programming strategy?

Of course, it has developed since we opened, and it has matured as well. When we opened, we designed it, both in programming terms and as a space, as a place where anyone could feel welcome. Age doesn’t matter, gender doesn’t matter: it’s simply a welcoming space. That was what we wanted to keep in mind. And in terms of programming, my background was at film festivals; I had never worked at a cinema, so I didn’t really know how cinema programmers work. That’s why, basically, our programming is much more similar to a film festival than to an arthouse cinema. We have a lot of activities: Q&As, cocktails all the time. 

We have a big limitation: we only have one screen. Everything has to happen on that one screen. The good news is that the screen has 90 seats and it is really well equipped. Many people wait until a film is programmed at Cine Tonalá. Watching a film at Cine Tonalá often means watching it on what may be the best screen in the city. 

If we go back to the physical space itself: when you took over from the cultural centre, did you need to do any renovations? 

Yes, there were a lot of renovations and transformations. My partner had more experience with that kind of work in other venues; I didn’t. It wasn’t easy to find investors, so we didn’t have much money for cash flow. It took almost a year and a half to put everything together. We changed the venue a lot, and we also needed a lot of counsellors or advisors. One of them helped us specifically with the design of the screening room – technology, setup, and the ideal position for projection and viewing.

The venue didn’t have a proper kitchen, and that’s super costly. Renovation is basically a never-ending task. Since we opened, we have been renovating all the time. And I think that’s one of the reasons people like to go to Ciné Tonalá; even though it feels relaxed and casual, they know it matters to us – one of our goals is that the audience experience is the best they can find, both in terms of watching a film and in terms of the social experience in the venue with our staff.

You mentioned your partners were experienced in opening bars and restaurants. Did you plan from the very beginning that an important part of your income would come from the bar and restaurant? 

In the end it’s the same project, and we try to make it very clear to everyone who works at Cine Tonalá. The programming team, the kitchen team, the administration team, the bar team, the waiters – everyone is connected in a horizontal way. They know that whatever happens in the screening room has an effect on the bar and the restaurant. And anyone who comes in to watch a film and then have a beer has one single experience at Cine Tonalá, and all the different processes they encounter are part of that same experience.

It’s a very big team with 33 staff members. How do you work together? 

Yes, we have 33 staff members right now. From the beginning, one of our main goals was not only to do what we want to do, but also to have a positive impact on the community through this project. And by “community,” we don’t only mean the audience or the film community who bring films – we also mean the workplace. For us, it’s very important that Cine Tonalá offers good job opportunities for everyone who works with us. It is also a safe space for women and for the queer community. We have people over 60 working with us, and we have tried to do this across the other venues we’ve had. At one point, we had four venues operating at the same time. Three of them closed in 2020 because of COVID. At that point we had about 100 staff members across all the cinemas. Now we have 33, and hopefully at some point we will be back with other openings. 

Could you tell us a little more about the other venues?

We opened a venue in Bogotá in 2014, after Mexico City. A Colombian director, Salomón Simhon, who used to live in Mexico City was a regular at Cine Tonalá. We had friends in common. He came and said, we have to take this to Bogotá. This was less than two years after we opened in Mexico City. The project was still dealing with some debts and a lot of issues at the beginning. We explained this and said, listen, it’s a lot of money, and it’s not like a regular bar or restaurant that can become successful quickly. This is slower, because you need to invest a lot – mainly because of the equipment. And the income may not be as good as other bars and restaurants. When you decide to start a project like this, you have to understand that it will take time to become stable.

In fact, Cine Tonalá Bogotá was doing really well, because the city needed a place where the local community could watch films that weren’t being shown by the commercial chains. Bogotá responded even better than Mexico City. But the regulations during the lockdown in Bogotá were very strict. In Mexico, for example, during COVID and the lockdowns, people could go out whenever they wanted. Businesses were closed at the beginning of 2020, but then they reopened. Everyone was outside – in the parks, on the streets. There weren’t really travel restrictions. So many people from other countries that had restrictions came here. Bogotá was the opposite. People couldn’t go outside. So, we had to close it, because our landlord wasn’t very flexible.

As for Tijuana, it is a border city with San Diego, in the north of Mexico. In Tijuana we were downtown, which is very commercial and full of bars. We had to close it because of travel restrictions, and because the downtown of Tijuana was dead during COVID. And similarly, our landlord couldn’t be flexible. There was another venue in Querétaro that only operated for one year and closed right before COVID. 

Your landlords in Mexico City were more flexible?

Our landlords in Mexico City were very flexible with us, and they waited until we could pay them back. We accumulated a big debt with them during COVID. What we saw was that people were super excited to go back to watching films and having social interactions. Right after we reopened post-COVID in Mexico City, the project got a new, fresh air. A lot of people started coming much more than before COVID. I know it didn’t happen the same way in commercial chains, but I think in art-house cinemas, at least here with Ciné Tonalá, we saw a big change. Since reopening, our numbers of audience members, and people wanting to do festivals and events have increased a lot compared to before COVID, until now. That helped us pay back our landlords. 

How do you understand your regional collaboration? 

We opened a venue in Tijuana because I met a programmer, Adriana Trujillo. She no longer lives in Tijuana. I met Adriana at the Flaherty Seminar, which is a seminar in upstate New York dedicated to nonfiction films. It’s a very interesting programming experience. A lot of scholars, filmmakers, and programmers go there, and I think it has been happening for more than 60 years. We were just opening Ciné Tonalá at that time, and Adriana and I were sharing our experience.

Tijuana is a place I love. It’s a border town with a very strong identity. The music that comes from Tijuana, the cinema – it’s always risky and bold. It has a big creative community. Outside Mexico, Tijuana has this image of being a super dangerous place, and I think that narrative only helps the US, or elsewhere. Yes, it can be dangerous, but it is also a super strong creative city. And it is a great place to eat, with amazing food. At some point Adriana came to Mexico City – she was doing a documentary festival in Tijuana called BorDocs. She came and said, we have to do something in Tijuana; there are a lot of films being produced, and the music scene is amazing.

How was your experience opening a venue in Tijuana?

So what we did was, from what we already have – the foundations of Cine Tonalá – we worked with a local partner to design it according to the needs of that city, and what we can add to what we already do to make something special. Something a bit tailor-made for that city. We went there to look for investors. And then we basically moved to that city and started the project with them.

Many of the initiatives Adriana had in Tijuana, and that Salomón had in Bogotá, we took and brought back to Mexico City, because they were amazing ideas. The link to the local community was these local partners. And in the end, the community is the one that takes over the project and makes it its own. In Bogotá, for example, we had two screening rooms, which is super helpful for programming. There were Colombian films that played at Cine Tonalá Bogotá for nine or ten months, because there was an audience that never stopped going. For example, Todo Comenzó por el Fin (2015) by Luis Ospina. Luis Ospina was a director who passed away in 2019, and he was an amazing director; he used to come to Cine Tonalá. We showed his Todo Comenzó por el Fin for almost a year – something we had never done in Mexico City.

When you expanded beyond Mexico City, did you see Cine Tonalá as a concept that could travel, as a franchise, or a mode of screening films and working? 

In Ciné Tonalá Bogotá and Tijuana, we brought our way of working, but the local teams took what worked for them, and then invented many other initiatives depending on the local audience and what was happening at the time. What we did, and this was very important for us, was to communicate how we want to work: how we want our staff to behave, to respect each other, and to have a great ambiente de trabajo.

We have many films, many artists and many clients who are, as I said, part of the queer community. For many of our staff, waiters or other team members, I have seen that some of them were not familiar with that in cities like Mexico City, Bogotá, or Tijuana. So we have a monthly meeting where we show the programming to all staff, and we explain the films and everything that will happen. In a casual way in those meetings, we always say: this is a safe space for all of you, and we will never tolerate any disrespect or bullying. It has been very positive for me to see that. I think we have managed to create a safe space for everyone who works there. And I think the programming, and understanding what we are showing, has value. It doesn’t matter if you are in the kitchen or in administration. Your impact on the audience and the community is the same as whether you are the projectionist or you work at the box office. I think that has helped us build a really good ambiente de trabajo. 

So we haven’t done this as a franchise. We get involved. We assume responsibility together with local partners. We go there to look for investors. 

Could you tell us a bit more about your work that goes beyond film exhibition?

Sometimes we distribute films. We started doing that in 2014 because there was a film we wanted to programme: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by Ana Lily Amirpour. When we tried to find a distributor in Mexico, we found there wasn’t one; no one was distributing it here. So we reached out to the agency. As we already had Bogotá, we secured exhibition rights for two countries: Mexico and Colombia. We distributed the film in the art-house circuits of both countries. After we started doing that, many projects took place across Tijuana, Mexico City, and Bogotá. It was really exciting to share ideas with local audiences.

There was an Argentine-Netherlands musician and director, Dick Verdult aka Dick El Demasiado. He makes cumbia, but he also makes cinema. We organised a tour with him to the three Tonalás, screening his films and hosting concerts; he was also presenting a documentary about himself called Es verdad pero no aquí by Luuk Bouwman. It was really hard to organise, because Bogotá-Mexico City is almost a five-hour flight, and Mexico City-Tijuana is almost a four-hour flight. We’re not close enough, and travel within Latin America is super expensive. But for us it was very important to have at least one opportunity where a film or an artist could appear across all the Tonalás. It communicated to audiences that we wanted them to experience what the other cities were experiencing. 

That’s why it was very hard for us to decide to close the Tonalás in Tijuana and Bogotá. But we didn’t have any other option.

Juan Pablo Bastarrachea holds a Bachelor’s degree in Audiovisual Communication and a postgraduate degree in Cultural Management. Since 2004, he has worked at film festivals in Mexico. In June 2012, he and a group of friends opened Cine Tonalá in Mexico City’s Roma neighbourhood, part of a network of independent cinemas that has since expanded with sister projects in Bogotá, Tijuana, and Querétaro.

He has produced documentaries and experimental works with directors such as María José Cuevas and Camila José Donoso. He has served on juries at Rio de Janeiro Directors’ Week, the Cuenca International Film Festival, and the Cinema Tropical Awards. He teaches the Distribution Seminar at the Escuela Superior de Cine in Mexico City and has been a tutor at various editions of Locarno Academy LATAM. Currently, as a producer, he is developing audiovisual projects involving adaptations of intellectual property.