If you took a casual stroll down Lower Clapton Road you might not even notice Ümit & Son, with its peeling façade melting away from view between brightly-lit fast-food shops. But look closer and you’ll find a rare treasure for cinema buffs. Film enthusiast Ümit Mesut has stuffed every corner of this shop with old reels, tapes, fading posters, and memorabilia of the lost golden age of 20th-century cinema. It’s not a very lucrative line of business in the age of digital filming and streaming, but, hearteningly, this shop isn’t just clinging on – it’s found a way to thrive. And now a big revamp is set to bring new audiences through its doors.
At the weekend, Ümit & Son debuted its reimagined interior. Once, the only way to explore its collection was to pick a narrow path through its ceiling-high piles of celluloid relics. There’s still plenty of faded, nostalgic charm, of course. But it’s now a flexible space, with room for film obsessives to watch old flicks, and dive deep into movie history.
Upstairs, you’ll find workshops on how to use a newly installed 35mm projector, plus a fully working Moviola. Head down to the basement, and you’ll see a living archive of film history and memorabilia, stuffed with rare treasures from days gone by. Best of all, there’s a new micro cinema with room for 15 people so that you can attend screenings of old reels from the shop’s teeming archive, flickering back to life in front of a rapt crowd of enthusiasts.
Ümit & Son’s big makeover is all thanks to a powerhouse collab between Ümit and filmmaker Liam Saint-Pierre, who first met when NHS physiotherapist Liam wandered in with an old Super 8 projector he’d found in a bin. Soon, he’d been coaxed into buying a new (old) one, and a creative partnership was born. In 2013, Saint-Pierre made a documentary about the shop called ‘The Way of the Dodo’, which bagged the award for Best Short Documentary at Barcelona Film Festival and brought him a whole new career. The duo started up Ciné Real, digging out old 16mm projections for weekly screenings at Castle Cinema in Clapton.
Meanwhile, rising rents were threatening to put the shop out of business. So last year, Liam shot a documentary (on real film, of course) about the pair’s quest to find Quentin Tarantino and beg him to save the shop. They didn’t manage it, but their quixotic mission got enough attention to fund the shop’s reinvention, raising £55,000 on Kickstarter (more than double the original goal).
Now, the shop’s 16mm film collection is listed online. If you want to watch classics like The Red Shoes, Wild Strawberries, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, you can hire out the 15-seater for a special screening, at £250 a time. Or just pop into the shop, and see why so many Londoners have fallen in love with analogue film, even as the cinema industry moves on to more practical, but infinitely less romantic modes of filmmaking.
Ümit & Son, 35 Lower Clapton Road, E5 0NS.
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