“Great to come to Aberfeldy…”

Well, here we are, just a matter of weeks to go before a brand new cinema arrives in the heart of Aberfeldy. My name is Paul Foley and I am your new Cinema Manager, hopefully we’ll be seeing plenty of each other in the months to come!

I’ve been variously a General Manager for live music and arts venues in Glasgow as well as a jobbing session musician which has seen me work with venues such as Nice N Sleazy and the Glasgow School of Art, as well as playing for bands including Snow Patrol and The Vaselines. This work was great while it lasted and took me as far as Japan and South America but after my last tour, I felt the need to get out the city and get to somewhere that has a little more relaxed pace of living.

By chance, I had been checking out boutique cinemas all over New Zealand and the USA while travelling and had ambitions to open something similar in Glasgow when I got back. After meeting a very interesting chap who ran a pop-up cinema from out of an old convenience store in New York, my mind was made up. Little did I know that an opportunity to get involved with something a little bigger than that was coming along!

 So – the cinema is going to be a fully-kitted-out, all bells and whistles and fully-functioning modern, digital cinema. You won’t have to wait weeks and weeks to see new releases as we’ll be putting things on as near to release date as we possibly can. We’ll have a packed program that is sure to please everyone, from opera and ballet to gaming sessions to festival tie-in’s that will focus on the theme of the festival, be it music, adventure sports or any of the other wonderful things that Highland Perthshire offers. If you want to watch 2D or 3D, we can do that to and we’ve future-proofed as much as we can to make sure that we can deliver the cutting edge in visual entertainment.

The important part is that we are opening in April, with a special screening on the 19^th for the lucky winners of our ‘Golden Ticket’ competition. Look out for details of how to enter in the local press and on our website – www.birkscinema.co.uk. Before then, we’ll be doing special preview screenings for schoolchildren, social groups and local residents between the 13^th and 18^th of April with paying customers welcome from the 20^th onwards. It’s all very hectic as we count down to the opening, so keep an eye on the website for regular updates of how to get involved, from volunteering to job opportunities. See you all soon!