Secret Cinema

On Saturday, I spent a heady evening in Kingston, Jamaica, partying like it was 1972. There was live music, there was a massive jerk barbecue, there were dancing girls and there was a fabulous man in a fabulous suit who kept asking me (and everyone else) if I was "still really really really feelin' da vibe-ah?" I really, really, really was - as, indeed, was everybody else at London's Coronet Cinema, home, for one night only, to all the sights, sounds, smells and violence of 1970's Jamaica.

Welcome, dear friends, to the world of Secret Cinema. The brainchild of the braindaddy behind Future Shorts, it's a quite wonderful thing. Basically, once a month, somewhere in London, they screen a film - you don't know where it is until about a week before, and you don't know what the film is until the film starts. And it's much more than just the film - they create a huge, perfectly crafted event around it. They show a mixture of films, from cult classics, to plain old classics, to previews of soon-to-be-released blockbusters: this time round we had the quite magnificent (and the quite bonkers) Harder They Come, starring the quite magnificent Jimmy Cliff, and it was quite suitably mental; last time they showed Anvil (which is quite, quite brilliant) at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, and as the credits rolled, the band themselves struck up from the balcony.

There's elements of flash-mobbing (the punters at the frankly terrifying Charlie Chaplin pub on E&C roundabout were more than a little bemused), there's elements of crowd-sourcing, and there's a whole lot of good old word of mouth - but more than anything, there's a huge amount of love and attention that goes into both the selection of the films, and the event-related brouhaha that surrounds them. I will be going again.

So there you have it. The Secret Cinema. It's awesome. Tell Nobody.