Slieker Film is the one and only arthouse cinema in Leeuwarden, located right in the heart of the city centre. With 3 screening rooms, the cinema provides a daily film programme with a mixture of weekly premieres, documentaries, classics, films for children, a senior-programme, festival nights and archive specials.
Slieker Film started in 1994 as Filmhuis Leeuwarden in a relatively small underground building with 2 screens and 100 seats. In 2013 the cinema moved with the Fries Museum to a brand new and impressive building on the main city square and now has a capacity of 162 seats. At the same time the name of the cinema was changed to Slieker Film, named after George Christiaan Slieker who in 1896 was the first to run film screenings in The Netherlands starting in, exactly, Leeuwarden.
Slieker Film is part of the organization Film in Friesland, which also has under its wings the Noordelijk (Northern) Film Festival and the Fries (Frisian) Film Archive. For the latter, Slieker Film hosts several archive specials throughout the year, in which the Frisian cultural (film) heritage is praised on the big screen. The Noordelijk Film Festival is an annually 5-days event in November, celebrating this year its 38th edition and with 20 to 25 thousands visits it’s one of the largest and oldest regional festival in the Netherlands. The festival – and to a lesser degree Slieker Film as well – has a strong focus on cinematic pearls from Northern Europe: from Iceland, via Ireland, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands to Scandinavia and the Baltic states.
Slieker Film is working together as much as possible with other (culture oriented) organisations in the city and province of Friesland. Screenings for (school) children are organized throughout the year, with a peak in children’s movies shown in October when the annually Cinekid on location festival is hosted. Other programme specials are a long term collaboration with the Movies that Matter festival from Amnesty International and recently a weekly documentary night was initiated, with promising prospects for the future.
With 2 multiplexes at walking distance rising on the horizon, Slieker Film is forced to think about their position in Leeuwarden. But with a connection to the strong Frisian identity, our focus on the Northern cultural and a programme in which we keep presenting the best of European cinema year-round, we are very confident that Slieker Film still has a unique position in the field of cinema exhibition in Leeuwarden.
Harmen Huizenga, programmer
Find out who is Slieker Film’s ambassador here.
