GARY MAK SING-HEI, the associate director of Broadway Cinematheque, rarely entertains the media in his Admiralty office these days. Mak usually meets them over coffee at the Yau Ma Tei multiplex's adjoining bookshop-cafe - within sight of film buffs browsing the shelves for books and DVDs. It's his favourite haunt, he says, a place that gets him away from his desk whenever his busy schedule allows.
To devoted film exhibitors such as Mak, the closure of Cine-Art House in Wan Chai last month was a reminder of how seemingly peripheral operations as his bookshop-cafe can be critical to the survival of specialist film venues.
'If we were to just do screenings like Cine-Art, we would have closed a long time ago,' Mak says.
'We wouldn't be here talking to people about celebrating our 10th anniversary [later this month].'
While films are firmly at the forefront of the Cinematheque's business, Mak concedes it takes more than innovative programming for art-house venues to survive. 'It's been the plan from the start that we should build a complex that makes it easier for people to know more about film culture,' says Mak, who joined the multiplex venture in 2000, four years after it opened.
'Back then, there was a film library, where members could borrow LaserDiscs of classics and watch them in viewing booths - one way we hoped to anchor a solid audience base,' he says, pointing to the space now occupied by a section selling DVDs of foreign-language films, documentaries and hard-to-find movie soundtracks. That library evolved into a club scheme which allows fee-paying members to borrow film discs and books for perusal at home, a system that encourages repeated, regular visits to the multiplex.