A peak into how the cozy café transforms into an intimate movie theatre every week

By Shreya Basu

On Tuesday nights at Rooms Coffee at 915 Dupont St., the café’s usual warm glow shifts into something more cinematic. By 8 p.m., the employees have transformed the cozy, vinyl-lined space into a miniature movie theatre, complete with rows of folding chairs facing the screen. About 15 people filter in — some regulars, some newcomers — stepping in from the November chill as they settle in for the week’s cult-classic anime screening: Mind Game.

Sam Ehsaei, a server who has worked at Rooms for nearly two years, said the weekly movie nights are a relatively new addition to the café’s lineup, having started in the summer.

The programming came from the owner, Nigel Wang’s personal tastes.

“He’s a huge fan of anime in general and I think a lot of this space is just built off of things that he loves.” Ehsai said. “He just wanted to provide a space for that experience for people.”

Despite the café’s emphasis on community, Ehsaei noted that the movie nights aren’t the most social of their weekly events.

“A movie begs [for] your attention and takes up a lot of space for two hours,” he said. “Whether they’re moved by the movie or it’s just an early night for them, [the moviegoers] don’t really stick around too much. We get a whole different crowd of people coming after the movie.”

Unlike some weekly programming, movie night doesn’t yet have a core group of regulars, as they only switch movies monthly.

“For four weeks, it’s the same movie. If somebody comes for one week, they don’t come for the other three weeks,” Ehsaei explained.

Ehsaei revealed their film selection is a culmination of Wang’s favourites — he picks one among the varying titles he loves. Popular titles rotate with lesser-known ones, like Mind Game, which many attendees hadn’t heard of before.

“To his credit, there’s a lot of bangers like Cowboy Bebop, Akira — things that are really famous and loved. But then there’s movies, like tonight, where a lot of people haven’t heard of it and the style is a little more experimental and different,” Ehsaei said. “You can tell this movie is going to be different and I like that he makes space for lesser-known titles.”

This month’s pick, Mind Game, is a 2004 experimental feature directed by Masaaki Yukasa, an animator celebrated for pushing the boundaries of what Japanese animation can look and feel like. Mind Game is a whirlwind of shifting animation styles including stop motion, motion graphics and live-action sequences blended with surreal imagery and existential themes. It’s the kind of film that rarely gets mainstream exposure, making this choice personal and culturally meaningful.

While the café hasn’t collaborated with local film distributors yet, it’s something Ehsaei says the owner is open to. They once screened a local documentary on the Jamaican diaspora’s influence on Toronto’s music scene and hosted both the director and the documentary’s subject.

Rooms Coffee has always been more than just a café. Its weekly calendar includes chess nights on Mondays, jazz-focused vinyl DJ sets on Wednesdays and freeform DJ sets on Thursdays. On weekends, the café clears the floor to create a 100-person dance floor for disco, funk and boogie.

“It’s a really, really good vibe here,” Ehsaei said. “Every party night, I walk home with 10 new songs in my Shazam.”

Movie night, though quieter, fits seamlessly into the café’s identity. It turns into a warm, inviting space created for intentional community building, complete with $3 popcorn cups for the guests to purchase and a complimentary drink ticket that allows them to choose from a thoughtfully crafted drink list.  

For the staff, transforming a full-service café into a screening room has become routine. 

“We have an hour and a half every day just to reset the space,” Ehsaei explains. On Tuesdays, that reset means rearranging the room for the projector, adjusting the lighting and creating an atmosphere suited for a cozy movie night. “Every night is kind of like a different transformation.”

During Mind Game, the room quieted down and the film’s visuals washed over the place with its rapid cuts and bursts of colour that faintly reflected off the disco balls above. Most of the audience watched in stillness, with occasional whispers and bursts of laughter during the film’s more chaotic and absurd moments. 

As the credits rolled and the workers folded up the chairs and took down the projector, the atmosphere slowly changed. People trickled out and soon after a different group began to trickle in: friends meeting up for a late-night drink, regulars greeting the staff and the space transitioned from a cinema to a bar.

In a city where independent art spaces are becoming increasingly commercialized and inaccessible, there’s something so refreshing about a space screening weekly movie nights purely out of a love for the medium.