Alicia Kozma Premieres as Director of the IU Cinema

ALICIA KOZMA, the new director of Bloomington’s IU Cinema, may be a sophisticated theater aficionado, but she’s also an unabashed popular-movie buff. One of her earliest inspirations was the critical duo of Siskel and Ebert, and her list of big-screen favorites is somewhat light on Bergman and Kurosawa but heavy on the crowd-pleasers she grew up watching with her father.

“I have a lifelong love of horror movies that really stemmed from my dad,” Kozma says. “We used to watch the classic Universal monsters, like Frankenstein and The Mummy.”

Such classics would feel right at home in the IU Cinema. The 260-seat theater melds state-of-the-art sound and projection systems with such old-school touches as an orchestra pit, a heavy Austrian drape that’s drawn back to reveal the screen, and four vintage murals. Since the founding director, Jon Vickers, opened it in 2011, the on-campus venue has hosted numerous film festivals and welcomed celebrity guests ranging from John Waters to Meryl Streep.

Kozma’s job is to build on those successes during the most challenging possible time. A media industry researcher who recently chaired the first academic program in communication and media studies at Washington College in Maryland, she plans to present a hybrid program of in-person screenings and online events at IU Cinema this fall.

“Long term, I’m looking to incorporate more of the rarely seen archival holdings that Bloomington has,” she says. “And I’m thinking about bringing more community-based film education programs.”

Planning such in-person get-togethers comes as something of a relief, because for Kozma, going to theaters to watch movies has always been less of a pastime and more of a necessity. She saw between 65 and 75 films in-theater annually pre-COVID, and hopes, someday, to return to that pace.

“It’s one of my favorite things,” she says. “I’ve been at such a loss, not being able to go into a movie theater. When I’m having a bad day, I go to the movies and it makes it OK. And when I’m having a good day, I go to the movies and it makes it even better.”

Kozma’s list of personal favorites is eclectic, to say the least, and includes Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, John Carpenter’s gorefest The Thing, the old whodunit Clue, and a Canadian “pitch-black comedy” called The Forbidden Room (the plot would require its own article to explain).

She’s also a big fan of the communal rush one can get from watching a movie in a crowded theater. During the pandemic, she developed some interesting hacks to try to replicate that feeling at home. For instance, on YouTube, there’s an entire genre of videos in which people sneak cameras into theaters to film not the movie itself, but the crowd’s reaction to it. Kozma found herself occasionally watching videos of opening-night crowds enjoying the end of Avengers: Endgame.

“There are tears, there’s applause, there are people jumping out of their seats,” she says. “I’ve watched those videos a couple of times during quarantine because it reminds me of how film connects us to one another and how it helps us share intimate moments with total strangers. Nothing really does that like the movies.”