Atom Egoyan and Hussein Amarshi raised the curtain on a shared, 10-year project earlier this month with the debut of Camera, a combination bar and movie house that, it is hoped, will put bums on seats and on barstools by screening non-commercial films for thirsty cinephiles. The 52-seat venue, located in an increasingly trendy west Toronto neighborhood, opened this month with a screening of the new art-house pic I, Claudia.

‘This has been a dream come true,’ says Egoyan, seated at the bar, a few days ahead of the opening. ‘There will always be space for the event movie, the large-scale event movie, but we wanted to create something for the small-scale event movie.’

Egoyan and Amarshi, head of Toronto distributor Mongrel Media, hope their bar will catch on as a meeting place for the city’s lovers of unconventional films, similar to the now-defunct Cinema Parallel in Montreal.

‘I think we live in a time where people have extraordinary home systems but what they don’t have is a place to hang out,’ the director adds. ‘This is hopefully a place where people can watch movies that provoke discussion… to talk about what they’ve just seen. I think that’s an essential part of the cinephilic experience.’ The first year’s schedule will be programmed by Amarshi, and is set to include a work in progress, Citadel, by co-owner Egoyan.

Egoyan admits, with a quiet laugh, that he has had better luck working in movies than he has in bars. The celebrated filmmaker used to bus tables at various watering holes when he lived in B.C. as a young man.

‘I used to spill a lot of drinks in people’s laps,’ he recalls.