LONG GONE cinemas in Keighley will be resurrected as part of next year’s RATMA international film festival.

Event organisers will establish pop-up cinemas in buildings that once housed some of the town’s many ‘picture palaces’.

There could even be a drive-in movie screening at the car park of Morrison’s supermarket, the one-time site of a popular Keighley fleapit.

RATMA boss Marcus Gregg, a tutor at the Keighley Campus of Leeds City College, this week launched an appeal for information about the precise location of Keighley’s former cinemas.

Mr Gregg and his team, which includes students from the college, also want to meet residents to hear about their memories of ‘going to the flicks’.

RATMA, the River Aire Ten-Minute Amateur film festival, was originally organised as an enterprise project for Mr Gregg’s’s motor maintenance students.

Held for the third year in 2015, the festival attracts hundreds of entries from creators of short films across the world, including a strong selection from Keighley movie-makers.

The one-day festival features screenings of all entries at Keighley Campus, followed by a gala night at Keighley Picture House for the winning films in each category.

For the past two years, the festival has been preceded by a popular ‘pop-up’ cinema in the Airedale Centre, where shoppers are given a sneak preview of shortlisted films.

Mr Gregg said this year the pop-up idea will be expanded to include locations of Keighley’s original cinemas.

He said he already knew sites of some, including the Last Orders pub in North Street and the Gala bingo hall in Alice Street.

Mr Gregg added: “Due to the changed layout of Keighley, I was hoping someone with old memories could walk us round the locations.

“I know two of them have been flattened – one was where the market is and another was at Morrison’s. We want a drive-in cinema in Morrison’s car park.”

In the week running up to festival day, each pop-up cinema would have a different reel of films pulled from the various genres, which include drama, action, sci-fi and animation.

Mr Gregg is keen to create ‘living history’ by filming Keighley people recounting their memories.

He added: “If we get a nice film archive of people talking about their days going to the cinemas, we could show them in the pop-up cinemas.”

Anyone willing to talk about their local cinema-going memories should visit ratmaff.weebly.com.

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