Philadelphia’s first

HD screening room.

MBN Original HD Screening room: 2000 – 2012

725 N 4th Street Philadelphia, PA 19123

The Media Bureau designed, built, and produced the City of Philadelphia’s first Independent  SD/HD film, media, politics, and art salon, complete with multiple digital studios and a spacious cafe/parlor (freeRADlab) in 1998. The strategy was to help unite and enable the greater Philadelphia creative digital media community and economy, and their global counterparts in one location, with all of the tools, at one time. The screening room was programmed from the extensive in-house content production, web/network access, and personal collection of Independent “digital” films, festival favorites, including genre films, documentaries, midnight cult movie’s, film slam selections, Real Time Documentaries, and much more.

Independent film and digital media was curated, live, as a one of a kind creative forum to converge, screen, network, share, and innovate ideas in real time across many genres. The underground film forum, #uff, originated in 1998 and met regularly until 2011 to screen and discuss global, often online, independent films. The #UFF is now the in-house curation DAO for the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival and its ongoing discovery and curation of independent film an technology.

Thank you to the thousands who passed through, had events, interacted, watched, discussed, debated, posted, innovated, got married, had Bar Mitzvah’s, and took part in what was a truly historical and magical creative cipher. The winds will never stop blowing.

Thank you,

All of us at the Media Bureau