New Old Home for Intellectual Film Buffs: Fancy coffee, indie and art films, app (optional)

On Thursday, September 19, David Fullerton opened Acoustic Java Café and Microcinema on 204 South Main Street in Providence. He chose an ideal spot, the place where Cable Car used to be. A microcinema is a single-screen theater that shows one film at a time. Java Café means you can expect gourmet coffee drinks, croissants, sandwiches and hipster music playing in the background. Acoustic Java Café and Microcinema is similar to Cable Car, but what makes it unique (besides the length of its name) is its bookshelf, its daytime workspace that uses the projection screen and an app, and the team behind it. David Fullerton, Alecia Bishop and Jared Wagner shared their story with Motif before their low-key opening. 

Stepping away from the coffee bar, Alecia Bishop, the general manager,  had no visible milk stains or coffee burns on her shirt though she had been busy making a customer’s cappuccino froth up artistically. It was around 6pm (well before the screening) with the kind of weather that made people passing by feel like drinking coffee and buzzing late into the night. She laughed, which seemed like a serious sigh of relief, and casually mentioned the naysayer she encountered after being asked whether she was nervous about living up to the reputation of Cable Car. 

“I’m just excited to finally be open and that all the popcorn has come,” she said. She also works at the Acoustic Java in Worcester, and first came onto the scene when Jared Wagner, a film buff and barista, started curating mobile screenings for the Acoustic Java Roastery.  

In those days, they carried a projector and screen into the roastery and showed films at night. They also collaborated with the Worcester Art Cinema. It became so popular they started doing short film festivals and realized they needed a more permanent space for movies. The empty projection room and café on 204 South Main Street, though a little far from Worcester, fit this need. 

Bishop reminisced about how Wagner’s passion for film grew into a community event. At that moment, Wagner popped by the table and gave a critical analysis of Cléo de 5 à 7 (the evening’s film).

“Agnes Varda was the only female [director] in the Fench New Wave,” he said while doing a tech thing on his phone for the event. Then he pulled a quick sad face, amplified by his wide-framed glasses and tug on his overalls, and left to go check on some sort of necessary last-minute task. 

Bishop was sitting on a wide red chair with thick cushions on its back and seat, the table next to it convenient for socializing, eating, and…emailing. The owner, David Fullerton, also was sitting on a red chair across the table, working at his laptop and listening to a documentary projected on the wall. The single-screen theater room is now also a workspace that is open during the day. Here patrons can use an app and headphones to listen to whatever’s playing on the screen, drink coffee and hopefully get through a good book or at least their inbox.

Fullerton pulled off his headphones to answer my next question: On the company’s website, it says Acoustic’s slogan is “As music tames the savage beast, coffee civilizes the man unkind.” Um, what does that mean? 

“Coffee is a work of art, and music work of art,” he said. The poetic and philosophic wording of the slogan made me want to get a croissant, watch a French film, and expand me understanding of the universe and its relationship to the coffee bean.

Acoustic Java continues to host popups at the Worcester location and plans to have a microcinema on Brussels street in Worcester, which will make a total of four locations.