August 2022 meeting: Two Dozen Years of Sidewalk Film

Chloe Cook is the executive director of the Sidewalk Film Center and Cinema and the Sidewalk Film Festival. At AMP’s next meeting, she will discuss Sidewalk’s ongoing work to connect filmmakers and audiences.

Cook’s talk, titled "24 years of Sidewalk Film,” will be part of the Aug. 11 meeting, which will begin at noon in Room 101 of the Homewood Public Library.

A native of Talladega, Alabama, Cook received her B.A. in communications from Auburn University. She has served as executive director at Sidewalk since 2009. Under her leadership, ticket sales for the annual Sidewalk Film Festival have quadrupled and the Fest has been recognized multiple times by international film industry press, most recently being named one of the "50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee" (MovieMaker magazine 2017) and twice named one of the "Top 25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World" (MovieMaker magazine, 2014, 2015).

In 2018 and 2019, Cook led a $4.9 million capital campaign to fund the Sidewalk Film Center + Cinema, an 11,000+ square-foot, two-screen movie theatre and film education center in the lower level of the Pizitz Building in the heart of Birmingham’s Historic Theatre District. The state-of-the-art facility opened to rave reviews Oct. 1, 2019, and after only five months of operation was forced to temporarily close its doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Cinema reopened in September 2020 with exceptionally limited capacity and is open today, proudly serving the film fanatics of the Birmingham metro area Thursday-Sunday every week.

Cook lives in the Glen Iris neighborhood of Birmingham with her 15-year-old daughter Clea, her husband Josh, and two “pound puppies.”

The hybrid meeting will be held at Homewood Public Library and on Zoom.