Hustle Cinematic is The Hustle Collective's film and visual arts strand - a series of immersive screening events that blend cinema with live music, visual art installations, and community gathering. Each event is built around a theme, a film, and a feeling: that watching something together, in a room with strangers, can change how you see the world.

Unlike a traditional film screening, Hustle Cinematic creates a full sensory environment around each showing. Live DJs and musicians score the evening, artists respond to the programme with original work, audiences are invited to dress up, participate, and linger. The aim is to make cinema feel like a genuine cultural event - urgent, social, and alive - rather than a passive night out.

Hustle Cinematic launched in April 2022 at Nottingham Contemporary, led by Christine Katerere - co-director of Green Hustle and a driving creative force within The Hustle Collective. The inaugural event, Black Speculative, centred on a screening of Afro Samurai: Resurrection - the Emmy-nominated anime scored by RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan - wrapped in live music from DJs NikNak and Uncle Mo, and original visual art by Nottingham illustrator Kim Thompson. The evening explored themes of Afrofuturism, speculative fiction, and the possibilities of Black identity beyond narrow cultural framings.

The launch was developed in partnership with The Screen at Nottingham Contemporary, with support from Film Hub Midlands (funded through the National Lottery) and Arts Council England. It was partly inspired by the Contemporary's Our Silver City 2094 exhibition, which imagined a cohesive Nottingham of the future - a thematic thread that runs through Hustle Cinematic's DNA.

Christine has spoken of the project's debt to a predecessor: Sophia Ramcharan and her Fade II Black Film and Music Lounge, a beloved Nottingham institution that brought Black audiences together around cinema and community in much the same spirit. Hustle Cinematic carries that legacy forward.

Hustle Cinematic operates from a belief that film is one of the most powerful vehicles for empathy and social change available. Rather than treating cinema as entertainment alone, the platform uses it as a starting point for dialogue - programming films that put audiences in each other's shoes, and building events around those films that make the conversation feel natural and joyful rather than didactic.

Future programming is deliberately shaped by community input. What does Nottingham need to see? What stories are going untold? Which voices deserve a bigger room? The platform works with a wide coalition of collaborators including Broadway Cinema, SheAfriq Collective, Nottingham C.A.N, and the wider Hustle Collective network - bringing together film programmers, artists, musicians, and community organisers around a shared commitment to diverse, inclusive, and meaningful screen culture.

Hustle Cinematic also operates as the film wing of Green Hustle, providing climate-focused screenings and a pedal-powered cinema experience at the annual Old Market Square festival - expanding its reach beyond dedicated film events and into the heart of Nottingham's broader cultural calendar.

Nottingham has a rich and often undersung screen culture - from Broadway Cinema's decades of independent programming to a growing community of filmmakers and moving-image artists working across the city. Hustle Cinematic sits within that ecosystem with a specific focus: centring the voices, stories, and experiences that mainstream film culture has historically marginalised, and doing so in spaces that feel genuinely welcoming to the audiences those stories belong to.

In a post-pandemic city still rebuilding its social fabric, Hustle Cinematic offers something simple and powerful: a reason to be in the same room as people you might not usually encounter, sharing something made with craft and intention, and walking out into the night with something new to think about.