Amsterdam's Underground Cinema Scene with Jeffrey Babcock

IN A CITY NOW DEFINED BY SKYROCKETING RENTS AND DIGITAL PROMOTION, ONE FILM ENTHUSIAST CONTINUES TO BUILD COMMUNITY THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY.

HOW DID A NETWORK OF SQUATS, BARTER ECONOMIES, AND UNDERGROUND SCREENINGS SHAPE A CULTURAL TRADITION THAT STILL THRIVES QUIETLY IN AMSTERDAM TODAY?

Still from The Adventures of Picasso (1978) at one of Babcock's screenings

Jeffrey Babcock is a cultural activist and lifelong film obsessive whose story feels inseparable from the underground cultural fabric of Amsterdam. He first arrived in the city in the 1980s, quickly embedding himself in its squatting scene, a time when abandoned buildings were not just occupied, but transformed into living, breathing hubs of art, politics, and community.

He recalls that in many of these communities money barely entered the picture at all. Instead, people relied on informal systems of trading and bartering, sharing food, tools, skills, and labour to sustain themselves. Someone might fix a roof in exchange for a meal, or project a film in return for a place to sleep, and entire networks of daily life ran on mutual support rather than rent or wages. Looking back now, it feels almost impossible to imagine such a system existing in the same city where housing prices have since climbed to dizzying heights. In today’s Amsterdam, with its notoriously expensive rents and tightening housing market, that earlier version of the city can feel like a distant world.

It was here, in these improvised spaces, that Babcock began hosting film nights: informal screenings that blurred the lines between cinema, conversation, and collective experience. Long before Amsterdam, though, his relationship with film had already taken root. He discovered his love for cinema in high school, which deepened during his college years in Wisconsin. What began as fascination soon became something closer to devotion, not just to films themselves, but to what they could do: provoke, unsettle, connect.

In the 1980s, Babcock’s joined a performing arts group and travelled extensively across the world, bringing experimental performances to wildly different audiences. One week he might be performing in grand, cavernous venues somewhere in Siberia; the next, in a tiny fishing village where the idea of “performance art” felt foreign. These experiences shaped his understanding of art as something fluid and communal, not confined to institutions, but alive wherever people gathered.

Today, his film nights carry that same spirit. They’ve taken place everywhere: cafés, squats, back rooms, makeshift venues. Wherever there’s a wall, a projector, and a handful of curious people, a screening can happen. Over time, these evenings have quietly become something of an institution, not in the polished, institutional sense, but as a kind of living archive of strange, beautiful, and unclassifiable cinema.

We caught up with him at one of his favourite local haunts, a small bar tucked near Elandsgracht. He speaks the way he introduces films: slightly rambling, always engaging, drifting between anecdotes, observations, and flashes of social commentary.

Before each screening, Babcock gives what is meant to be a short introduction; it rarely is. His prefaces spiral into charming digressions, bits of film history, political reflections, and personal memories, setting the tone for the evening without ever quite explaining it. The films themselves are just as unpredictable: obscure, surreal, sometimes controversial. Walkouts aren’t uncommon and neither are audible gasps.

Anomie attended one of his weekly monday screenings in Amsterdam West at De Nieuwe Anita: a showing of The Adventures of Picasso, a 1978 surreal retelling of the artist’s life filtered through satire.

Babcock prefers to keep things small, he remains resolutely offline, save for a small and rather exclusive mailing list. Instead, the showing rely on word of mouth and chance encounters rather than algorithms or promotion. The result is a kind of temporary community: a room full of strangers who happened, for whatever reason, to be there that night.

His screenings are not just about watching films. They are about being there, in that specific room, with those specific people, sharing something fleeting and quiet. In an age of endless streaming platforms and solitary viewing, Babcock’s film nights feel almost radical in their simplicity.

For him, cinema has never been just content, it’s a social act, a shared experience, a space where ideas can collide and conversations can begin. As long as there are people willing to gather, on a Monday night, in a small room, somewhere in Amsterdam, he’ll keep the projector running.