The Portal Cinema, a 49-seat nonprofit single-screen arthouse, is aiming to open at 3293 Mission St. in October — but first it has to close a $250,000 Kickstarter that ends Sept. 18.

Programmer Nellie Killian has spent more than two years turning a former Mission Street real estate office into a tiny repertory theater. Now the project comes down to money: an all-or-nothing crowdfunding campaign that has to cover a PG&E electrical-panel upgrade, HVAC, and the 35mm and 16mm projection that would let the room screen film prints, not just digital files. It's a test of whether a neighborhood-scale, nonprofit cinema can still be willed into existence in a city that has spent a decade losing independent movie houses.

San Francisco keeps closing movie theaters. The Portal Cinema is betting a very small one can still open.

The nonprofit venue — 49 seats, a single screen — is set to move into 3293 Mission St., a narrow slice of turf between the Mission and Bernal Heights that locals variously call La Lengua or "Mission-Bernal." The theater's own website (external source, opens in a new tab) now simply reads "Opening October 2026," and SFist reported (external source, opens in a new tab) an October target, pending fundraising.

Getting there depends on a Kickstarter (external source, opens in a new tab) with a $250,000 goal and a Sept. 18 deadline. Because Kickstarter is all-or-nothing, missing the number means the pledges evaporate. Per SFist, the campaign is built around an initial $25,000 first-weekend target, and roughly $50,000 of the total is set aside specifically for a PG&E panel upgrade and HVAC — the unglamorous infrastructure that stands between the room and full operation. In her funding statement, founder and programmer Nellie Killian framed the money as a bridge to open at full capacity, paying for the panel upgrade, the film projection and surround sound.

, a narrow slice of turf between the Mission and Bernal Heights that locals variously call La Lengua or "Mission-Bernal."

That capital sink is the real story. Plenty of people announce theaters; the Portal's pitch is that a genuine repertory house — one that can thread a 35mm or 16mm print, not just play a digital file — needs physical plant most storefronts don't have. What Killian is promising in return is volume and specificity: a rotating slate of new independent releases and older repertory revivals, with the site advertising 11-plus screenings a week and a lobby café built to double as a hangout.

Killian says she wants the theater to sit alongside the city's other arts institutions and to program adventurous work in what she calls "an intimate, community-focused space."

This is not a sudden idea. Killian, a San Francisco native, spent two decades in New York as a programmer and curator — her résumé runs through Metrograph, the Museum of the Moving Image, the British Film Institute, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Criterion Channel — before returning during the pandemic. She leased the Mission Street space in 2023 and has been grinding through the city's permitting process since. Back then, as the SF Standard (external source, opens in a new tab) reported, she was describing the block itself as the draw — "a really magnetic street," a block from El Rio, Thrillhouse Records and Mitchell's Ice Cream, "a place where you can really spend a day."

The context Killian keeps invoking is loss. Over the past decade, she says, the Bay Area has lost many of its most valued independent theaters and alternative arts spaces — the gap she casts the Portal as helping to fill.

Whether the Portal opens at all will be settled largely in the next few weeks, by strangers with credit cards. Killian's wager is that a 49-seat room can generate loyalty a multiplex can't — regulars who treat each screening as an event and use the lobby to meet other film obsessives from around the Bay. The deadline to find out is Sept. 18.