When Microcinema Walked Into the Philadelphia Film Society

A screening at the Philadelphia Film Society carries its own kind of expectation. The organization, founded in 2001 as a member-supported nonprofit, has spent more than two decades curating international cinema for Philadelphia audiences: running the Philadelphia Film Festival, programming the Philadelphia Film Center and the PFS Bourse Theater, and operating the PFS Drive-In at the Navy Yard. These are not tiny rooms. But they are also not the multiplex, and the difference matters more than it might appear. When Harry Hayman showed up to watch his brother Ben Hayman and the film collective The Secret Handshake bring their particular brand of wonderfully weird cinema through those doors, alongside The Reel Collective, Hyde City, and Penn Treaty Pictures, he was watching something specific happen. The underground and the institution had agreed to share the same room.

Harry Hayman and the Names He Notices

Harry Hayman does not describe this experience in his caption as a film review. He does not describe the audience’s reaction or what the room felt like when the lights came up. He names people. Ben Hayman. Ruben. The Secret Handshake. The Reel Collective. Hyde City. Penn Treaty Pictures. The naming is the point. In the Philadelphia he moves through and writes about, the programmers and curators who put rare and difficult and unexpected things in front of audiences are doing work that deserves credit by name rather than acknowledgment by category.

His public voice has always operated this way. The musicians get named. The chefs get named. The community organizers get named. The approach reflects something he returns to across different parts of his civic and cultural work: culture does not appear because an institution decides to host something. It appears because someone, somewhere, spent years knowing what belonged on the other side of those doors. The screening at the Philadelphia Film Society was made possible by people who had been doing exactly that in smaller rooms long before any institution issued an invitation. Harry Hayman watched the result and found it worth saying out loud.

The Film: A 1971 Coproduction That Exists in Two Versions

The movie Ben Hayman and The Secret Handshake brought into the Philadelphia Film Society is not one that appears in standard domestic programming calendars. Zatoichi and the One-Armed Swordsman, released in 1971, was a genuine Japan and Hong Kong coproduction, built around a premise that required two different studios and two entirely different screen traditions to execute. Katsu Productions, the Japanese studio behind the Zatoichi series, partnered with Wing Luen Movie Film Company, a Hong Kong outfit, to put two of the most recognizable action film figures in either country on screen together for the first time.

Shintaro Katsu played Zatoichi, the blind masseur and swordsman who had already carried more than twenty films in the series by that point. Jimmy Wang Yu played Wang Kang, the one-armed Chinese swordsman. Kimiyoshi Yasuda directed the Japanese production; Hsu Tseng Hung oversaw the Hong Kong footage. The result was a film that existed, at the moment of release, in more than one form.

The Japanese release and the Chinese release had different endings. In the Japanese version, Zatoichi was the one still standing. The Chinese edit reportedly gave Wang Kang the victory, with a resolution that left the opponent alive rather than dead. The language barrier between the two protagonists was not a plot convenience or a period detail to be waved past. It was written into the story as a source of actual tragic misunderstanding. Two audiences in two countries, watching what appeared to be the same film, were reaching two different conclusions about who deserved to walk away. That is not an unusual condition for international coproductions of this era, but it is exactly the kind of detail that independent programmers carry in their heads and that standard distribution histories do not organize around.

A multiplex does not screen this film. A streaming platform with a large library might make it technically accessible, but locating it there and clicking play from a couch is not the same as what happened at the Philadelphia Film Society. The work of finding a print, confirming the source, and placing a film like this in front of a live audience is the work that microcinema programmers do by default.

The Secret Handshake and Philadelphia’s Programming Culture

The Secret Handshake is, as the Broad Street Review’s guide to Philadelphia film clubs describes it, a film collective focused on unexpected double features built around a shared theme. Their home venue is The Head & the Hand Books in Fishtown. The pairing is always the argument: two films in a single evening that illuminate each other in ways neither film announces on its own. Programming of this kind requires a genuine command of cinema that reaches well beyond the major studio catalogues and standard repertory channels, into the zones where titles move rarely and prints are tracked down by people who know to look.

The Reel Collective and Hyde City appear in Harry Hayman’s caption as part of the collaborative effort behind this screening, alongside The Secret Handshake and Penn Treaty Pictures. Public information about The Reel Collective and Hyde City is limited, so they are named here as Harry named them. What the caption makes clear is that the Philadelphia Film Society evening was not a solo production by a single group. It was a gathering of the city’s independent programming community, which is itself part of the story. The microcinema world runs on exactly these kinds of collaborations, where groups with overlapping values and complementary programming instincts combine their reach to make something happen that none of them could have placed on a major institution’s calendar alone.

Penn Treaty Pictures and the City’s Film Ecology

Penn Treaty Pictures is a free outdoor cinema series at Penn Treaty Park along the Delaware River waterfront, organized by Reel Nomadic with Secret Handshake as a programming partner. Its bill runs to cult classics, samurai films, international cinema, and repertory work screened outdoors at sundown. The slide naming Penn Treaty Pictures in one of the photographs Harry Hayman posted from the PFS event, alongside a reference to an outdoor Wild Style screening, shows that the conversation between the outdoor series and the Philadelphia Film Society program runs in both directions. These are not competing circuits. They share audiences, programmers, and a shared sense of what kinds of films deserve to be seen together.

cineSPEAK, the Philadelphia arthouse cinema and journal founded by Sarah Mueller, has operated for more than a decade putting independent and international films in front of city audiences at venues across Philadelphia, without a permanent home theater. The Secret Cinema, founded in 1992 by Jay Schwartz and examined in a 2026 account of Philadelphia’s independent film scene by 34th Street Magazine, maintains actual film projection equipment for repertory work and faces, as Schwartz has described it, the persistent difficulty of finding resources that larger archives take for granted. These organizations form the ground on which something like a Secret Handshake screening event at the Philadelphia Film Society becomes possible.

Microcinema: The Movement and the Material

The word microcinema entered the cultural vocabulary in 1994, when Rebecca Barten and David Sherman named what they were doing at Total Mobile Home MicroCINEMA in San Francisco. As the Wikipedia entry on microcinema documents, they used the term to describe a worldwide movement of small scale, DIY cinema exhibition operating outside the major studio ecosystem. The roots of the form go back further, to the film societies and art houses of midcentury, but the 1994 naming gave the contemporary movement a shared vocabulary and a model that spread through the same channels as the DIY music and publishing scenes developing in parallel.

The challenges that define microcinema are material ones and they remain so. Tracking down exhibition prints for older films is among the most demanding parts of repertory programming, requiring contact with studios, exhibitors, archives, and private collectors. The National Film Preservation Board at the Library of Congress has documented that works without clearly defined owners or immediate commercial value, including many international coproductions, present particular difficulties for any organization trying to screen them in a public setting. A film like Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman sits between two national cinema traditions and belongs fully to neither one’s standard distribution history. The programmer who locates it, confirms a source, and puts it in front of an audience is doing something closer to archival recovery than conventional booking.

The Little Rooms and What They Build

Harry Hayman’s caption lands on a short list of things that matter: the little rooms, the strange movies, the independent programmers, the film nerds who keep discovering and preserving and sharing things. He is not being sentimental about underground culture for its own sake. He is describing a pipeline.

Philadelphia in 2026 is a city with a significant international platform, and the institutions that benefit from that visibility sit on top of decades of work done in smaller spaces. The groups that took Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman into the Philadelphia Film Society had been building that pipeline in Fishtown bookshops, along the Delaware waterfront, and in borrowed rooms across the city before any major institution extended an invitation. Harry Hayman attended and noticed, which is what he does. The evening was not the end of something. It was the point where one part of the circuit became visible enough for somebody standing at the back of the room to see clearly.