Melkweg Cinema

A cinema on the second floor of a milk factory

Melkweg Cinema is the film room inside Melkweg, the Amsterdam venue at Lijnbaansgracht 234a, a short walk from Leidseplein. The building is the only factory still standing on the canal belt. It was put up in the nineteenth century as a sugar refinery, bought by the dairy company OVVV in 1920 and used to process milk until it closed in 1969. After a year standing empty it was reopened on 17 July 1970 by Cor Schlösser and a group of fellow organisers as a summer-only cultural project, with a café, a restaurant and a single hall for music and theatre. The experiment ran again in the summers of 1971 and 1972 before Melkweg became a permanent, year-round centre in 1973. The venue's own account of those years describes Amsterdam at the time as a cosmic centre of the world, and the building as a biotope for successive subcultures, from hippies to punk, grunge and hip hop.

The cinema itself sits on the second floor, reached by lift, and holds 90 people in fixed seats with no standing room. It shares a foyer with the Upstairs room, which is where the bar, lockers and toilets are. There is no fixed wheelchair position in the room, but the venue arranges space on request through its accessibility address, and a standard ticket covers it; the nearest adapted toilet is beside the Max on the ground floor. It is the smallest of the six spaces Melkweg lists for the building, alongside the Max, the Oude Zaal, the Rabozaal, the Theaterzaal and the Expo gallery.

From hippie stage to pop temple

Melkweg turned more decisively towards live music through the 1980s, added a photo gallery in 1985 and opened the Max, its largest hall, in 1995. The concert history is the reason most people know the name. U2 played their first show outside Ireland and the United Kingdom there in October 1980, Nirvana appeared in November 1989 before they were famous, and Prince put on a surprise show in 2011 with tickets going on sale an hour before doors. By 2010 the venue was drawing around 400,000 guests a year and was estimated to have hosted nine million people since it opened. In 2019 it staged 1,250 events with more than 1,600 artists, bands and makers.

The fiftieth birthday fell on 17 July 2020, in the middle of the coronavirus lockdown, and was marked with a 24-hour livestream rather than a party in the building. Coverage of the anniversary put annual attendance at roughly 540,000 and made clear that music remains the overwhelming bulk of what happens inside. Film has nonetheless been part of the offer since the early years, according to Melkweg, and the cinema has carved out a distinct identity within that: Cineville, the Dutch cinema-pass network, describes it as an idiosyncratic film house inside the pop temple, with weekly attention for music films and documentaries as well as anime and genre cinema.

The Dutch home of the music film

The programme is built around music. Amsterdam's official city guide describes Melkweg Cinema as the Dutch arthouse cinema for music films, covering the whole spectrum from concert recordings to documentaries, with hip hop, metal and R&B alongside older names and films about clubs and festivals. Melkweg's own film page adds classic and new music films, what it calls the very best animation, and engaged programmes with special introductions, Q&As and live music. Screenings occasionally move down into the Max or the Rabozaal when a film warrants a bigger room.

Much of that comes through partnerships. Melkweg lists In-Edit, the music documentary festival; Kaboom, the anime festival whose series runs monthly in the cinema; IDFA, the Amsterdam documentary festival; Heat; MUBI; Caribbean Creativity, which brings its CineCarib strand of Dutch-Caribbean and Surinamese work; and Steppin' Into Tomorrow. CineRadar is an annual showcase for new talent. Amsterdam Dance Event also lists Melkweg Cinema among its venues. Most films are shown in English or with English subtitles, which the venue points out for its international audience.

Tickets work like an arthouse rather than a gig venue. Cineville pass holders can reserve a seat through Ticketmaster without a barcode and have the pass scanned at the box office, and tickets are also sold at the Melkweg counter. Melkweg's own year members get certain screenings free.

Autumn 2026: Oasis, the Sex Pistols and Akira in one week

The September 2026 programme shows the mix in practice. On Thursday 10 September the evening opens at 19:00 with I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol, a 102-minute documentary directed by Nick Mead and Andre Relis in which original bassist Glen Matlock tells the band's story, free to year members. At 21:15 the same night the room switches to a restored print of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira from 1988, 117 minutes in Japanese with English subtitles.

The following three nights belong to Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger, the 120-minute film by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace charting the Oasis Live '25 reunion tour, with rehearsal, backstage and onstage access and the first joint interviews with Noel and Liam Gallagher in more than twenty years. It screens on 11, 12 and 17 September at 21:15, and the 11 and 17 September shows were already marked sold out on the venue's listings in early September. Also on 12 September is CineCarib #3: Beach Inna Bondage, a reggae documentary. It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley follows on 15 September, Amadou & Mariam: The Blind Couple from Mali on 17 and 23 September, Billy Idol Should Be Dead on 18 and 19 September, and the 1995 anime anthology Memories in the Kaboom slot on 19 September. NOFX: 40 Years of Fuckin' Up on 25 and 26 September is sold out on both nights.

The run continues through the year: The Black Fire Documentary, a set of jazz, funk and Afro shorts, on 14 October; Children Who Chase Lost Voices on 17 October and All You Need Is Kill on 14 November for Kaboom; The Magic City: Birmingham according to Sun Ra on 25 November; the 1991 anime 3x3 Eyes on 12 December; and Miles, a jazz documentary, on 16 December.

What a night in the Cinema is like

A visit is a single feature rather than a double bill. Doors open fifteen minutes before the listed start, films run between roughly 100 and 120 minutes, and the standard price is 12 euros, free with a Cineville pass and, for selected films, with Melkweg year membership. The room is seated only, and with 90 places a documentary with a live fanbase fills up fast, which is why two of the three Oasis nights and both NOFX nights had gone before the month started. Some screenings carry an introduction, a Q&A or a live set, though the September listings opened for this profile did not advertise any.

The venue is honest about one quirk of watching a film in a working music hall. Every cinema listing carries the same warning: Melkweg often runs concerts, club nights and films at the same time, and there may occasionally be some noise from other programmes during the screening. Published reviews of the room itself are scarce, so the most reliable read on the audience is the sold-out notices and the fact that the cinema keeps returning to the same partners year after year.