The new Sidewalk Film Center and Cinema will have a “Ta-da!” moment tonight, as its very first audience enters the space on the lower level of the Pizitz building in downtown Birmingham.

About 200 people will attend a 7:30 p.m. screening of five Alabama-made short films, settling into two theaters that form the centerpiece of the 11,000-square-foot cinema and film center at Second Avenue North and 19th Street.

Tonight’s event, which is linked to the 2019 Sidewalk Film Festival, is the first of four Spotlight Nights that run through Thursday at the Sidewalk Cinema. These screenings offer movie fans a way to start their festival early — Sidewalk proper runs Friday through Sunday at several downtown venues — but they also mark an entertainment milestone for Birmingham, as a long-awaited art house cinema opens its doors to the public.

(Can’t wait to see the space? The photo gallery at the top of this post offers a sneak peek of the cinema and film center.)

“This is a very exciting time,” says Chloe Cook, executive director of Sidewalk. “For us, this is almost like a new lease on life for our organization.”

Visionaries at Sidewalk have been dreaming of an art house cinema — brainstorming ideas, scouting locations and discussing possibilities — for about 20 years. (The Sidewalk festival was founded in 1998 by Erik Jambor, Alan Hunter, Michele Forman and others who wanted to develop an independent film community in Birmingham and bring more indie movies here.)

Concrete plans for the cinema and film center have been underway for more than two years, and fundraising for the $5 million project started in April 2017. Sidewalk has raised about $4.5 million to date via a capital campaign, and organizers at the nonprofit organization remain hopeful they’ll reach their goal.

Construction of the cinema and film center began about nine months ago, and although a few finishing touches are necessary, Cook says that phase has pretty much come to a close.

“People who’ve been into the space have been overwhelmingly positive,” Cook says. “People have said, ‘It’s a lot nicer and cooler than I imagined it would be.’ It’s been sort of fun to hear people who saw it at the groundbreaking ceremony say, ‘Oh, you’re really pulling it off.’”

The cinema and film center — designed by Birmingham’s Davis Architects and and built by the Stewart Perry construction company — includes two 95-seat screening venues, two lounges, a bar and concession stand, offices for the Sidewalk staff and an education space for classes, meetings, seminars and the like.

The cinema and film center is intended to supplement the annual Sidewalk festival, not to replace it. With that in mind, Cook and other members of the Sidewalk team wanted to unveil the space in tandem with this year’s festival, making a splash with Sidewalk’s fan base and using the new cinema as one of the festival venues.

That’s exactly what’s happening this week, but folks attending the Sidewalk festival can’t just show up at the cinema over the weekend, hang out at the bar or request an impromptu tour. The cinema is being used for specific screenings such as the four Spotlight Nights, and will be open for some encore screenings during the festival on Saturday and Sunday.

The bar and concessions stand will be open during those screenings, Cook says, but both will have a limited menu.

After the festival ends, the Sidewalk Cinema will go dark for a few days and re-open on Aug. 31 for another round of encore screenings. Movies that were popular at the festival, or drew overflow crowds, will be on the agenda through Sept. 2.

After that, the cinema and film center will have a “soft opening,” Cook says. The grand opening is planned for Sept. 13-15.

Organizers expect the cinema and film center to be open 360 days per year, with daily programming in both of the theaters.

“It’ll be about 50 percent first-run indies that will run just like a movie theater seven days a week, with multiple screen times every day," says Rachel Morgan, Sidewalk’s creative director. "About 50 percent is retrospective or one-off screenings — in other words, where we do a screen talk, or something like that, and screen a film once and move on.

“A lot of those retrospective screenings are auteur series, or celebrations of particular actors, or a flashback series representing a particular generation or decade," Morgan says. “It’s a calendar model, meaning that every single day will look different in the cinema. You can put the calendar virtually on your computer or on your fridge, and you can kind of go, ‘What do I want to do on Wednesday?’ There’s several different things happening at the Sidewalk Cinema.”

Although tonight’s event is an introductory one, the folks at Sidewalk believe it offers a glimpse of what movie lovers will experience when the cinema and film center are operating at full strength.

“I think the energy that’s created by the overall design of the space is really positive,” Cook says. “Everything is looking nice.”