Honey, I bought a cinema! Geoff Hill proves that maverick can be magic

December 17, 2025

Honey, I bought a cinema! Geoff Hill proves that maverick can be magic

By Ros Dodd

Thinking outside the box has always come naturally to Geoff Hill. Aged nine, fed up being consigned to an unheated mobile school classroom alongside his fellow "underachieving" pupils (Geoff is "terminally dyslexic"), he organised a playground protest and invited a local TV crew to film it. The result? The local education authority paid for him to go to a boarding school for dyslexic children. Four decades later, despite knowing nothing about film and at a time when "no one was buying single-screen rural cinemas", he and a friend took over the Magic Lantern in Tywyn. The result? It's just been named the first Cinema of the Year at the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA), beating 130 other venues across the UK.

The cinema's success is due in no small part to Geoff's ability to combine the playful, even the "silly", with a commitment to community, an ability to find gifted partners to work with and a sizeable dollop of hard-headed business acumen. This maverick approach has served him well in other ventures, too - from developing the historic Frongoch Boatyard, near Aberdyfi, into a tourism and small-business enterprise to entering the Cuprinol Shed of the Year competition in 2012 with a floating version moored in the Dyfi Estuary that beat nearly 400 land-locked rivals to win the "unusual" category (and second place overall).

Sitting in one of the two quirky glamping boats at Frongoch - now called Smuggler's Cove - with his two-year-old Spinone Italiano called Cwtchi, Geoff is not only bursting with pride over the BIFA accolade; he and his Magic Lantern co-owner/manager, Sara Hulls, and their team are full of plans for the cinema's future, while he also has plans for his other pursuits. Turning 65 might signal retirement for some people - but certainly not for Geoff.

Although he's been based in mid-Wales for several decades, Geoff was born and raised in Dorset. When he was 16, he boarded a bus outside his house and went to Stonehenge Free Festival, which fuelled not only his love of the arts, but also set him on the entrepreneurial road. "I started to do work around festivals, and I also travelled quite a lot: I spent a year in India." In 1984, he bought his first events tent and ran a café stage at festivals.

"My road-to-Damascus moment came when I realised that rather than paying for a pitch and preparing food, I could simply hire out the tent to someone else to do. So that's how I started my tent company, Hill Top Tents. Over the years, it became quite successful."

By then, Geoff was based near Llanidloes and had a workshop in Caersws. But in 2001, foot-and-mouth disease struck, knocking a big hole in the events industry, so he decided to give up his office and workshop and buy a boat instead.

"I started looking for somewhere to put a boat, driving up and down the coast, and came across Frongoch, which was overgrown, with mattresses fly-tipped on the beach and a faded 'for sale' sign outside."

Back in his office the following Monday, Geoff "stared at the wall for a while" and then rang the estate agents to ask for details. He was told there was an acceptable offer on the table for the boatyard, so he "stared at the wall again" before calling back and, despite "having no money", making an offer of £5,000 over the asking price. "I then spent the next six months working out how to pay for it," he recalls wryly.

Teaming up with business partners and an expert in property refurbishment proved to be the way forward, and in 2002 Geoff moved into the boatyard, living in a "shed with no roof, under a tarpaulin, for six months" before starting to rebuild the two cottages - on the other side of the A493 - as holiday lets.

As the boatyard took off, Geoff scaled down his tent company. "Up until then I'd been spending months on the road, and it's a young man's game. I still run the company, but this year I've only done three events that weren't in Wales, one of them being Glastonbury."

Smuggler's Cove now supports ten micro-businesses, from a carpenter to a company making Finnish saunas, as well as tourism.

One of Smuggler's Cove's two glamping boats

In 2009, seven years after investing in Smuggler's Cove, Geoff was sitting in a pub in Machynlleth with his friend Mark Bond. Both had enjoyed successful years, business-wise, and the subject of the Magic Lantern - on the market for two years at that point - came up.

"The Magic Lantern was very nicely run and was using standard 35mm film," he recalls, "but no one in their right mind was buying single-screen rural cinemas."

All the same, Geoff and Mark drove to Tywyn to see it. The following day, despite "knowing nothing about running a cinema", they made an offer to owner Bob Garrod, who had leased it from Gwynedd Council - and it was accepted.

Immediately, the two men committed to opening seven days a week, all year round. That first summer, still using 35mm film, the cinema showed Toy Story, and Geoff, Mark and Geoff's wife, Annie, ran the box office and sweet shop between them. The following winter, "almost no one came - perhaps ten to 12 people a week - but we survived."

Things picked up the next summer, and Geoff and Mark ploughed every penny they could into making improvements, including putting in a stage and bar. "My wife, who'd moved up here from London, had worked in arts and events, so she brought valuable ideas." Gradually, the hard work and creative thinking started to pay off.

In December 2019, Mark wanted to move on, so Sara Hulls - who'd been working at the cinema as venue manager for two years - bought into the business. Then, just a couple of months later, came the Covid pandemic. The Magic Lantern, like the rest of the events and entertainment industry, was hit hard. But the need to improvise proved to be the venue's making.

"In some ways it was the best thing that happened to us, because it made us think outside the box," says Geoff. “It made us turn the bit of wasteland behind the cinema into an outdoor cocktail bar. We did that in just two days - and Sundowners was created."

They also made the decision to take out every other row of seating in the cinema - halving its capacity - and introducing waiter service. Although this hiked the cost of wages, it also led to customers spending significantly more on food and drink than they did pre-Covid.

"Being able to come in, sit down and order from a menu meant that a trip to the Magic Lantern wasn't just about going to the cinema; it turned it into a night out."

Cheers! The Magic Lantern offers waiter service

The cinema is now a thriving, vibrant community hub; not only showing a wide range of films, from blockbusters to independents, but also hosting an array of regular events, from live comedy and music nights (it even has its own house band) to quizzes and charity gigs.

Geoff believes the Magic Lantern's investment in the local community and, crucially, the community's investment in the Magic Lantern, was key to winning Cinema of the Year.

"We've got the most fantastic team here," he explains. "The feedback we get tends not to be about the film someone's watched - it's about the staff and how knowledgeable they are. We're very lucky, because we're miles from anywhere, so if you're young and creative and want to be allowed your head and to say, 'I've got an idea', there aren't many places around where you can do that. It means we get the pick of the crop of talented people. Take Ella Morgan, for example. She came to do open mic night when she was 14 - and now she fronts the house band and is venue manager.

"Our commitment to the community and the community's commitment to us is so important. In the early days, literally no one would come when we showed independent and foreign-language films, but we kept on, doggedly, and now we have an audience for them. We still show films we know we're going to lose money on, but they are good films, and there is nowhere else locally to see them."

So, how does Geoff hope the venue will benefit from being crowned Cinema of the Year?

"To show a film, we have to negotiate with every individual distributor - and for a one-screen cinema, we show a lot of films - so winning the award might give us a bit more leverage. We might get to host a film premiere in the UK as well. I also want to use it to lobby for investment in arts and culture in rural places in general, not us particularly."

Geoff would love it, too, if the cinema could obtain an electric minibus to allow cinema goers in far-flung villages to get to see films without having to drive. "The idea would be to do a different village pick-up each evening," he explains. "If you live in an area where public transport is a problem, you can have the best cinema in the world, but there will be people who aren't able to come."

It's taken a long time to make the Magic Lantern the success it is today, observes Geoff, and even now there's no room for complacency. "We never know when the next curved ball is heading our way! That's why we have to reinvent ourselves on a regular basis. For example, we used to hold open mic nights once a month; now we hold live music nights every Friday, with free entrance."

Another free event is Christmas Presence, run by volunteers, which provides festive food and entertainment for people who want to be with the local community on Christmas Day. "I've been asked why we do it every year, and my answer is: why wouldn't we? There are lots of things in the community that need doing, so let's do it."