A double feature of David Lynch's The Straight Story and Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire will unfold outdoors next month at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, where organizers are asking moviegoers to bring lawn chairs and blankets but leave the alcohol at home. The screening is set for September 22 at sunset, with a rain date of September 23 already locked in should weather intervene.
The event, called Cemetery Cinema, was announced by the Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Brookline nonprofit that has run the outdoor series in recent years, as reported by MassLive. Seating will be on the grass and sidewalk in Hazel Dell, a natural amphitheater within the cemetery grounds ringed by mature trees and historic gravestones, according to Coolidge Corner Theatre. Tickets start at $40 before taxes and fees, and the cemetery will provide on-site parking, per the same account.
Because Mount Auburn remains an active burial place and a sacred site to mourners, organizers have laid out ground rules for the evening. Attendees may not bring alcohol and are asked to refrain from touching or leaning against monuments or headstones, MassLive reports. Light concessions will be sold at the event, and guests are welcome to bring their own chairs, blankets and snacks.
A Setting Steeped in History
Founded in 1831 by Harvard physician Dr. Jacob Bigelow and the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Mount Auburn Cemetery was the first landscaped “rural” or garden cemetery in North America, a design that helped launch the 19th-century American public parks movement, according to the U.S. National Park Service. The 175-acre grounds, which straddle Cambridge and Watertown at 580 Mount Auburn St., hold the graves of figures including poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., reformer Dorothea Dix and architect Buckminster Fuller, per the Park Service. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 2003, according to Mount Auburn Cemetery.
This is not the series' first run through the cemetery's grounds. Cemetery Cinema returned to Mount Auburn in September 2024 after a five-year hiatus, screening a double bill of The Seventh Seal and Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, as detailed by BOStoday. Last August, the series hosted a 4K restoration premiere of Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter paired with Errol Morris's Gates of Heaven, according to Time Out. Organizers have consistently leaned into films that grapple with mortality, grief and memory, fitting for the setting.
Behind the Screenings, a Theater in Transition
Cemetery Cinema is one piece of a broader summer strategy for the Coolidge Corner Theatre, which also stages outdoor screenings at Charles River Speedway, Rocky Woods in Medfield, and the Rose Kennedy Greenway, mixing 35mm prints with digital restorations at each stop, per BOStoday's reporting. The theater itself has deep local roots: built as a Universalist church in 1906, the Brookline building was converted into an Art Deco movie palace in 1933 and rescued from commercial redevelopment in 1989 by a grassroots nonprofit foundation, according to the theater's own history.
The nonprofit is also navigating labor tension back home. Floor and projection workers represented by UAW Local 1596 rejected management's proposed final contract in June, advancing toward a possible strike over wages and scheduling after two years of negotiations, Hoodline previously reported on the standoff. The dispute has not been reported to affect the theater's off-site programming, including the upcoming cemetery screenings.
Cemetery Also Mid-Upgrade
Mount Auburn Cemetery itself is in the middle of physical changes unrelated to the film series. In March, the cemetery began a construction project to enhance its historic Egyptian Revival Gateway and surrounding entrance area, aimed at improving pedestrian access for visitors, according to the cemetery's own announcement. Whether that work will affect access during the September screenings was not addressed in available reporting.
For now, the plan stands: gates open at Hazel Dell on September 22 at sunset for The Straight Story and Wings of Desire, with the September 23 rain date as a backup. Attendees looking to soak in both a piece of cinema history and one of the country's most significant cemetery landscapes will need to plan around the no-alcohol and no-touching-the-headstones rules that come with watching a movie among the dead.
