Sidewalk Film Center adds pajama party screenings of The Secret of NIMH
Sidewalk turned The Secret of NIMH into a pajama-party matinee, pairing weekend mornings, breakfast and drinks to bring Birmingham families together.
Sidewalk Film Center and Cinema used a weekend matinee of The Secret of NIMH to do what repertory theaters do best: make moviegoing feel like a shared habit, not a special occasion. The Birmingham theater’s Pajama Party series brought parents, kids and nostalgic animation fans into the same room on Saturday, May 16, 2026, and Sunday, May 17, 2026, both at 10:30 a.m., with each screening running 83 minutes at Sidewalk Film Center + Cinema.
The setup was built for ease. Sidewalk invited guests to come in their pajamas and arrive early for light breakfast options, with a Bloody Mary and mimosa bar for the grown-ups. That combination gave the series a multigenerational feel that few theaters can pull off without looking strained. Here, it fit the room: a morning screening, a familiar title and a low-pressure way to get families downtown before the day filled up.
The film choice did the rest. The Secret of NIMH, released in 1982, is Don Bluth’s directorial debut and an adaptation of Robert C. O’Brien’s novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Its story of a widowed field mouse trying to move her family, including an ailing son, away from danger with the help of a crow and escaped lab rats gives the movie enough peril and wonder to work for adults who grew up with it and for younger viewers seeing it for the first time. In a family matinee slot, it played less like a museum piece and more like a bridge between generations.
That is the larger point behind Sidewalk’s Pajama Party programming. Sidewalk describes itself as a federally recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to encouraging filmmaking in Alabama and building audiences for independent film, and the May 2026 calendar showed Pajama Party screenings repeating across multiple dates. The theater was not just filling a weekend slot; it was building the kind of repeat attendance that keeps an independent venue visible to families who might otherwise default to the multiplex.
The institution behind it has real Birmingham roots, too. Sidewalk Film Center and Cinema was incorporated in 1998 by Erik Jambor, Kelly Franklin and Wayne Franklin, originally as the Alabama Moving Image Association, with the Sidewalk Film Festival as its core mission. With about $1.7 million in FY2023 revenue and about $2.8 million in assets, the nonprofit has the scale to keep putting on events like this. The pajama party screening made that legacy feel immediate: a Saturday and Sunday morning where Birmingham parents, kids and film lovers could meet a 1982 classic on Sidewalk’s terms.
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