Brand and digital experience for Norway's national cinematheque
Overview
Cinemateket is Norway's national cinematheque, dedicated to preserving and sharing film history. Unlike a regular cinema, its mission isn't just to sell tickets. It's to connect audiences with the depth and richness of film as an art form, the directors, movements, and stories that most people never encounter.
Together with the Norwegian Film Institute, we at Snøhetta reimagined how Cinemateket presented itself to the world: a new visual identity, website, and digital experience built to feel as rich and curious as film itself.
The Challenge
The existing experience was functional. Schedules, practical information, how to book. What it didn't communicate was what made Cinemateket genuinely extraordinary.
The brief was to increase ticket sales and grow memberships. But the real opportunity was bigger: create a digital presence that matched the cultural depth of the institution and gave people a reason to keep coming back beyond whatever was screening that week.
Approach
The strategic direction came out of early workshops with the Cinemateket team. What became clear quickly was that these weren't just programmers or administrators. They were curators in the truest sense, people with deep, encyclopaedic knowledge of film history, every director, every movement, every composer. People who wanted to share that knowledge and guide audiences toward work that genuinely mattered.
One detail stuck with us: Cinemateket employs film technicians who maintain and operate vintage projectors, because some of what they screen doesn't exist digitally. It only exists on film reels, shown the way it was originally intended, with the light, the grain, the physical presence of the medium itself.
That became the creative foundation. Cinemateket isn't a cinema that shows old films. It's a guardian of film history, and the experience should feel like that.
It's why we chose a dark, cinematic visual language. Why the typography carries weight and intention. Why the editorial experience was designed to invite exploration rather than just facilitate transactions. Every aesthetic decision traced back to what we'd heard in those workshops: an institution with extraordinary expertise and a genuine desire to share it.
Outcome
The redesign helped increase online ticket sales and nearly doubled membership growth. It was recognised across the design industry with multiple awards.
But the number that mattered most was harder to measure: Cinemateket had a platform that finally reflected who they actually were. The commercial goals and the cultural mission, for the first time, pointed in the same direction.
Reflection
The most successful cultural experiences aren't built around what someone came to do today. They're built around creating curiosity about what they might discover next.
Good design doesn't just help people buy tickets. It helps them fall in love with the subject behind them.
