It’s a long walk to Folly for a Flyover, at least if you’re using the canal. The route is a bit of a jumble; on the one hand it’s one of the quieter, more gorgeous parts of East London, on the other there are those sections when it becomes a building site, with bits of the Olympics showing up here and there.

As you travel it’s difficult not to think about the way in which the area is growing and changing, mostly for the better, as it undergoes the extensive urban regeneration that will prove the 2012 Games' true legacy.

But then, as you’re walking along looking out for cormorants and feeling vaguely hopefully about the future, you reach the A12 flyover, and another building site.

This one is different to the others. Not only because it’s populated with serious-looking twentysomethings, but because of what they’re building: a cinema, made of wooden bricks and a great deal of ingenuity. Folly for a Flyover is a hand-built cinema that will sit under the A12 flyover for the next six weeks.

The project is the creation of Assemble, who last year wowed audiences in Clerkenwell with the Cineroleum, a cinema built in an abandoned petrol station. This time they have become even more ambitious.

During the day the Folly will hold workshops, performances, boat trips and dance parties, while in the evening it will screen a programme of films featuring everything from Bicycle Thieves to 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the occasional light show or silent film set to a live score. Looking over the programme the question isn’t so much what you want to see as what you don’t want to see. Which isn’t much.

We spoke to Amica Dall, one of the leaders behind the project, about its conception, construction and the challenges of building a cinema under a motorway.

What made you decide that you wanted to create a cinema under a flyover?

After the Cineroleum finished we were thinking a lot about redundant space, and we just found here and thought it was amazing. And we wanted something quieter. The Cineroleum was so unpredictable; there were police cars going by, drunk people were coming out of the pubs, now and again an articulated lorry would rumble by. We were mixing the levels live to try and steady it but it was a problem. But here the noise is actually quite incidental when you’re underneath the flyover.

Does the weather affect the experience?

Oh, the rain looks incredible. I actually think it’s better when it rains because you’re completely dry but there are these narrow stripes of rain across the canal.

How did you develop the design?

We wanted it to be something quite beautiful in and of itself, but that was also functional. A lot of the structure was dictated around the different demands of being a café space, a bar space, and an auditorium too. We wanted it to have a sympathy with the local topography and also for it to take advantage of the motorway by poking up between it.

The idea was for it to feel like the motorway had been built over the cinema, and it had been forgotten about. We work really slowly and collaborated, so it evolved over quite a long time. I think the biggest breakthrough is when Lewis − he works for an architecture firm near here − went in a timber yard and saw some pieces of wood that we cut up quite small, and we started thinking about making wooden bricks. Rather than using them decoratively, to hide things, you could actually build out of them.

Did you find there was anything you didn’t know how to do?

Basically when we can’t do something we just ask people until we find out how to do it. With the bricks we were trying to work out how to make them load-bearing, so we asked a structural engineer friend who worked on James May’s Lego House and she helped us figure it out. It’s a question of finding ways to do things rather than just outsourcing them, because then you learn as you go along.

How did you decide on which films you wanted to show − did you think about them in relation to the space, or did you just choose films you loved?

We’ve been working with the Barbican. They approached us and said they’d like to work with us next year and we said “Oh we don’t know what we’re doing next year, how about now?” They have this exhibition of animation that’s all about trickery and illusion and fairytales. As an idea that excited us because this space looks bleak but it’s also quite magical. So we thought we could do a tie-in, satellite project. They’ve put their exhibition into different categories, so we just picked them up and started playing with them and built a programme of features based around it. So our first weekend is all about fairytales.

Our first film will be Snow White and on the Sunday we’re showing Baron Munchausen. It seems quite appropriate − a teller of tall tales who lives in his own fiction, as the Folly has its own fake history. We just proceeded like that really, choosing films that we thought were approachable but interesting, that people would enjoy.

What will happen to the building once you’ve finished?  

Everything will be used somewhere else. The entire structure is a dry fit − there’s no mortar anywhere, so all the struts and things can just be lifted out at the end. The actual fixings remain useful, unlike mortar where you’d have to chip it off and you’d be starting from scratch. You’ve already still got the holes there so you can build new things out of them really easily. We’re giving some materials to the business over the canal, and others are scattering around. Some of the bricks are going to an adventure playground, some are going to make an outdoor waiting room − all sorts of stuff. People keep e-mailing us, asking if they can have one of our curtains, or some of our seats. It’s really great: the building will be absorbed into the community.

Folly for a Flyover opens this weekend and continues until 31st July. During our talk Amica mentioned how tickets for the Cineroleum had sold out within hours. While being elated at its success, they were disappointed that members of the local community would miss out. Learning from that, this time around the ticket releases have been staggered and will be released throughout the season. It’s well worth checking the website to see what’s on, and when you’ll be able to get them.

Ever since his 1992 debut The Living End, director Gregg Araki has been responsible for some of the most transgressive, bold and just plain silly films to have come from the indie world. In 2004 he reached an unprecedented level of critical acclaim for Mysterious Skin, a mature, devastating adaptation of Scott Heim's novel about a gay hustler dealing with the memories of his childhood sexual abuse. Araki follow-up was "the Citizen Kane of stoner movies" Smiley Face, underrated and unreleased in the UK, and is now back with Kaboom.

Candy-coloured and lurid, Kaboom is about impossibly good-looking college students who find themselves in embroiled in a convoluted conspiracy that just about distracts them from their revolving door sex lives. It's like Araki wrote the film whilst snorting a bin liner full of sugar as Twin Peaks played on loop in the background. Maybe it's awful, but somehow that's okay. It's bloody ridiculous but is about as fun as Mysterious Skin was soul-destroying.

Kaboom opens in cinemas this weekend, but we spoke to Araki when he visited the UK for the film's premiere at the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.

You wrote Kaboom after making two films that came from other people's source material. Would you say it's a personal film to you?

Kaboom is so near and dear to my heart. Of all my movies it's probably the most autobiographical one I've ever done, which sounds weird because it's such a crazy movie, but it's very much based on my own experience, stuff I did when I was 20 years old and an undergraduate in Film School. I went to USC Santa Barbara which the college in the film is based on and my best friend was an art student like Stella. That's why there are so many scenes in coffee shops because during that period of my life there were always big adventures and afterwards you'd go to the coffee shop and talk about what just happened and how you felt about it.

Was it a conscious choice to make something that was more your own?

It's not like I feel like Mysterious Skin or Smiley Face are any less mine than Kaboom, because when you're working from other people's material you're dealing with what attracts you to that material. For Mysterious Skin my mindset and sensibility is so aligned to Scott Haim. We have a similar sense of the world and so it was a natural fit for me. I brought to that film everything I could bring to it from my own experience but ultimately everything about the story and those characters was his. It's like an adopted child. I love Smiley Face and Mysterious Skin and I'm so proud of both of them, but there's a difference between something that comes purely from your imagination and something that doesn't. There's more responsibility I think.

The events of Kaboom are very dark, but it never feels that way - it's like a confection. I don't mean that in a bad way.

No, I think that's very appropriate. It's interesting because I originally envisioned Kaboom as being this very dark apocalyptic epic but there's a playfulness and a sort of joyfulness about it. Despite its darkness there's a sense of fun. The world of Kaboom is so stylised and comic-book that you feel anything can happen. That was what we set out to make - the thing I dislike about 99.9% of movies is that I always know where they're going to go before they get there.

It must have been freeing once you'd decided that the film wouldn't be entirely grounded by what could happen in the real world.

I remember when we were shooting it the cast and the crew and everybody would be just like "Oh, we're going to Kaboomworld now". It was like its own little world and that's certainly meant to be the experience of watching it. It takes you to another place that's more stylised and colourful and everybody's beautiful and everybody's having sex. It's a utopian, dystopian world.

As festivals go, the East End Film Festival is one of the shaggier. The problem is, it finds itself caught between two stools: it’s both a festival celebrating East London filmmaking and a film festival that happens to be based in East London.

The programme is dotted with things that have only a notional connection to the East London area, such as its gala screening of the documentary The Libertines - There Are No Innocent Bystanders.

There are also seemingly random events, such as a screening of Taxi Driver “presented” by Adrian Utley from Portishead, or a screening of the director’s cut of Ken Russell’s The Devils.

Either would be a treat to go and see, but what’s the connection? Perhaps the randomness of it all is meant to reflect the idiosyncratic nature of the East End, but it’s hard to not flick through the festival programme and wish there was a bit more shape.

What separates a film festival from being a collection of interesting films to being something truly special, is a sense of there being a curatorial impulse - the idea that the screened films can illuminate things about each other by their presence together.

This doesn’t mean that the festival isn’t filled with worthwhile films and events, but I can’t imagine someone seeing a programmed afternoon by Guillemots during the Camden Crawl feeling inclined to check out the strong Romanian strand in the Festival’s European section, or vice versa.

You could do either and still have a great time, of course, but you might not feel like you’re a part of something. Sometimes that’s enough, if you see a good film. But perhaps a great film festival is one where you see a bad one and that’s still okay.

The biggest misconception that people have about silent cinema is that it was silent. In fact, early cinema was never silent, as there would always be a musical accompanist present.

If you’ve had the chance to actually see silent films in this way then you’ll understand how wonderful it can be. It brings not just the films, but the whole era, to life, in a way that's difficult even for later cinema. It isn’t difficult to see why an audience in 1924 would enjoy silent film, because you’re enjoying it in the same way. Silent films stop being objects from an earlier, intangible past and become something that is current, a performance, something that engages with you.

I Was Born, But ... (1932)

If you’ve yet to experience silent films in this way, then this year’s British Silent Film Festival is a good place to start. It starts today and runs at the Barbican until Monday.

The use of sound and music in British silent cinema is the Festival's theme. It will be showing some of Britain’s best interwar silent films, many of which haven’t been screened since their original releases.

Morozko (1925)

Musicians such as Neil Brand, Philip Carli, and John Sweeney will accompany the films, and there are a number of other presentations and events.

Highlights include the world premiere of the restored original score for Morozko, a Soviet film based on the Russian fairytale “Father Frost”; Yasujiro Ozu’s classic I Was Born, But…, and a lecture by Matthew Sweet from Radio 3’s Night Waves, on the stories behind the history of British silent cinema, and the role of gossip within it.

Friday marks the start of the BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, reliably one of the stronger of London’s many film festivals.

The significance of the Festival is that it exists both as a celebration of a community, as well as a cultural entity in its own right. There’s an unfortunate tendency to ghettoise queer filmmaking, and the Festival’s value derives from the range of work it shows not just to a LGBT community, but to a wider audience as well.

A still from Michael (1924).

Highlights this year include special screenings of classics such as When Night is Falling and Mysterious Skin, to celebrate the Festival’s 25th anniversary; Resist Psychic Death, a lecture on “DIY cultural production for queer community building”; a discussion on feminist pornography, and novelist Sarah Waters in conversation. An adaptation of her excellent book The Night Watch is also being previewed.

The Festival’s gala opening film is Kaboom, written and directed by Gregg Araki. It's the story of a libidinous college student who somehow finds the time to uncover a conspiracy between his endless couplings. As a film Kaboom is profoundly stupid, but it’s difficult not to be charmed by it. It’s hard to hate a film that’s enjoying itself so much. The whole thing is effortlessly subversive and its lack of shame is gleeful.

Look out for our interview with Gregg Araki when the film is released nationwide in June. For now, more information is on the festival's website. 

The visual artist Tacita Dean wrote an interesting piece in the Guardian last week about Deluxe buying the London-based Soho Film Laboratory, and how as a result they will no longer be processing 16mm film. It’s worth a read. Dean focuses on the effect this will have on artists such as herself, but I’d argue that there’s another group that also thrives on 16mm: film students.

The appeal of digital for film schools is understandable: it’s cheaper for the course runners, and is easier to use for the students. Speaking as a former film student myself, the first 16mm films that one makes inevitably end up looking like bawdy British sex comedies from the 1970s. It’s depressing.

However, the value in 16mm is not in the picture quality (although it can look gorgeous, actually) but what’s gained from the process of using it. There’s a horrible sinking feeling that accompanies the knowledge that you have more footage left to film than stock left to film it with, and it’s one of the most valuable things a film student can learn. Not only does it force you to be economical, but it teaches you to be creative and decisive. What is the most efficient way of telling this story? How do you want to shoot it? These are things you can’t learn when it’s possible to leave the camera running all day.

If British Cinema in the 2020s is bloated and unwieldy then this decision by Deluxe can be pinpointed as its genesis. Dean has started a small campaign of letter-writing and has created an online petition; if you’re interested in signing, it's online here.