Detroit’s filmmaking community is getting a boost thanks to a new initiative in the city’s Little Village neighborhood.
RATHAUS, a Brooklyn-Detroit film production company, plans to soon begin construction on THE RATHAUS – Artist Residency Theatre, a space which will house a screening room, post-production facilities and in-house amenities meant to support Detroit-area and visiting filmmakers through their filmmaking processes. The space is slated to open in August 2027, the collective announced Tuesday.
Plans for the privately funded, approximately 3,800 square-foot residence were first dreamed up around two years ago, says Kevin Steen, who is part of the four-member RATHAUS team.
“I was thinking through what a filmmaking house would look like,” says Steen, and he and his team came up with a list of needs for the space.
That includes post-production equipment, community gathering areas and room to house two individuals. The RATHAUS team plans to offer the space, on a rotating basis, to one local emerging talent and one established filmmaker visiting Detroit from elsewhere.
The space will also house a 30-seat screening room with a projector that can read DCP, or digital cinema package, the collection of digital files, which is how most films are projected in theaters today.
And, of course, there will be a top-of-the-line popcorn machine. “You have to have good popcorn,” Steen says, with a chuckle.
RATHAUS — pronounced “rat house” — was founded 10 years ago by Steen, along with filmmaking partners Madeleine Askwith, Alexandra Byer and Shabier Kirchner.
The company has produced six feature films, including 2023’s “Ex-Husbands” with Griffin Dunne and Rosanna Arquette, and “Familiar Touch,” the critically acclaimed 2025 release about a woman dealing with dementia as she enters an assisted care facility. It premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 2024, where it received several honors for its director, Sarah Friedland, and its lead actress, Kathleen Chalfant.
Steen, 37, is a filmmaker as well as a board member of the Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He grew up in Grand Rapids and moved from New York to Detroit 10 years ago with his wife, Gretchen R. Valade, who is a Grosse Pointe native as well as the granddaughter of Carhartt heiress Gretchen Carhartt Valade.
Since 2023, RATHAUS has sponsored an annual grant program for local filmmakers, which awards $10,000 to aspiring filmmakers living in Detroit. The program received around 40 applicants in its first year and around 70 this year.
Building on the grant program, Steen sees the Artist Residency Theatre as the next step in fostering and supporting the filmmaking community in Detroit.
“It’s a place for people to develop, work, think, share and create,” he says.
The new space is designed by Dash Marshall, the Brooklyn-Detroit design firm, which also designed the Detroit Public Theatre.
Applications for the new filmmaker’s residency will open in winter 2026.
As filmmakers come through the space, Steen wants them to drop off examples of their work or movies that have inspired them, in effect creating a library of movies, a kind of “reverse Criterion closet,” as Steen puts it.
Down the line, Steen says there may be possibilities for a public-facing component of the theatre, but at launch it will act as a private space.
Steen knows the blows Detroit’s film community has taken over the last several years, including the closures of area art theaters and the lack of tax incentives for filmmaking projects in Michigan.
But he hopes the Artist Residency Theatre is a step toward brightening and enriching Detroit’s film family.
“This isn’t solving the bigger issues we have, but it can help nurture and curate the up-and-coming filmmakers that we have in the city,” he says. “This is a piece of the puzzle.”
agraham@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Detroit house will serve as workspace, residence for local filmmakers
Reporting by Adam Graham, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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By Adam Graham, The Detroit News | USA TODAY Network
