It has been more than a year since brother and sister team Will and Haley Sampson turned on the lights and opened the doors to the Indywood Movie Theater on Elysian Fields.

The project has grown through ups and downs, and is today a well-established independent theater in a city where the art of cinema is blooming.

The venue, a cozy room with set of red seats lined up under a home projector, welcomes the Marigny crowd and moviegoers from all over the city. The projector is put to use for screenings of classic films, local productions, foreign movies and other independent works, but the site also hosts community events like the Saturday Morning Cartoons, Bad Movie Nite, or recently Mudlark Theater’s Puppet Show.

“We are really focused on what the community wants to see, so we take a lot of ideas from people. They will just email us what they want to see and we try to listen to them,” said Will Sampson, although he admits that running Indywood has consisted in “flying by the seat of their pants.”

But the young entrepreneurs’ vision extends beyond offering a new alternative for moviegoers. The siblings have their eyes set on fostering a sense of community revolving around cinema, and encourage the flourishing of a local independent scene filmmakers.

“Right now, all the power rests on six major companies on what the whole world will see,” said Hayley Sampson. “Independent films are so important because they tell the stories that aren’t necessarily being made with big budgets for 14 year olds. There’s more diversity in everything.”

In the past 20 years, the six top grossing movie distributors accounted for more than 75 percent of the industry’s market shares. The same companies swiped 81 percent in 2014.

But the first signs of success came with the amount of material Indywood received for the first edition of their Local Film Night, one of Indywood’s most successful events and evidently Will’s favorite, as it embodies the ultimate goal of the project.

“Hollywood south is awesome, but Indywood south will be where there’s directing and producing, post production and all of it,” said Will in reference to the thriving of the movie industry since the Louisiana 2002 tax incentive, an initiative that he thinks brings more filmmakers from outside the state rather than encouraging the local industry. “The goal was to create a self sufficient film industry in Louisiana, and we’re not there yet.”

Another step that the brother and sister are taking toward their shared dream is the optimization of their website, which they eventually want to shape as a tool for having the crowd involved in the theater programs and the funding of local productions.

The coming of the Internet has drastically changed the way we approach movies. Netflix has made them available at home while websites like Kickstarter modified how they are funded. Will and Hayley are inspired by those changes and search to follow these new trends while bearing their dream of taking cinema back to the neighborhood and bringing people together.

“I’m very real about this dream,” said Will. “My absolute goal is to use Indywood as a base to start generating a legitimate independent film community where we’re all helping each other.”