What's up ladies and gentlemen boys and girls around the world I would like to welcome you back to the real talk with Zuby podcast now on today's episode we have got on a very brave lady as soon as I saw her story

and saw a video of her going around on social media I thought I want to talk to that woman I like her I want to speak to her this is the owner of cinema and co which is a cinema in Swansea Wales in the UK and this is Anna Redfern welcome to the show

welcome hi thank you for having me happy to have you here so Anna for people who are not familiar with you and what you do please tell them a little bit about you

okay so yes I put cinema and co for five years a student on his gap year set it up and it was only supposed to be a pop up cinema but it proved so successful that he wants to continue when he went back to university

so I met up with him to see about getting funding to keep it going because that's what I was doing at the moment as well as being a stay at home mum

so yes I met up with him and I was so inspired by the place it was like he had made it just for me it encapsulates all my skills my experience and it's a real vehicle for all my ideas so I feel very privileged to have that and also I'm very much an opportunist so yes I've always drifted around not really knowing what to do with myself

and yeah I feel so lucky to have the cinema so that's the story of that that's awesome and up until this point did you ever have any problems with it or any issues anything like that or was it all smooth sailing up until this point

well it was going from strength to strength and so I finally got to a point in my business where I could leave it for ten days and go on a call singing holiday to Morocco and that's when we went into lockdown and so I came back from Morocco to a lockdown UK

and yeah I had to close the cinema immediately and yeah I wanted to hear the first screening we cancelled it was 1984

what was the what was the timeline at this point so this was March 2020 okay all right yeah so I must admit

2020 was the best year of my life you know the first for the first time I really felt present in the moment

because of course running your own business you've always got loads of things going around in your head

even when you're on holiday you're still thinking of what's going on and and yes and the weather was

absolutely glorious I we discovered Swansea what we've got on our doorstep the beautiful beach

within the walking distance and spending such time with my children as well and yes it was

incredible and it was really nice to have an empty brain so so to speak so but then of course they kept

moving the goal posts we were allowed to reopen just before Christmas and we did that I

employed some new staff and yeah the day their first day Mark Drake for denounced that cinemas

were going to have to close from a week that day so so yeah I had to give loads of refunds away

because we I'd spent lots of time and energy putting money into our Christmas program and yeah

it's it was awful it was a really sad time and frustrating time as well and yeah of course

I had to throw loads of stock away and it had an effect on the staff as well so yes it was

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