Fresh empirical work on rural cinema, Catholic cinema, and of film exhibition in non-commercial cinema circuits challenges the idea of a single normative mode of (commercial, metropolitan) cinema exhibition in a purpose-built venue and destabilizes this exhibition mode as a standard point of reference in the history of cinema (Allen 2006, Fuller-Seeley 2008, Aveyard & Moran 2013, Biltereyst & Treveri Gennari 2015, Thissen & Zimmermann 2016). Featuring the rural and industrial region of Bergslagen in Sweden, our research highlights the importance of grass-roots civic society involvement in cinema exhibition in villages and small towns throughout the twentieth century. With a location analysis that traces opening and closing dates of cinemas in the region as well as changes in ownership patterns over the years we unravel the extent of civic society engagement in cinema. Our analysis suggests that civic societies contributed to the high number of cinemas in rural and small town Sweden as well as to the persistence of a surprisingly evenly distributed and decentralized pattern of exhibition up until this day.