Kent and Martha on Cape Cod in the early 1980s. Photo courtesy of Kent & Martha DiFiore

WRITTEN BY SPENCER WINDES

Their first date was at the movies.

As young doctors working on their residencies in Utah, Kent and Martha DiFiore had known each other for a while before they decided to go out together, so it was never a question of where they would go on that first outing. Cinema has played a part in their lives since childhood, and the magic of the movies is woven into their relationship.

“I came from Kentucky and came out here not knowing a soul,” Martha recalled. “I came to do a medical internship and residency at the University of Utah, and one of the first people that I met was Kent.”

“She paged me at the University Medical Center and asked me to come down and see a patient,” Kent added. “I came down the next day and thought, wow, she’s really cute. I asked her out, and she said ‘No, that’s really forward of you. You don’t even know me.’”

It was film that came to the rescue. As Kent tells it, a few years after their original missed connection, “She came down to the cafeteria for lunch. There was an intern with me I was mentoring. We started talking about films as we were eating lunch. She hadn’t seen this movie, and I hadn’t seen it either. The intern I’d brought with me started kicking me under the table, saying ‘ask her out! She wants to go see this movie.’ I did ask her out and we did go see the movie, and that’s how it all began.”

Kent and Martha in the new Kent and Martha DiFiore Cinema in the Film & Media Arts Building.
Photo: Todd Collins

Martha went on to do a fellowship in pulmonary medicine, and Kent in hematology and oncology, before going into private practice. Their careers were in medicine, but the arts continued to play a role in their relationship for their next 45 years in Utah. Many evenings were spent at the former Blue Mouse and the Tower Theatre, taking in the world through the power of film.

Kent recalls how, growing up in Lincoln, NE, his father, who worked for a theater chain, would drop him and his sister off at the local cinema on Saturday morning to watch cartoons, old Abbott and Costello films, and other fare. One morning, during a showing of “South Pacific,” the curtain theater caught on fire!

Martha remembers her own introduction to cinema. “I must have been no older than eight or ten. I had a couple of babysitters take me to see ‘The Virgin Spring’ by Ingmar Bergman. I was too young. I was thinking, what’s going on? This is too much for me!” She remembers more fondly the first time she was enthralled by seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless.” “That was years ago. I’m sure I didn’t understand it at all!”

Kent and Martha don’t just love the arthouse classics. A new favorite is Gints Zilbalodis’ recent animated film “Flow.” They also adore a good comedy. “One way you can look at a favorite movie,” Martha explained, “is something you’re willing to see again. Any Christopher Guest movie, I would see again!” It’s obvious why Kent and Martha have been Sundance devotees every year since its founding, especially enjoying the documentaries, such as “Hear and Now,” and “God Grew Tired of Us.”

The DiFiore’s have given back to the university that brought them together in many ways over the years, with the College of Fine Arts always at the forefront. “We’re arts consumers,” Kent explained. “Martha loves the opera and with that you get the symphony, which I love. We have two girls and they really enjoy dance. We enjoy all the arts, and especially film and media arts. It just seemed like a natural thing to do, to support these things that we believe in. We’ve finished medicine and now are more involved in community support. We developed a foundation, and most of our money goes to the arts.”

Their commitment to the new Kent and Martha DiFiore Cinema is a huge step forward for the university and for their philanthropy. This state-of-the-art facility, with 16mm, 35mm, and digital projection, can show any format — everything from Blu-Rays and DVDs to scans of archival prints. Students will both come for classes and exhibit their own work to their peers and the public. It’s a place to screen films from all around the world, media from the 19th century up to now, and films that have been made by the university’s community of makers and scholars and professors, as well as the emerging professionals that are the U’s film students.

“It gives us pleasure to see young people succeed,” said Kent. “This is the largest school in the College of Fine Arts. If we can have something like this that will help young people succeed in their careers, that’s worthwhile. We wanted to leave a legacy of who we are and what we did. We’re going to be gone someday. It was important for us to have a thing we can call our own, even though we don’t own it, but at least people can know it was important for us.”

Tim Palmer, chair of the Department of Film & Media, described the DiFiore Cinema this way: “The cinema is not just a physical entity — it’s something that adds value to our students, to the campus, to the community, to the region. We as a species are crying out for places where we can come together and reconnect and find our common humanity. Media and films and cinema have a wonderful, amazing ability to do this.”

When asked what their aspiration is for the cinema, Kent replies that it’s bringing people together, and Martha adds that it’s having the students stretch, because now they finally have a space where they can show what they are doing, where they can push their own envelope.

After years of healing bodies, the DiFiore’s are now committed to healing souls. The new cinema is at the heart of that commitment.