What & Why

A film club, like a reading group, is an intimate and informal gathering where people can encounter ideas, experiences and emotions that may not be everyday topics of discussion but which shape all our lives.

Film is a vast vault of stories stretching back one hundred years, across every continent and told in every language. It is an extraordinary cultural asset. The theatrical releases represent a tiny and culturally skewed percentage of this archive of creative and intellectual endeavour.

Now that both the technology and distribution methods are at a point where a model film club could be reproduced.

Cinema, like theatre, was originally a social act – a collective spectatorship of a story played out upon a stage or screen. Sitting together, but apart, in the darkness and the warmth was integral to the experience. Many people experience film quite differently now and viewing is often an isolated act – on computers and phones. FILMCLUB is changing that.

A film club is one way that a school can help children to feel a part of something, not apart from everything. Inclusion is a central aim of many teachers’ film clubs, and headteachers are quick to see that a film club can make children more emotionally receptive to learning. A film club audience is a unique, self-selecting group of children. It’s unusual to find a grouping quite like it at any other time or place in the day. It cuts across age, class, ability, gender and ethnic boundaries and it is often a magnet for curious, shy and unusual minds who find their way each week to sit in the dark to watch what film writer, David Thompson, calls ‘the frenzy on the wall’ – who linger afterwards to listen and share their thoughts on films as diverse as Wall-E, Spirited Away, Madagascar, Shaolin Soccer, Mad Hot Ballroom and The Story of the Weeping Camel.

resource: intofilm.org