There is a very incredible power of bringing people together around film I’ve been thinking since I started The Housewarming Club. At Club we had various events but something was smoother and easier when people come around a film and hang out after.
Where nobody was looking at their phone or nobody was performing.
For two to three hours long movie everyone in the room looking at the SAME thing and have the SAME experience, response it in their unique ways.
It’s actually a strange and rare thing.
It’s a shared and undistracted event with a room of people who have never said a word to each other before or may have never met.
So I’ve come to think of cinema less as an entertainment but more as an infrastructure these days. It’s like a social architecture create that space to bring people together in a same room and it does over and over again. It gives a room full of strangers an immediate and structured common ground before anyone needed to introduce themselves or pitch their best selves.
Lots of ways we learnt about meeting people or making friends ask you to present driest parts of yourself: what do you do for work or where are you from or what did you study etc.. But film clubs -as we always been- looking for other ways to understand people and explore peoples social styles to really connect them and bring them to the same room again. Beyond small talk and beyond your performance of how to pitch yourself.
Cinema skips all that.
There is more to talk about something already you have experienced and you’ve been looking at for hours. Two people now have more in common which starts from their “seeings” of that movie, they discuss in their ways and pass onto each other. You are receiving someone’s experience while you share yours. You’re suddenly deep in something; in interpretation, in that parts of movie grabbed onto your life experience. You exchange that even before any biographical information you exchange about each other.
That’s why cinema is such a potent conversation starter.
It’s not like weather or it’s not performative like the most small talk. It truly reveals how someone reads a film, and tells you an enormous amount about how they read the world.
But this revealing part feels safe in a way, because you’re technically talking about the movie, not about yourself. The film becomes a language you suddenly speak in common about things usually takes months of friendship to surface.
So this is why film clubs are having a real moment and it’s not a coincidence.
They’re changing how traditional cinema works - buy ticket, watch film and leave- into a curator with a point of view then you follow a discussion with total strangers.
With a little irony underneath tho - we’ve now more films available to us than ever was and less occasion to experience them all together. Film clubs now dragging cinema back to cinema, insisting on the parts streaming removed in the last a few years. It creates a new format that a group of people shows up with you and meets on the other side of screen for you to talk to them. It’s not a nostalgia for it’s own sake. It’s a recognition that some of what makes a film matter isn’t just the film: it’s the conditions under which you watched it, and you watched it with.
It now does matter no more than ever in the world of digital togetherness people find themselves seeking ways to reconnect in real life. Film clubs and its activities turns out to be the one remaining formats that still does it well.
It asks nothing you except to be present and be you.
No icebreaker, no name tags, or no forced vulnerability.
Welcome to House Film Club.