‘Without him I’d be isolated’: Bradford amateur film club fights to survive

You’ll have to squint a bit, but down a lane south of Bradford town center is West Yorkshire’s own dream factory.

Somewhere behind flying refrigerators and scrawled graffiti is Bradford Movie Makers. For almost 90 years now, enthusiasts have been tirelessly filming and showing their own creative extrabudgetary films in the same building – a former hayloft converted into a private cinema in 1936.

Now they are one of the last amateur film clubs of their kind and they train cameras for a funny, touching and very beautiful documentary. Bunch of amateurs. A promotional tour of the film takes the club to a special screening at BFI Southbank. Joe Ogden, who has been part of the club for almost three decades, finds it hard to believe. “When I see it there, I’m like, ‘Wow, yeah, we did it – that’s the thing,’” he says.

Facebook algorithms brought director Kim Hopkins to the attention of the club in 2018. She saw a message from Ogden, now 59, describing his loneliness and saw that he was part of the Bradford Movie Makers. Phil Wainman, one of the youngest members at 49, became her road to the club.

“It didn’t matter what color you were, it didn’t matter your age, gender, they just went along,” says Hopkins. “A cup of tea and cookies are always waiting for you.”

It was not so easy to invade the homes and lives of the participants. hopkins previous film, voices of the sea, followed a young woman in a remote Cuban fishing village as she tried to flee to America. “It was easier for Communist Cuba to get access than Bradford Movie Makers,” she says.

Wainman has always been a philosopher. “We are a small club that is running out of money and no one has heard of us,” he says. “If we are completely ruined, if we end up looking like complete idiots, then we have lost little – anyway, no one knows that we exist.”

As things thawed, Hopkins captured tender, intimate moments: dashing Harry Nicholls, 86, playing the piano for his failing wife Mary; The group’s oldest member, Colin Egglestone, who joined the group in 1973 and is now 90, carefully brushes his wife Shirley’s hair when he visits her at a nursing home for people with dementia.

Janet Wilson, Ogden’s girlfriend, took some time to adjust to filming. “I’m not used to being in front of a camera, and I had a really hard time with that,” she says. “I’ll do it. Kim says you should love it, and the more you like it, the better you feel. So I tried to do it that way.”

Wilson spent much of his recent show at Sheffield Doc Fest trying to see how the audience would react. She didn’t have to worry. Her cheerfulness has made her so popular that some fans followed her to the restroom after a recent show in hopes of meeting her. “It scared the hell out of me, yeah,” she laughs.

Bradford Movie Makers was founded in 1932 as Bradford Cine Circle in one of the city’s barbershops. Filmmaking was an expensive business in those days, and the club, according to Hopkins, was run by Bradford’s Movers and Groovers. The club is packed with archival footage. Stern men in tuxedos and women in pearls applaud at a dinner party, while the president presents trophies at an awards ceremony.

By the time Hopkins arrived in 2018, times had changed. She caught the club trying to scrape together his £300 a month rent he’d been getting for five years and keep themselves from collapsing.

At the time of filming, only about a dozen members remained, most of them in autumn age. Your film club is one of the few survivors,” says Ogden. When Leeds Movie Makers closed last year, there were five people left, one of whom was over 100 years old.

“Leeds is gone, Wakefield is gone, Sheffield is still hanging by a thread. Halifax is still two members – they still meet once a week to show each other their old movies.”

By the time Hopkins began filming, Bradford’s rickety headquarters had a hole in the roof and dump trucks dumped refrigerators and cupboards onto the driveway, and a series of burglaries forced the club to move their valuable archives. These pieces of urban heritage, so old and fragile that they could no longer be risked on the projector, slowly crumbled in the garages of the participants.

But even against this wretched background, the films of the participants are incredibly ambitious. The 1963 film telling the legend of Boudica attempted to show her final battle against the Roman occupiers with four cloaked men running slowly across a marshy field when they were in the recent remake of Oh What a Beautiful Morning. Oklahoma!Nicholls is transported through a green screen from the club’s slightly dirty back room to the cornfields at eye level.

The gap between the big dreams of the filmmakers and what ends up on screen is often very, very funny. but Bunch of amateurs balances Bathos with genuine admiration for the members’ tireless creativity and love for filmmaking. This is important not only from an artistic point of view.

“Where social services let us down, this club really stepped in and did the job,” says Hopkins. She notices how they argue and from time to time snap at each other, and then somehow embarrassedly correct themselves. “They are very tight.”

Wainman constantly looks after his brother, and the club has long been his creative outlet. “I only go out once a week,” he says. “Monday night, the nurse comes to put my brother Chris to bed… Without him, I would be pretty lonely.”

He is not the only one. After filming, Nicholls lost both Mary and his 52-year-old daughter. [Wainman] put his hand on my arm and squeezed it,” says Nicholls. “He has empathy for me.”

Whatever happens, the band’s commitment to making films is unwavering. Even when Egglestone fell in front of the club one night and broke his shoulder, he encouraged Hopkins to keep going despite the disapproval of the paramedics. “When they put Colin on the stretcher, they said, ‘What is this man filming for?’,” Hopkins recalled. “And Colin said, ‘We’re a film club – we film everything.’

Giving nothing away, the club gets its Hollywood finale. The documentary was produced by the BBC and clubs from all over Lancashire and Yorkshire attended this summer’s 90th anniversary party. The dilapidated building has been rehabilitated and now includes a studio, a script team and a completely refurbished stair lift.

“At some point, we were afraid of losing members,” Wainman says. “But we seem to be slowly winning them at the moment.”

At BFI, the group is caught in a storm. Nicholls, a former magician, spends part of the Q&A doing card tricks. Egglestone demonstrates the spin he can achieve with his new prosthetic shoulder. Ogden films everything. Wilson is enjoying his first trip to the capital at the age of 60. “I love it!” she tells the audience. “That’s exactly what you see on TV.”

Then, in the lobby, Wainman talks to men in their early twenties who want to join in, while Hopkins hands Egglestone half a beer. “This is the pinnacle, BFI, isn’t it?” says Ogden, a little flustered.

However, the group wants to do more. Hopkins says Wainman dreams of becoming a Hollywood screenwriter, while Ogden has taken on his first feature-length project. The film begins with a cry and becomes a celebration of the desire to create art for its own sake. For Hopkins, Bradford’s filmmakers are two fingers happy for the idea of ​​slowing down and growing up.

“We’re going there, all of us,” she says. “And we want to know what it would be like if we were a little older, what we would do.

“Can we have some fun? Can we still live and not just work to shake off this death spiral? They certainly make the most of their share.”