After 94 years, Bradford Movie Makers prepares for its first international film festival
Gregory Wakeman explores one of the oldest surviving amateur filmmaking clubs in the world.
Even after 94 years, the Bradford Movie Makers amateur film club continues to evolve. Founded in 1932 as the Bradford Cine Circle, its members have been meeting up once a week for decades to screen, archive and discuss all things cinema – and then make all types of different shorts and documentaries. It is widely considered to be one of the oldest surviving amateur filmmaking clubs in the world.
Since 1935, the hub of all that activity has taken place in the same building just off Little Horton Lane. And on Saturday 10 October, it will be the very venue for the Bradford Movie Makers’ first-ever international film festival.
As well as screening movies made by its own members, the club has selected entries from Brazil, Iran, Russia and other parts of the UK, which were submitted through the FilmFreeway website (considered the world's leading platform for submitting films to festivals). While entry to the festival is astonishingly free, donations are very welcome.
“We just thought, why don’t we have a film festival?” answers Dave Marshall, the current president of the Bradford Movie Makers, when asked about the event’s origins. True to form, the club has also worked closely with filmmakers from across the world to ensure that their work could be screened, even at the expense of the Bradford Movie Makers’ own finances ...
To cover the £75 cost to register the film festival on FilmFreeway, Bradford Movie Makers had initially charged filmmakers a minimal entry fee of between £3.75 and £12.
“But we had filmmakers from Iran and Russia asking for fee waivers to enter because you have to pay Film Freeway in dollars and there’s no way they could do that,” explains Marshall, as people living in these countries are unable to make direct payments to American companies.
Bradford Movie Makers were so impressed by the films from Iran and Russia that they allowed them to submit their work for free. “We let them off because their films are really good,” declares Marshall.
Viewers of A Bunch Of Amateurs – the 2022 documentary that depicts Bradford Movie Makers creating their own films while struggling to keep the club afloat – will know that the club is as much about community as it is about celebrating cinema.
Directed by Kim Hopkins - the award-winning, Yorkshire-based documentary behind Voices of the Sea and Man In The Sand - A Bunch Of Amateurs shows members helping each other through grief while trying to figure out a way forward for the club – as well as documenting them relentlessly bickering as they make a homage to Oklahoma! shot in a Bradford field and numerous other horror shorts.
Critically acclaimed for its heartwarming depiction of camaraderie, England’s dwindling club community and filmmakers shooting for passion rather than profit, A Bunch Of Amateurs won the Audience Award at the 2022 Sheffield Doc/Fest, the Feature Documentary Audience Award at the Leeds International Film Festival, as well as prizes at film festivals in Leipzig, Germany, and Santa Barbara, California.
“I just wanted to show the working class with kindness and show how good they are at creating a community,” says Hopkins, who shot over 90 hours' worth of footage of the Bradford Movie Makers between April 2018 and August 2021.
“I remember I wanted to call it A Bunch Of Amateurs and because the word amateur has all these different connotations now. I had to tell them that it comes from the Latin and French word that means doing something for love, not for career and money. They loved that and really embraced the word amateur.”
Marshall doesn’t think any Bradford Movie Makers film has ever been shot with a budget. Instead, they all act in each other’s work. And if they need props, they make them, while also transforming the streets of Bradford into any city in the world or planet in the galaxy.
They even have a small studio and green screen that they use for visual effects. In A Bunch Of Amateurs, when Harry Nicholls – a longtime member of the club – wanted to remake the opening of Oklahoma! for his ailing wife, he was unfortunately unable to get up on the horse. Instead, fellow Bradford Movie Makers Phil Wainman and Joe Ogden used the green screen and studio to impose Harry’s face over the horse’s owner as she rode the animal ...
