National Cinema Day: Greater Manchester film society offers affordable cinema everyday

National World - LocalTV

Hundreds of cinemas across the UK are coming together on Saturday the September 2 to celebrate National Cinema Day.  Participating cinemas are offering tickets to all shows from just £3 each, hoping to encourage anyone and everyone to come together to share in the big screen experience.  The day is supposed to be an incentive for people to sit back and enjoy a movie at a multiplex - and a local film society is joining in with the celebrations, and will be screening Harry Potter this Saturday.  Leigh Film Society in Wigan will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of its Film Festival next month, where creators from all over the world submit their short films to be previewed over two days at Leigh Film Factory.  The international festival still celebrates local filmmakers and has five winning categories - documentaries, animation, young filmmakers, North West, and UK and International.

Transcript

00:00 There's something a little bit special about this cinema. It's been built by the community

00:04 and has been created in an old spinning mill in Leigh. The mill has been under construction

00:09 since before the pandemic and is now home to a variety of community spaces. These include

00:15 spaces for sports such as archery and table tennis, a cafe and of course, Leigh Film Society's

00:20 new cinema.

00:21 Leigh Film Society has been around for nearly 10 years and we've never had our own cinema

00:26 space. We've always hired venues as and when we needed to. It's been on the back burner

00:31 for a long time, we've talked about it for a long time, let's build our own cinema. And

00:36 then Spinner's Mill came on the horizon about hiring units within the mill, which is a really

00:43 exciting concept and we just said, let's go for it. Let's see what happens. Let's take

00:48 a leap of faith.

00:50 One of the very few advantages of the lockdowns and things like that was that we had time

00:55 to think about it and plan it and get the skills that we needed. So my wife's background

01:02 is in space planning, so we kind of got together and designed that area, the bar area.

01:08 The tables in this bar have been crafted by hand from parts of the old mill and the idea

01:12 behind it was to keep the original industrial features of the building alive.

01:17 And we're just trying to make a space where people, where they like to be, where they

01:22 want to spend some time, but also that has a feel of where they are. Because we are in

01:27 a mill, we're in an industrial building. It's an industrial, the town has an industrial

01:33 background and we wanted the space to fit.

01:36 The cinema isn't the only space rented out in the mill. There are already rooms up and

01:41 running and many more on the way.

01:43 The floor two, there's mainly, it's like a sports and activities floor. There's a cafe

01:49 on there, which is some of the best cake you'll ever have, it's lovely. But there's also a

01:54 table tennis, there's archery, there's a gym, there's personal fitness or something there.

01:59 And then floor three, as far as I'm aware, is mainly like small businesses, community

02:04 groups, there's charities on there. That's where I think human rights are, we work with

02:09 quite a bit. And then this floor is going to be the cultural floor.

02:15 The building is already a community hub. Floors two and three are currently open to the public,

02:20 with floor four to be opening a computer museum and Leigh Film Society's film factory shortly.

02:26 Our launch event is to sort of say, here we are, this is us. It's a special event for

02:31 people who have funded us, our trustees, our patrons, just to say, this is what we are,

02:38 we're ready to go and thank you so much for all your support. We set out an ethos about

02:43 how we were going to use film and how we wanted to be perceived by the public and our audiences

02:49 that were going to come along. And we've been very transparent in our message. We're about

02:53 film and entertainment, that's for sure. But also we want film to fight against social

02:59 isolation, that people can come on their own but they feel part of a community cinema family.

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