Wendy Ide 

A Bunch of Amateurs review – moving study of a dwindling Bradford film-making society

Kim Hopkins’s lovely documentary portrait of an amateur cineastes’ club founded in 1932 and now on its uppers is a little gem
  
  

Hollywood of the north: A Bunch of Amateurs.
‘A lifeline’: members of the Bradford Movie Makers in A Bunch of Amateurs. Photograph: Film PR handout undefined

Formed in 1932, Bradford Movie Makers was one of numerous amateur film-making societies in the north of England, a region that, says one member, might have rivalled Hollywood were it not for the disruption of the war. But in contrast to its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s (captured, appropriately, on scratchy Super 8 home movies), the club is now on its uppers. A headcount of its ageing membership barely scrapes into double figures; they haven’t paid the rent on their clubhouse for five years. And the building itself is shedding chunks of masonry and plaster, its creaky stairs a looming hazard to the hips of its increasingly doddery regulars.

But, as this terrific and very moving documentary shows, the society, fuelled by bickering, biscuits and cinephilia, is a lifeline for its members, who weather bereavements, loneliness and fiercely argued creative differences within its peeling walls. Lovely stuff.

Watch a trailer for A Bunch of Amateurs.
 

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