Bradford Movie Makers is one of the oldest amateur film clubs in the UK. Founded in 1932, the organisation celebrates its 90th anniversary this year. For the members, some of whom are very elderly, making movies and watching them is both a passion and a way of escape.
They meet every Monday night at 7.30pm to socialise, drink cups tea and show their films. They struggle to pay the rent on their premises (down an alleyway off Little Horton Lane). No-one supports them but, against the odds, they keep the club going.
These dogged cinephiles are the heroes of Kim Hopkins’ new documentary A Bunch Of Amateurs (sold by MetFilms and receiving its premiere at Sheffield DocFest this week).
The new film is executive produced by Simon Beaufoy, writer of The Full Monty (1997), the smash hit comedy about unemployed Sheffield steel workers re-inventing themselves as male strippers. Hopkins knew Beaufoy from their days at the UK’s National Film and Television School. When she showed him an early version of the film, he recognised the ‘Full Monty’ spirit of the doc and agreed to help in any way he could.
“Oddly enough, it was the algorithms of Facebook,” director Hopkins explains what first led her to the club six or seven years ago. She had read a post by one of the members who “lamented how lonely he was.” Hopkins followed a link which led her to a short film made by that member. “It was a real dirge, someone wandering around the rainy streets of Bradford. I thought: ‘it has something.’”
Hopkins investigated further, attending one of their AGMs and asking the members whether they might agree to being subjects of a documentary. “They were very suspicious,” the director remembers. She had ventured to Cuba for her previous film Voices Of The Sea (2018), but nothing she encountered in communist Cuba prepared her for the cussedness of the Yorkshire film club veterans. “They’re just so suspicious of…cameras. I guess quite rightly. I eventually gained their trust through spending an awful lot of time with them.”
After a while, some of the members agreed to go to the pub with her. One or two invited her into their homes. Gradually, they accepted her as one of their own.
Hopkins, who makes her films through Labor Of Love Films Ltd, approached the project in traditional verité fashion. She took what she calls “a deep dive” into her material. “I really commit heavily to my characters,” she says.
On the one hand, A Bunch Of Amateurs is very funny. It squeezes all the comedy it can out of the club’s attempts to make their own version of Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma, compete with ageing club member Harry Nicholls on horseback (even if takes some green screen special effects to get him into the saddle) singing “Oh, what a beautiful morning.” On the other hand, Hopkins is touching on poignant, sometimes very dark subject matter. Her protagonists lead tough lives.
“When Harry started miming to Oklahoma, there was something in his eyes. He was so in character. He was [movie star] Gordon MacRae,” Hopkins observes. She knew that Harry had a wife at home who had been lying in a hospital bed in his front room, suffering from vascular dementia. Crooning the song was his way of escape. “It was that scene which really made me know there was a film there,” Hopkins says.
The director realised that outsiders might question her decision to make a feature documentary about such a parochial and seemingly insignificant movie club. That’s why she was determined to show how much the club mattered to its members. Hopkins wanted viewers to feel their passion and commitment. For veterans like Colin the carpenter, who has been part of the club since the 1960s, it is the one place where he still socialises. For Phil, a younger member still in his 40s, the club provides respite from his responsibilities caring for his brother, who has cerebral palsy.
As for the whimsy and the jokes, Hopkins believes that documentaries and documentary festivals can sometimes be far too solemn for their own good. “I felt the doc industry needed a film with humour,” she says of the comic undertow to A Bunch of Amateurs. “It doesn’t preclude it being about serious stuff…[but] some of the best stuff, the stuff which says the most, is funny.”
The club members can all see the absurdity of the filmmaking process. They like to laugh at themselves and to tease each other about their occasional moments of artistic vanity.
When the pandemic started, Hopkins worried that she might have to postpone or abandon the project. Her subjects were very vulnerable to Covid. However, the director also realised that they were filmmakers. If she wasn’t allowed inside their houses when they were isolating, they could shoot material on her behalf. She was also able to give them microphones and to film through their windows.
“At first, I thought it [the pandemic] was going to be a massive problem but it actually brought quite a lot to the film.”
The film club received some Covid support which enabled the members not only to pay the rent but to take care of the gas and electric bills as well.
Hopkins still feels that the club has been “let down” over the years. Its activities are rarely covered by the media. Funders have ignored it. Nonetheless, the filmmakers turn out provocative, funny and surrealistic work (films like Haunted Turnip and Nice Jam). Their movies have obvious social and historical value too.
“The distance between being an amateur and a professional is sometimes fairly small. Sometimes, it is just about opportunity,” Hopkins reflects. She is from the north herself (and is based in York) but had the opportunity to build her career because she spent “25 years in London.”
“We are still waiting for the levelling up here,” Hopkins adds of the plight of filmmakers working too far from the south-east.
Bradford has its own cinema museum. It has a rich cinematic heritage. Movies from Billy Liar to Ali & Ava have been made in the town. Even so, the “good, honest people” who are part of Bradford Movie Makers club have endured years of neglect and indifference. They’ve never given up. Hopkins’ documentary is a tribute to their resilience as well to their good humour in the face of adversity, and she’ll be screening the film for the club members as part of their 90th anniversary celebrations at the end of July.
Development funding for A Bunch Of Amateurs from US outfit, Catapult Film Fund. BFI Doc Society provided both development and production support. There was also backing from Screen Yorkshire and from Gotham (formerly IFP).
