Hi!
We are glad that you clicked through and hope you'll stick around as we explain a little more about the project we are attempting to launch.
But first, a little about who we are.
Our non-profit film club, Film i Malmö and our host venue, Hypnos Theatre were both founded in December 2018. Our first public event was a 12 hour long local film festival which took place on January 19, 2019. Over a 1000 people were interested in the event on Facebook which garnered local and national media attention. We welcomed our first 100 members that day and watched 15 films by different directors representing all sorts of genres and moving image artworks.
Since that day we have had 1500+ members, some of whom became volunteer hosts of the nearly 1000 screenings.
The founders of Film i Malmö had at least these two principles in mind:
1. to make a counteraction against the isolating effect of increasingly popular home streaming. Film i Malmö always looks for ways to reinforce the social aspect of cinema.
2. to disengage from the traditional stratification of the film industry. Our programming is and has always been entirely decided by volunteers with little to no prior curating experience. It's a pick, promote and project what you want program (while of course obeying the terms of our licensing agreement for film rights).
Here is an introduction to the project we are launching!
In swedish it's called "Gemenskap över gränser"
In english we are calling it: Community across borders
We attended an independent cinema networking event here in Sweden because why not! and we discovered a few things. First, that we are unique. No other cinema operates like we do. Secondly, we are not alone in our love for this. Nobody is getting rich, so the indie industry attracts is full of people who genuinely love what they do and want, above all else, to keep doing it in spite of the cinema industry hardships. And that means everyone is open-minded, looking for creative solutions, generous with their ideas and contacts.
While we have some things in common with these independent commercial cinemas we have come to know, our particular model as a nonprofit, volunteer run organization / film club is unique and has different ambitions. So we have tried to find other film clubs, non-profit cinemas to connect with. This search brought us to the International Federation of Film Societies where we discovered the initiative Cinesud. We thought, why not try to do something like this in our part of the world?! But let's start by just getting to know others and see what we can learn from each other's experiences and what common ambitions we could have.
So we applied for and received some funding from Malmö City and Region Skåne to research the possibility of creating a network. With this money we are able to travel via train (for environmental reasons) to visit you and other organizations, see how you operate, present how we operate, to take you out for a meal and discuss what if anything we all might want out of a network.
Here are the official aims we outlined in our applications (keep in mind that we are open-minded people and will not let our original aims interfere with better aims should we encounter them!):
1) to build a network and long-term collaborations with non-profit film and moving image organizations so that we can learn from one another's experiences, methods and practices and improve our practices, and
2) to share resources, above-all our local network of filmmakers with the goal of spreading quality films that are not available through established international distribution.
We hope that you will reach out with questions or an invitation. Write to us at this email: info[at]filmimalmo.se and put COMMUNITY someplace in the subject line.
This project is being led by
Paul Kraus (founder of Hypnos Theatre, member of Film i Malmö board of directors)
Volha Rudak (communications at Trans Europe Halles, Film i Malmö volunteer/programmer)
Shona MacKenzie (vice-chairperson, Film i Malmö board of directors)
For further reading here are a couple of our past projects:
Filmimalmo.se (2020)When the pandemic struck, Film i Malmö immediately commissioned the creation of a robust website with the capacity to stream films behind a subscription paywall. After its construction we collaborated with Filmcentrum Syd to showcase a collection of films celebrating their first ten years and with ShakoMako to host a M.E.N.A. region queer film festival. We also received local funding to purchase streaming rights from local and regional filmmakers to stream to our members.
Global Cinema (2021)
Malmö is an extremely diverse city with inhabitants of 186 different nationalities (source). At the time Film i Malmö's 7-member board of directors was comprised of Malmö inhabitants from Germany, Sweden, Uruguay, Poland, Serbia, USA and Iran. With this in mind we sought out films from areas of the globe with limited distribution in Sweden. With financial support from Malmö city and Region Skåne, we were able to purchase screening rights for over 30 films, 26 of which had never been shown in a cinema in Sweden.
And a selection of photos
