The church hall cinema that sells out every Thursday
Seventy seats, a borrowed projector and an interval for tea and cake. How a few volunteers built the town’s favourite night out.

Sam Okafor
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5 min read

Seventy seats, one projector and an interval for tea.
Every Thursday at 7:30pm, seventy people sit down in St Anne’s Hall to watch a film that most of them have already seen. Brantwick Community Cinema has sold out every screening since March.
It started in 2019 with a bedsheet, a projector borrowed from the primary school and a licence that cost more than the projector. The volunteers now have proper seats, salvaged from a cinema in the city that closed, and a screen paid for by a summer of cake sales.
How to get a seat
Tickets are £5 and go on sale at the library desk on the Monday before each screening. There’s no online booking, which the volunteers say is deliberate. ‘It means the people who want to come are the people who live here,’ says organiser Joan Fairley.

About the writer
Sam Okafor
Listings and what’s on
Compiles the listings every week and goes to more quiz nights than is healthy. Send him your event and he’ll put it in for free.
The Friday email