The Hamilton Film Society

To the uninitiated the Hamilton Film Society might sound like something stuffy.  It isn’t.  It’s all about watching diverse, interesting, sometimes even challenging movies, things that cannot easily be seen elsewhere.  The films may be in a language other than English.  They might be in black and white.  They could even be silent.  In almost all cases they enrich the viewer, informing, entertaining and leading to greater historical and cultural understanding of the world and our place in it.

The Society meets every Tuesday, usually 8pm, at Victoria cinema.  With a forty film programme the $100 membership fee works out at around $2.50 per screening, with the added bonus of further discounts at both Victoria cinema and Auteur House.  Student and unwaged membership is $90 and a $30 ‘flexi ticket’ gives casual viewers the option to attend three films of their choice.

The 2009 programme includes a retrospective of the Polish director Lech Majewski and a series of shorts by the ‘mother of the [French] New Wave’ Agnes Varda.  The former will personally attend the March 17 screening at the earlier time of 6pm.  Later highlights include a number of fascinating cold war era East German films, a feature and a student short by the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky, at least one Hollywood musical and some classic, silent slapstick.