Chair's Annual Report 2021-2022
It has been another sad year for Keswick Film Club, where we learnt to make the Covid-enforced conditions our new-normal but ending on a hopeful enjoyable note with an (almost) old-normal Festival.
The Club ran the whole year with 'social distancing' in the cinema limiting our audiences to around a 90 maximum. All the disruption obviously left us with very odd figures for the year, the largest audience being only 85, though we did double the 10 films shown last year - almost back to pre-Covid levels. Our total audience was still only 1368 - around half what we hope for next year.
The good news for Keswick was the reopening of the Alhambra, albeit a few weeks later than our usual start date. The cinema now has a second screen as well as looking magnificent. Our thanks again go to the Rennies and Jonathan Moore (and all those wonderful volunteers who helped along the way).
Once again we abandoned our brochure and our season passes as we booked films a month at a time, sticking with the Alhambra booking system for our tickets and leaving our voting system online. We may continue the 'monthly booking' as it does increase our ability to get the latest films, though we will need to review this against the loss of a brochure. (Note for the start of the Autumn 2022 season we have produced an extended 'Talking Pictures' sheet to give an overview of the first half season).
The Film Festival, held right at the end of the year, was our first 'non-Covid' event and was a celebration of this fact. The audiences were still down, but a great time was had by all. Thanks to Ian Payne and his enthusiastic team of helpers!
The other good news from the year is that, once again, we are still in good financial position having managed our spending to our income...
I would like to thank the Committee and the Alhambra for managing to keep the Club running under such strange conditions. We can now hope that this coming year will be a celebration of 'back to normal' in our new Alhambra!
Vaughan Ames, Chair