For many years, the Drill Hall Film Society has been a source of things you just can’t find on the little screen.
And since Covid, numbers have not really returned to what they once were, so the society is wanting to remind the community what great fun it is to go to the cinema and invite everyone to come along to watch something strange…
The Drill Hall Film Society was started in 2018 by a group of locals – Michael and Sonia Borenstein, Peter Gough, Greg Aitken, Sunita Bailey and Alex Benham – the group was formed to fill the gap left by the Left Bank Film Society, when Michael and Rebecca Lines-Kelly returned to Victoria.
Since then, the society has screened 60 films, a mixture of Australian, British, American and European classics made between 1940 and 2018.
Black comedy
The program for the next season has been locked in, and to kick things off, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or : How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb will screen July 23 from 7pm. The well-known black comedy was made in 1964, and feels oddly timely in our crazy world.
The society’s Alex Benham says movies mark time.
‘Movies have a history, as do nations – and histories tend to be forgotten. In this day of high consumption, rapid turnover, there are some absolute, groundbreaking, instructive, brilliant movies that don’t get seen because they’re not on SBS and they’re not on TikTok.
‘I mean, Dr Strangelove is probably the most savage satire of war ever made, it makes M*A*S*H look fairly tame. It is deeply vicious in a political and social sense, and the achievement is extraordinary. Kubrick only made one full-on comedy. This is it!’
Membership benefits
The annual Drill Hall membership is $75, and includes associate membership to the Drill Hall Company, which offers free tickets to dress rehearsals for Drill Hall Theatre productions, discount tickets to the Drill Hall Theatre’s own productions and access to workshops.
Each screening is introduced, and there is a brief discussion afterwards and the bar and kitchen are open 30 minutes before the film.
The society has 11 screenings per year and membership is now open for the following 12 months.
To find out more, visit: drillhalltheatre.org.au/films.
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