Member spotlight

Cork Cine Club

For our May spotlight, we’re highlighting the great work of Cork Cine Club.

The Cork City based club has been screening films since 2009, and has been going from strength to strength in recent years. They have recently been featured in the Irish Examiner and other local media.

As they wrap up their latest season – which finished up in mid-April with a screening of Jafar Panahi’s fantastic It Was Just An Accident – the team in Cork have been generous enough to put together some reflections on their club’s past, present and future.

Cork Cine Club was formed in response to the 2009 closure of the Kino Cinema, Cork’s flagship art house cinema. The Save the Kino campaign raised some money and made lots of noise but unfortunately ended in failure.

Ann FitzGerald and Mary Doran – a barrister and an architect, respectively – talked about how much poorer Cork’s cultural cinema scene would be without the Kino. They resolved to find a new way to offer the best of independent world cinema to Cork audiences. They looked at different models and decided on access>CINEMA. They met the wonderful team at access, who have supported and encouraged us down the years. The rest is history!

Our first venue was The Half Moon Theatre in Cork Opera House, where we kicked off in February 2010. We moved for one season to the Crawford Art Gallery, before finding our home in Cork College of FET Douglas Street Campus in 2012.

We programme two seasons of ten films each per year, meaning that we’ve offered more than 300 films to Cork audiences over the past 16 years. We recently introduced a Classic Choice, with selections such as A Heart in Winter [1992] and Hidden [2005]. We regularly offer a showcase to short Irish films before the main event.

Our enterprise depends for its existence on choosing the right films – we hope! – and on our loyal audience who troop out on Thursday nights in all weather, 20 weeks of the year. A complimentary glass of wine twice a season is a regular feature, adding a sociable aspect.

Some feedback from Cine Club regulars:

“We are friends who are interested in the arts, culture and cinema and since joining the Cork Cine Club some years ago, we have enjoyed interesting, thought-provoking and entertaining shorts, documentaries and films that would otherwise not be accessible to us. We are very grateful to the members of the committee for giving us the opportunity to see them and for their warm welcome to us each week.”

“The films that we have seen have been windows into different cultures, issues, histories and senses of humour around the world, from home to the furthest of places and have made us realise that there are more similarities than differences between us humans. The quality of the acting, the production and the cinematography is consistently superb.”

“Films that we found particularly powerful and moving will stay with us forever and they have coloured our sense of the world and inspired us to try to do our bit to make it better.”

Cork Cine Club is non-profit, non-funded, and volunteer-run. Our small but mighty committee is composed of Stephen Broekhuizen, Mandy Collins, Malachy Cullen, Ann FitzGerald, David Gould, Jean Kearney, Jamie Monagan, John Talty and Thomas Quigley. John’s wife, Kathleen Hoctor, regularly pitches in. Mary Doran stepped back from active service but remains a loyal supporter, while Reg Murphy and Ben Cuddihy have been valued contributors along the way.

Without these hardworking, dependable stalwarts, Cork Cine Club would not have thrived for 16 years. We hope to continue to bring the best of independent world cinema to Cork audiences.

Cork Cine Club,

Cork College of FET,

Douglas Street,

Cork City,

T12 DW32

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