Can you socialize at the movie theater? Thanks to promotional tours, meetings, and film clubs

Cinemas are the places of the new sociality. If before one couldn't miss the title of the moment to not stay out of the conversation or because one absolutely had to express their opinion on social media, post-Covid the cinema hall has acquired a new value. In an era of small and pervasive screens, the total and unanimous immersion in larger ones, capable of transporting us to other worlds, allows us to escape together with a group of people into mythical and fantastic universes, seeking a contact that is human as well as simply cinematic. Contributing to this are the many initiatives that are transforming cinemas into real social clubs, including in Italy, with offers that allow experiencing the social side of cinema on multiple scales of value, where sharing is central to the purpose of the hall experience.

The "social cinemas" in Rome, Milan, and Bologna

A bulwark of such gathering is, for ten years in Rome, the Cinema America project, former occupied cinema from which a Foundation was born that every summer organizes the Cinema in Piazza initiative and that, between outdoor spaces and the now official headquarters, the Cinema Troisi in Trastevere, has become a meeting place for audiences and artists where exchange becomes integrated into film viewing. What is offered in Milan by the Cinema Beltrade or the Anteo Palazzo del Cinema, where moments of confrontation with directors and actors are often a constitutive part of the screenings, bringing spectators together to talk and discuss together. Experiences that take on an almost academic aura, but never pretentious when carried out by the Modernissimo in Bologna, renovated and reopened on November 21, 2023, fifteen years after its closure, where guests literally take the chair to converse with the public, who are assigned a seat with the name of a cinema world figure written on it.

The supplement of the meeting, a moment that for a long time in Italy was taken for granted, has created a support network for films arriving in theaters and pushes the audience even more to gather to listen to how a work was realized by its director or experienced by its interpreters, in turn giving their opinion on the film. Real tours are set in motion for the promotion of a work, an advertising technique that has expanded especially after the pandemic to allow titles to have broader shoulders to face box office receipts. Today, an indispensable and significant solution for the audience that can come into contact even with those who are usually on the other side of the screen, fueling a sense of participation that fits into the idea of living cinema as a common practice, as a moment of encounter and exchange.

A return of the cineclub?

Experiments that, in recent years, have brought back into vogue a truly twentieth-century custom: the cineclub as a meeting point where to talk and confront each other together to arrive at a human and cultural exchange that is enriching and genuine. There are the more official variants, critical, even here professional in the strict sense. From initiatives like Breakfast with the Critic promoted by Fondazione Brescia Musei to the courses of a critical and journalistic reality like Longtake, which with its cinema seminars does not focus only on the unidirectional encounter where the expert explains and the public listens, but offers a complete package that also includes a brunch together to make everything more convivial and continue talking in an intimate and relaxed atmosphere about the designated focus.

There are then more colloquial formulas, from the Poltroncine appointment that punctuates the halls of the Circuito Cinema di Roma to the revival of the Eliseo Film Club, in its third season at the Multisala Cinema Eliseo Cesena, where membership contributes to stimulating both the desire to watch films and to discuss them together. And this is what cinema should most aspire to, to a continuous giving and receiving from each other that goes from the screen to people and then to others again. The hall as a church that welcomes everyone, whose doors are - and must remain - always open.