Stacking Chairs, Urn Tea and a Nervous Projector: In Praise of the Village Hall Cinema

The first thing you notice is the smell. Floor polish, faintly, and then the hot dust of an electric heater that has been switched on for your benefit roughly twenty minutes ago. There's a trestle table by the door with a cash tin on it and a woman called Jan who has known your family since 1998. You hand over a fiver. She gives you a raffle ticket you didn't ask for and a look that says sit near the front, the back's draughty.

This is the village hall cinema, and I would genuinely rather be here than in any Odeon in the country.

The transformation is the point

What I love most is that the room has to be converted. Nothing here is purpose-built. A group of volunteers arrive at half six with a roll of blackout lining and a staple gun, and for the next twenty minutes they do battle with the windows. Someone's holding a torch. Someone else is up a stepladder saying a bit more to the left, Barry. There's a screen that unfurls from a tripod and never quite sits flat, so for the whole film there's a gentle wave down the middle of the picture, like watching a movie through a net curtain.

The stacking chairs come out of the cupboard under the stage. They are the same chairs that hold the parish council meeting, the Pilates class and the Christmas craft fair, and they have a very specific relationship with your spine after ninety minutes. Nobody minds. Somebody's brought a cushion.

Compare that to the multiplex, where you walk into a darkened room that has been a darkened room since the day it opened, staffed by people who will not remember you and lit by the glow of a pick-and-mix counter charging nine pounds for the privilege. Efficient, sure. But the village hall has done something the cinema chain can't: it has made an occasion out of it.

What your fiver actually buys

The ticket gets you in. That's about it, in theory. In practice you also get:

• a cup of tea at the interval, poured from an urn that predates the euro
• a slice of cake from the WI, cut generously and slightly asymmetrically
• a raffle with prizes including a bottle of something, a box of biscuits and a mystery bag
• a film you would never have chosen yourself
• the sound of forty people laughing at the same joke at the same time, in a room with terrible acoustics

And I want to be clear that the interval is not a quaint detail. It is a structural feature. It's where the whole thing happens. You stand up, you stretch the bit of your back the chair has ruined, you queue for the urn, and you have a conversation with a stranger about whether the lead actor was in that thing on BBC Two. Half the audience is under twelve and the other half has brought a flask. It is the most socially useful forty minutes of my month.

In defence of a projector that may not cooperate

There is always a moment, about four minutes in, where something goes wrong. The aspect ratio is off and everyone in the room is an expert on aspect ratio. The subtitles are in the wrong place. The sound is coming out of one speaker at the front-left, so the whole film appears to have been made by someone standing in a corner. Once, and I will never forget this, the projector shut down entirely at a crucial plot point and we all sat in the dark listening to a man called Graham say give it a minute, it does this.

It did it. It came back. We cheered.

You might read that as amateurish. I read it as the opposite: it is the only place left where a film is an event that everyone in the room is jointly responsible for. When it fails, the audience doesn't get a refund from a call centre. The audience waits, and someone fixes it, and then everyone says ooh when the picture returns.

Why it beats the big screen

The multiplex sells you immersion — the recliner, the wall of sound, the darkness. But you're alone in it, in a room full of strangers who've all agreed not to talk. Village hall cinema does the opposite. It's a room full of neighbours who've all agreed to sit on uncomfortable chairs for two hours because it's raining and this is what's on.

You get films you'd never pick. A bit of foreign-language cinema nobody would risk at £14 a ticket. A black-and-white classic that half the room saw on television in about 1983. A sing-along of something deeply unfashionable that turns out to be enormous fun by the second chorus. The programming is done by people who like films, not by people who like opening weekends.

How to find one near you

This is the part where I tell you it's easier than you think. Rural and community cinema is a genuine, quietly thriving British institution, and there are proper networks behind it.

Cinema for All is the national body for community cinema and has a searchable map of screenings around the country — an absurd number of them are in halls exactly like the one I've just described. Moviola runs rural film nights across much of the south and south-west. Flicks in the Sticks does the same for Shropshire and Herefordshire, often in halls with no phone signal whatsoever. In Scotland there's the Screen Machine, a mobile cinema in a lorry that serves places where the nearest multiplex is a ferry away. The BFI also keeps a directory of neighbourhood cinema. Your parish newsletter is, unbelievably, an entertainment listings magazine.

A short etiquette guide

Sit where you're told. Bring cash. If there's a raffle, buy a strip. Don't explain the plot to the person next to you, even if they are clearly lost. Take your mug back to the table. And if the projector dies, do not panic — say the line, in unison, with the rest of the room: give it a minute.

It will come back. It always does.