Buenos Aires’ cinephiles are going back to basics: getting together to watch good films. Anywhere.
As blockbuster releases clog multiplex theaters and isolated binge-streaming becomes an increasingly unfulfilling habit, in recent years amateur film clubs have sprouted not only in regular theaters but also in improvised locations such as bars, cultural centers and even downtown offices.
“What a film club really does is build a community, and not just for cinephiles,” Paula Félix-Didier told the Herald. A programmer at MADO, an organization that runs the Recovered Cinema Week, she is also one of Argentina’s top film preservation experts and a former director of the Buenos Aires Film Museum.
A community was precisely what Andrés Firu Fichendler, a film editor and artist who co-founded the Florida film club in mid-2023, was looking for when he ventured into the La Cueva film club in Mexico City.
“I had just moved to town. I didn’t know anyone; I had no friends. And an Argentine friend who had been there before told me I should go to this great film club,” he remembers. “I ended up going every week, and that’s where I made my Mexican friends.”
