The Valleys Film Society got off to a hesitant start in 1997 when Mary Drinan organised a small group of people to put on a film to raise money for a village regeneration project in India.

We got Robert Johnson of Staffordshire Reels on Wheels to show Brassed Off in a school hall.

It was a great success raising a substantial sum for the village and prompting us to set up the society with the aim of providing a community cinema in this rural area around the Tanat and Cain Valleys, as well as giving people the opportunity to see films had not received a wide distribution.

The nearest cinema in Oswestry had closed some years before and the cinemas in Bala and Welshpool, each about 16 miles distant showed only the most commercial of movies.

We soon realised that showing films is riskier than we imagined. The first film we showed as a society was Into the West. It was a wet winter night and it clashed with another local event. For our small committee it proved the most expensive night at the movies we had ever experienced.

All the profits from Brassed Off had gone to India and so we had to cover a loss of over £300 from our own pockets. We recouped some of this with a later showing of Mrs Brown, but our 'business plan' clearly wasn't working.

Meanwhile Llanfyllin High School applied for a Lottery Grant to turn their hall into a fully equipped theatre. We were asked to get involved as potential users of the hall, and as a result a projection room with a reconditioned 35mm projector and a big screen were included in the project. We now had access to a 290-seat cinema with raked seating, although we still had to pay for its hire.

Fortunately, our first film in the new venue (Land Girls) was a triumph - we almost filled the theatre and so had some funds to cover future losses. These proved to be the norm. In the early years of the society only about one film in six or seven made a profit.

Many of these profitable films were the half-term specials that we put on for children and parents at a reduced price. Fortunately these 'roundabouts' each covered the losses from a large number of 'swings'.

We also put on festivals of foreign language films for the first few years with help from Arts Connection - who had access to grant funding. They also provided funding for us to show Welsh language films and we eventually showed most of those that were made, although the audiences were almost always disappointing, despite this being a stongly Welsh speaking area.

Some people said that they didn't like the sub-titles, but it may simply be that the Welsh film industry didn't make enough films of the type that most of our local population would like to see. Perhaps, they simply didn't make enough films - if we had shown the entire production of Hollywood we would probably have had a similar pattern of hits and flops.

More recently we have gained a more regular level of attendance with fewer big losses but also fewer big profits. We now try to survive without grants - in any case these seem more difficult to obtain, except for capital equipment.

This does, however, give us greater freedom to show what we think our audience would like to see. We now show a mix of the better mainstream films and what could loosely be called world cinema. We are gradually getting some feel for what works in our area, although we can never be sure.

Anything with Johnny Depp seems to pull in a lot of ladies of a certain age, perhaps indicating some unfulfilled longing. There is also a big following for films with an anthropological theme about distant societies - Himalaya, Latcho Drom, The Weeping Camel, and Ten Canoes have all been popular.

Each year we show a few of the major releases, although we generally cannot get them until well after their peak. This year Casino Royal and The Queen did well.

We have still only filled the theatre once, and that was when members of Women's Institutes from all over Montgomeryshire turned out in droves to see Calendar Girls, much to the annoyance of some of our regulars who arrived to find the theatre full.

We show films every Friday at 7.30 during the autumn and winter school terms. Tickets cost £4.00 at the door - we don't take bookings following the Calendar Girls event! Membership costs £6.00 and gives free entry to one film and mailings of our program for two terms. For more information contact pieternelson@mac.com or call 01691 860425."

Article by Pieter Nelson