A Bunch Of Amateurs
A bunch of amateur film-makers, with nothing left to lose, tackle one of Hollywood's greatest musicals in order to save their beloved Bradford Film Club.
The most quintessentially British working-class filmmaking club, Bradford Movie Makers’ members grow old amid flickering memories and the brutal reckoning of their final years. Desperately clinging to their dreams, and to each other, fuelled by endless cups of tea, this quietly hilarious, profoundly moving portrait of shared artistic folly speaks to the delusional escapist dreamer in us all and to the need to spend time together face to face in an increasingly lonely, digital age.
Director’s Statement by Kim Hopkins
A Bunch Of Amateurs is set in Bradford in the north of England, in an area where outsiders are treated with eyebrow raising suspicion, and those wielding a camera are outright cold shouldered. I was raised here, so I understand the local codes, working-class sensibilities and the tough history. The ghosts of a prosperous industrial past are everywhere, but Bradford is now one of the poorest cities in Europe. These working-class folks are the collateral damage of an ideologically split society that at best ignores them, at worst somehow holds them responsible. Here, comedy has a very serious function – to ward off the devil, be that devil sadness, loneliness or the Grim Reaper himself. Laughter is a sort of survival mechanism to get you through the bad times. They are good, honest people, the so called ‘salt of the earth’. It is these sentiments that I wanted at the heart of A Bunch Of Amateurs.
I had to immerse myself wholly into the world of these characters. I decided on an old-school character-driven verité approach with a handheld cinema camera fluidly following subjects so that an intimate portrait and storylines would emerge without need of commentary or other story devices. Some scenes would be filmed by the characters themselves. Footage from the Club’s archive, dating back to the 1930’s, along with excerpts of subjects’ own movies provide a varied texture and historical sweep.
A whimsical tongue-in-cheek tone and playful editing are intended to hook the audience on a slightly absurdist journey where we ponder more and more on why anyone makes a film in the first place. Why ordinary Joe aspires to be an artist in an anti-art culture?
The story of A Bunch Of Amateurs centres not only on the love and magic of the cinema, but on the ritual of gathering to watch movies together under one roof. As Walter Murch writes: “Humans have been assembling in the dark, listening to stories, since the invention of language. It is indelibly part of who we are and how we bond with each other. The theatrical experience is a recreation of this primeval gathering, the flames of the campfire replaced by shifting images that are telling the story itself.” And in a moment when we have all tasted what it feels like to be isolated, marginalised, vulnerable, and also impoverished, A Bunch Of Amateurs is a zeitgeist film about our overriding need for contact and connection, regardless of actual age.
While talking about the isolation of our elders felt somewhat abstract and altruistic pre pandemic, these days isolation feels like something we all immediately understand and want to abate. A Bunch Of Amateurs shows ageing warriors against isolation actively generating contagious collective activity and union, delighting in ingenuity and self-expression while building a glorious sense of belonging, never more pertinent than now.
– Kim Hopkins, 2022
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