Creative St Helens 1982-1995
On 25th Nov we premiered the film ‘Another Country’ at Lucem House in St Helens. The sold out screening featured a panel discussion featuring Roger Hill, Rebecca Ainsworth, Paul Hogan, Barry Gore and Barrie Pennington.
Over the past few weeks we hosted 3 screenings of our film ‘Another Country’ created as part of this project, looking at the creative period 1982-1995 and what enabled it to happen.
All the screenings were virtually sold out and there were lively discussions after each screenings often leading towards what needs to be in place for this creative period to happen again.
It was also a really good way for people to make connections, either old friends and colleagues or ones for new possibilities. It reminds me of the power of cinema – these connections would be unlikely to happen if we had just put the film on the internet. We’re planning more public outings of the film for next year.
On Friday 26th and the afternoon of Saturday 27th, we screened a couple of our archive films at Lucem House Community Cinema in then heart of St Helens. Friday’s screening of The Houghton Project was followed by a discussion with some people who were involved at the time, Barry Gore, Esther Wilson, Andy Cave and Roger Hill.
We had a reasonable turnout given the hot weekend weather and it was great to watch the film with a collective audience and their response. This was interesting, generally, people were not just looking back with a ‘It used to be great back then’ perspective, but with more of an impetus to ‘Why can’t we do something like that now?’ The 80’s for St Helens were in many ways a tough time for the town with many local industry and employers closing down, yet, it was also a time for immense creativity. In some of the interviews we’ve done, people talk about this sense of waiting for something to happen and it kind of feels that way again.