Hoylake Community Cinema is a volunteer-run organisation operated by Hoylake Village Life CIC.

We reinvest any profits made into the cinema through various  projects, by supporting other organisations and groups, including a three year, £3,000 bursary to Liverpool University Film Studies Unit.

We screen films at The Parade, Hoylake Community Centre, which is equipped with a high-quality digital projector and sound system, on a large screen. Seats are comfortable and movable; there is disabled access and a hearing loop. Films are selected on the broad basis of international awards and nominations and critics’ reviews.  Each annual season will feature a range of films from across genres: classic, comedy, drama, animation, sci-fi…

After the films, audiences gather in the adjacent ‘PUB’ (Pop up bar) to enjoy homemade food, real ales, wines, teas, coffees and soft drinks. We hold a regular quiz and offer unique prizes.

Our patrons include actors Dai Bradley (Billy Casper in Kes), James Bond actor Daniel Craig; Alex Cox, director of Repo Man and Sid and Nancy among other cult classics,; Karolyn Grimes (Zuzu in It’s a Wonderful Life); Patricia Kelly, widow of the legendary dancer Gene Kelly and Celyn Jones, writer actor and producer (known for Set Fire to the Stars).

Our aim is to bring high-quality independent and classic film (or ‘specialist’ film) to the local community and also to create added value events of regional importance that will help put Hoylake on the cultural map.

For example, on 11 November, 2011 we screened Regeneration, a film based on the Pat Barker book, about the War Poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. The evening was attended by members of the Wilfred Owen Story, and a professional actor dressed in WWI uniform read out under torchlight the enormously evocative Wilfred Owen poem Dulce et Decorum Est before the film. We also enjoyed a world premiere reading by John Gorman of a letter written by Siegfried Sassoon.

We’ve buit a reputation for great Q&As: with Als’ Lads screenwriter Marc Gee; actor Dai Bradley (Kes); cult film director Alex Cox (A Fistful of Dollars); Chinese indie director Peng Tao (Little Moth); producers, writers & directors Andy Evans, Celyn Jones and Andy Goddard (Set Fire to the Stars); producers Roy Boulter and Sol Popadopolous (Of Time and the City); director Iain Softley & actor Ian Hart (Backbeat); director Hope Dickson Leach (The Levelling); actor & musician Neil Innes (The Life of Brian) and more…

Each Christmas we feature a ‘Christmas Special’ screening.  In 2011, the film It’s a Wonderful Life, starring James Stewart, was shown to a full house of 135 people; a great Sunday afternoon feel-good family occasion with mulled wine and mince pies, and screened again in 2015 and on the 75th anniversary in 2016 when we shared a surprise live linkup event with the It’s a Wonderful Life Museum in Seneca Falls, New York including the remaining cast members of the film and Donna Capra, daughter of the director Frank Capra.

Before the screenings, we often read out personal greetings and messages from stars of the screen including Honor Blackman (Goldfinger); Mel Brooks (The Producers); Woody Allen (Annie Hall) and Akira Kurosawa’s son and film producer Hisao Kurosawa (Rashomon).

In 2016 we welcomed Japanese pianist and composer Mie Yanashita who performed an outstanding live piano accompaniment for our screening of The Passion of Joan of Arc… (she composed and performed the accompaniment on the acclaimed recent Masters of Cinema DVD re-release of the film).

Watch this space for these and more exceptional forthcoming events!