How We Select Our Films
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Monday Night @ the Movies is an independent group of volunteers who organized themselves to bring interesting films to Oakville in partnership with Film Circuit and the Toronto Film Festival. These volunteers are the people you see on film night selling tickets, taking e-mail addresses and handing out film sheets.
Monday Night @ the Movies is an independent group of volunteers who organized themselves to bring interesting films to Oakville in partnership with Film Circuit and the Toronto Film Festival. These volunteers are the people you see on film night selling tickets, taking e-mail addresses and handing out film sheets.
At the beginning of our season, MNM is presented by Film Circuit with over a hundred titles from which the group must choose only a few. Included are short synopses for each film, along with ratings, length of film, country of origin, director’s name, etc. All of these films have been at the Toronto Film Festival and TIFF has arranged with the distributors for a copy to be circulated among the film groups.
Every committee member is involved in the selection process, and once we have narrowed down our list, the Programmer presents this to Film Circuit, which is an arm of the Toronto International Film Festival Group. Our aim is to come up with as diverse a group of films as possible in both subject matter as well as country of origin, all the while keeping in mind the types of films that we hope our Oakville audience will enjoy.
The Programmer and Assistant Programmer research the films thoroughly: how well have these films been received by critics and audiences so far, for example, and is this film about to open in Toronto or even locally before we are able to screen it.
On top of this, we are also in a bit of a lottery system, as we "compete" with the many, many other Film Circuit groups across Canada, to secure a particular title for a particular date as there are only one or two copies of each film available. There can also be last_minute changes as distributors decide not to release a film until a later date than was first advertised.
It is a vast and complicated process. There are times when our favoured titles are simply not available to us and we must choose again.
We find that most films that we show provoke quite a variety of opinions, which is the aim of Film Circuit and Monday Night @ the Movies. That aim is to bring to our community films that may not otherwise be screened here, and to inspire debate and interest in their subject matter.
