Miss going to the movies? Check out Charlotte Film Society’s new Virtual Screening Room

In a world where culture has slowed almost to a standstill, the Charlotte Film Society has picked up speed.

In a year when theaters across North America have closed, the society hosts more screenings than ever.

And in a time when Ballantyne Village Cinemas died and Park Terrace Cinemas switched to mainstream movies, leaving only the two-screen Manor Theatre to show non-mainstream work every week, the CFS has become a powerhouse of alternative programming.

Its latest endeavor, the Virtual Screening Room, kicked into high gear two weeks ago. The society struck deals with international distributors to offer private online screenings of five pictures that had never played in Charlotte and weren’t available through conventional streaming sources. Five more films became available the following week, and more will follow.

They range from the Oscar-nominated Polish drama “Corpus Christi” to the French-Haitian horror fantasy “Zombi Child” to the Brazilian mystery “Bacurau,” which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year.

Filling the gap

As the roster continues to grow, it confirms the importance of the Society, which started showing movies in January 1983 at the now-defunct Queen Park Cinemas on South Boulevard. (The first series opened with the Oscar-nominated “Man of Iron.”)

“The Manor is the only other game in town that regularly shows foreign and independent films,” says Sam Shapiro, who programmed movie series at the Public Library before retiring this winter. “A county this size ought to have two or three Manors, so the Charlotte Film Society is a godsend. If it weren’t for them, the landscape would be a lot more depressing.”

The CFS has predecessors. Marty Shapiro, Sam’s dad and a UNC Charlotte professor in the 1970s, joined other faculty members from UNCC and what was then Queens College to show foreign films at Dana Auditorium. The Visulite Theatre on Elizabeth Avenue brought new titles and classic movies of all stripes in the late 1970s and early ’80s; unfortunately, it opened and closed like an accordion, as the managers alternately accumulated money and ran out of it.

By 1983, the Visuilte had given up. The Manor had switched for a while to commercial movies, and no other chain theaters offered alternatives, so the CFS filled the gap. For 17 years, it followed the same template: a subscription series of one film a month, nine to 10 months a year, first at Queen Park and later at the Manor.

Making inroads

It expanded to a Second Week series in 2001, showing three or four unusual offerings one week a month; that program bounced from the Manor to Stonecrest to Park Terrace, then dwindled to one film a month over a four-day weekend. By 2009, the CFS was back to holding single screenings one night each month in its Saturday Night Cine Club.

But over the last decade, it has expanded to three ongoing programs in very different neighborhoods and made inroads elsewhere. It also scored a coup this year by taking over the Charlotte Film Festival, the first place in Charlotte – and one of the first in America – to show the multi-Oscar-winning “Parasite” and Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Life” last September.

The relationship makes sense. The CFS started holding special screenings last year at Ayrsley Grand Cinemas, the home of the festival, to put movies on the big screen that had planned to bypass Charlotte theaters. That started with the triple Oscar-winner “Roma” and went on to the likes of “The Irishman” and “Marriage Story.”

In Charlotte’s close-knit alternative film community, the DNA of the two groups inevitably intertwined. Film Festival programmer Jay Morong sits on the Film Society’s board, and Film Society president Brad Ritter has overseen financial backing for the festival and helped connect it with distributors.

“Here was an organization that had been around almost 40 years, had a larger board and good (industry) connections,” says Morong of the CFS. “It seemed like the right time to combine the two nonprofits and hand the keys over.”

2020 festival

Nothing will change with the festival for 2020, assuming theaters re-open by September. It will still show a mix of narratives and documentaries, features and shorts, heavyweight imports and local products such as “My Father’s Brothers,” a Vietnam documentary by Charlotte’s Shawn Kelley that ran last fall.

The festival will be a five-day distillation of the work the CFS does all year. The monthly Cine Club thrives at Theatre Charlotte, augmented by post-screening Q-and-As with experts. The group recently spent $15,000 to upgrade projection equipment and buy a screen with twice the square footage of the last one.

“They’re not always going with softballs, films that are the easiest to digest,” says Shapiro, who sometimes hosts there. “They showed ‘Beanpole’ (about Leningrad during World War II), which was absolutely staggering. They make eclectic choices that challenge audiences, and audiences meet them halfway.”

Across town, at C3 Lab in South End, the Back Alley Series brings films Morong describes as “transgressive,” movies whose subject matter and content might shock or offend the more restrained Cine Club. A third series brings movies that don’t fit the first two molds to VisArt Video on Eastway Drive; those run a full week in a tiny screening room that seats about 20. The society also partners with International House to show pictures (mostly documentaries) set in countries that have strong ethnic representation in Charlotte.

Virtual Screening Room

Decades-long cultivation of distributors such as Kino, Oscilloscope, Magnolia and Film Movement paid off this spring in the Virtual Screening Room, after theatrical releases halted. The society managed to negotiate deals where $12 would buy viewers the right to watch a new movie as often as they wanted over a set period of time, usually three to seven days.

They’re splitting the profits with distributors. But as Ritter says, “Memberships are what keep us going. We’ve had several people sign up through the site recently and make donations.”

Those $15 annual commitments entitle you to discounts at the Manor and VisArt, reduced prices at CFS screenings – you make the money back if you buy three Cine Club tickets – and special members-only events.

You might expect the society to rest contentedly during uncertain times, but it itches to expand. The board of directors contemplates new member events, new partnerships around the city, maybe even an added series of classic films.

“We’ve talked for a long time about expanding our core mission, and we’re very interested in film history,” says Morong. “It would make sense to show older films or restorations and educate people that way.” Shapiro, who has taught film studies at UNCC, would be a logical host and might bring along his audience from Public Library screenings at ImaginOn.

At the moment, though, the dream of every film society remains out of reach in Charlotte.

“We would like to have our own dedicated space, one we can control,” says Ritter. “But that’s a long way down the road.”

This story is part of an Observer underwriting project with the Thrive Campaign for the Arts, supporting arts journalism in Charlotte.

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This story was originally published April 8, 2020 at 12:17 PM.