Buenos Aires’ cinephiles are going back to basics: getting together to watch good films. Anywhere.

As blockbuster releases clog multiplex theaters and isolated binge-streaming becomes an increasingly unfulfilling habit, in recent years amateur film clubs have sprouted not only in regular theaters but also in improvised locations such as bars, cultural centers and even downtown offices.

“What a film club really does is build a community, and not just for cinephiles,” Paula Félix-Didier told the Herald. A programmer at MADO, an organization that runs the Recovered Cinema Week, she is also one of Argentina’s top film preservation experts and a former director of the Buenos Aires Film Museum.

A community was precisely what Andrés Firu Fichendler, a film editor and artist who co-founded the Florida film club in mid-2023, was looking for when he ventured into the La Cueva film club in Mexico City. 

“I had just moved to town. I didn’t know anyone; I had no friends. And an Argentine friend who had been there before told me I should go to this great film club,” he remembers. “I ended up going every week, and that’s where I made my Mexican friends.” 

Back in Buenos Aires, Firu partnered with his friend and cinematographer Lucio Castelnuovo to set up Florida Filmclub in the downtown area, where the real estate fallout of the pandemic offered cheap office spaces.

With free screenings every day, nine programmers, a bar, and no social media, Florida is now a 30-seat, semi-clandestine small cinema people can access only through a Whatsapp group. 

“Working through word of mouth helped to make the community more real,” says Firu. “We’re not doing it for the Instagram story,” he adds.

“Couples have begun here; others ended. I made a bunch of new friends, which I haven’t done since I was a kid. Lots of people also found work, because we get 20-something film students as well as experienced film professionals over 50.”

Florida’s programming, he says, is diverse and “super whimsical.”

“We screen whatever we want to see. I myself program surprise films, films I haven’t seen yet and want to watch. Instead of watching them alone at home, I play them at the cinema, and people come to take a chance along with me,” he says.

A red screening room at Aquilea 57 bar in a restored mansion in Villa........

© Buenos Aires Herald