Reply
With the costs of acquiring rights to show films, the restrictions placed on ‘film societies’ which are not permitted to charge per visit and thus must rely on annual membership in order to obtain better rates on screening rights, plus the cost of hall hire, JCFS has had to shut down. We went down the legal track. We probably could have got away with it ‘on the black’, under the radar, but we didn’t want to go that way. You can’t (legally) just buy a DVD in a shop and then show it in public: you have to buy screening rights to do that. It was costing us more than $200 per night to put on a show.
There is a small amount of funds remaining in the JCFS coffers which will be applied to other community projects (including the production costs of our esteemed organ ‘The Chronicle’) according to the rules of the JCFS. Some has already been applied to The Chronicle.