The Yorkshire mill that played host to the first hydro-powered movie screening
Yorkshire is chock full of mills, which stand as a memory of the industrial revolution, a time when thousands of workers would spend their days making textiles, becoming a vital part of the British economy.
These days, the country is home to many disused mills, with the north of England alone the location of around 690 of them that are either abandoned or underused, despite the fact that they’re massive buildings with the potential to be employed for good.
Many mills have been converted into useful sites of housing or accommodation, while Saltaire’s impressive Salt’s Mill is now a collection of shops, restaurants, and even a dedicated gallery space exhibiting David Hockney paintings, so surely, transforming one into a cinema space can’t be too far behind. That’s what happened when the Grade II-listed Howsham Mill in North Yorkshire, which you can find on the River Derwent, hosted a pop-up cinema experience that aimed to bring cinema-going to more rural areas, emphasising the importance of making movies more accessible.
If you live in a city, you’ve got endless options and ways to watch the latest releases, even the more obscure ones that only play in select theatres, but try to do that living out in the sticks, and you’ll realise your privilege, and hence North Yorkshire Digital Cinema set up their Screenwaves initiative, which saw them use the water mill to host the first ever hydro-powered screening.
Fittingly, they chose to screen Richard Ayoade’s off-kilter coming-of-age comedy Submarine, starring Craig Roberts as Oliver Tate, an eccentric teenager who experiences his first relationship while reckoning with a potential affair between his mother and their new neighbour.
“The UK Film Council were aware that there were lots of people in rural communities who weren’t served by a cinema,” Screenwaves director Zoe Naylor told Eye for Film, “We have a high-quality projection kit that’s portable. I stick it in the back of my car when I go to screenings, and it can be set up wherever. So most of the screenings are actually happening in village halls or community centres – already established buildings in those communities.”
Screenings like these keep exciting cinema-going experiences alive, allowing people to watch a movie in an unusual location and set-up, offering a chance for community as well as exposing areas without a big cinema, or perhaps any cinemas at all, to movies they might never have seen otherwise.
“The screening at Howsham Mill, it will eventually be a community centre, but at the moment it’s a Georgian Mill with no roof, and they’re in the process of restoring it. So that screening will effectively be outside, but it’s lovely to be able to do screenings in these kinds of unusual places. And that screening is just about as rural as you can get,” Naylor added.
Unconventional screenings such as these often make the biggest impact on audiences, and you can imagine just eye opening it would be to watch a movie like Submarine on the big screen in an old mill as a teenager living in a rural area with little access to cinema; it’s these moments that can truly change lives.
