Our hobby was outlawed, now it's making a comeback

Collectors of cinema reels and other film spools are celebrating the 50th anniversary of their annual convention.

The first British Film Collectors Convention (BFCC) was held in 1976, with the next event taking place in Oxted, Surrey on Saturday.

Mark Stuckey from charitable trust Film is Fabulous said the hobby was once outlawed, but is now growing in popularity.

"If we go back just a couple of decades or so, a private collector owning particularly a 35mm print would have been in prison, because technically that print was not owned by him," he told the BBC.

"If he had acquired it, he had technically stolen it and therefore a lot of collectors for many years went underground," said the 70-year-old from Cromer, Norfolk.

"The result was that early silent film, which was part of our social history, has gone forever."

The BFCC allows collectors to sell or trade films, ranging from 35mm to Super 8 gauges, and to view projected cinema.

Convention organiser John Clancy said it "looked like the convention was killed" by the Covid-19 pandemic.

"We brought it back for one event in 2023... I started to think that film was fashionable once more," he told the BBC.

Film is Fabulous was set up after that 2023 event and has since helped recover film believed to be lost.

Clancy, from Wiltshire, said collectors had heard about families of elderly collectors who had died "quite often just putting the collections into skips", and this set "alarm bells ringing".

The 61-year-old said he had been "fascinated by the moving image" since his father purchased a cinecamera when he was aged two.

"As soon as I was old enough and getting pocket money, I started buying films," he said.

He counts the film Alien, purchased in the early 1990s for £300 on Super 8 film, as among his favourite items from his collection.

Stuckey said the hobby "changes every time you put something different on, so it's a really lovely type of atmosphere to share".

According to the collector, film also "gives you a more vivid colour range" and there was "something natural about it which you cannot still get with a digital process".

"What goes around comes around, just like vinyl," he said.

"Even young people now are buying into the little Super 8 projectors and they're buying film, and they're enjoying them again, which is great."

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