Rather enjoying the summer months and a break from putting on films, but that doesn’t mean we’re not thinking about the film society. We’ve nearly finished setting the programme for next year, and it is looking very exciting and ambitious.

It is also a good time to take stock of this season. The table below shows the admissions for all the Forest Row Film Society films (15/6: this post has now been updated to include data from the last film, Alice in the Cities):

Our average audience is 62, which is the highest ever. It is only slightly more than last year, but it is still double what it was a decade ago and is much more consistent. We have had a total paying audience of 1299 in the 2009/10 season, which is wonderful. Apart from the silent Buster Keaton, which always draws a big crowd, it is interesting that the bulk of the most popular films are French. We don’t have quite so many French films lined up for next year, so we hope that isn’t a mistake. It will be a very strong line-up so we hope our programming sense matches your desire to turn up.

Now, consider the numbers and costs for next year:

We can see that we need to take about £200 to cover a film. These figures don’t take into account the membership fees or other income, eg from refreshments or adverts etc, but essentially, we need 50 people to break even at our current prices. That’s fine, and almost all of our films have done that. The key failures were the children’s films and The Constant Gardener. We know that if we want to do films aimed at children in the future we need to devote a lot more energy at building that audience and we will need a special team of people to do it. If you are interested in getting involved in that please let us know. At the moment, we are not planning any films aimed at a younger audience for next season.

The poor audience for The Constant Gardener illustrates that it isn’t very sensible to show fairly mainstream films that have had a wide exposure. Perhaps The Lives of Others begins to point to that as well.

One thing that we don’t do yet is measure the audience reaction, which many community cinemas do. It would be interested to compare which films get the highest approval rating against their audience numbers. Setting up such a system isn’t too hard, but we will need someone to do it. Any takers?

Do you have any other thoughts and observations about this most recent season and this data? We’d be very interested to hear your thoughts.