Film Society - Germany

Germany

The first film clubs developed in Germany after 1945 upon the suggestion the British and French after the Second World War, in order to promote non-political strictly cultural exchange and democratic consciousness. In the 1950s, the decade of the flowering of the film club movement, gave it a wave of reestablishments, also in the Soviet occupation zone and/or later German Democratic Republic. The film clubs became either independent associations or worked under a carrier, which itself education and culture had used up. From them important impulses for the German film landscape proceeded, for example the establishment of film festivals as from International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg.
In the German Federal Republic however the number of the film clubs decreased to such an extent that in 1971 the Federal association dissolved. For the 1970s stepped in many places local cinemas to the place of the film clubs. With the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, many East German film clubs lost the financial and organizational basis, succeeded also here unite the step to the local cinema.
There are two national bodies for film societies in Germany who are members of the International Federation of Film Societies, the Bundesverband Jugend und Film e.V. and the Bundesverband kommunale Filmarbeit.