NEWS

The Davidson Film Club shares the following plans for the up-coming series, our nineteenth series, running from January to June, 2022. Ideally, we would like to be back in the Armour Street Theatre for the screenings and discussions of our award-winning international films. We all keenly miss the monthly meetings with our numerous members (115 currently) and friends and suspect that many of you do too.

Since June 2020, as you all know, we’ve been watching the films independently at home and then gathering on Zoom for the monthly Saturday evening discussions. We’ve had remarkable discussion leaders facilitating very enjoyable in-depth discussions, usually lasting over an hour and a half with two to three dozen very active participants. But we still miss watching films with another 90 to 100 other film lovers and proceeding to discussion immediately afterwards and would love to get back to that.

However, we still need to make our plans in relation to the evolution of COVID, including the extremely contagious Omicron variant that is spreading rapidly across the country. The prognostics are worrisome, most estimates showing us faced with a significant winter surge, which appears to have already begun, since we are closing in on a couple hundred thousand new cases each day currently, nearly a 50% increase since the previous week, with over 1,500 deaths a day.

With this in mind, the film club board wants to let you know that it is possible that we will not be able to resume our events in the theater in January. If we do so, however, we will probably have to require proof of full vaccination (including the booster shot) and the wearing of masks by all of the attendees.This is already being done in many venues around the country and in a number of colleges and universities (like Davidson and Duke, for the coming semester). We are sure that many of our usual audience members are already fully vaccinated, but if you are not, please consider getting the shots well before January 22, when we would screen our first film of the new series in the theater. We do not wish for anyone to be excluded from our screenings owing to COVID.

Your opinions on all of the above are very welcome. We value all of our members and friends and respect your viewpoints. You can reach me easily by email at [email protected] if you would like to share any thoughts.