Last month, a bunch of people showed up at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco to watch a movie called The Thinking Game, an 83-minute documentary about the founder of artificial intelligence company DeepMind. When the movie ended, credits rolled by as usual: directed by Greg Kohs, produced by Gary Krieg, cinematography also by Kohs. This would be the time to start throwing away your popcorn and try to remember where you parked. But instead of getting up, the audience stayed put in their seats to chat.
“A lively little debate about AI broke out,” says Lex Sloan, the Roxie’s executive director. By the end of the evening, strangers were exchanging contact information and following each other on social media. “I was like, ‘Oh, I might be watching new friendships get made in real time,” Sloan says. “It just made me happy.”
The conversations weren’t an accident — they were happening at nearly 70 other theaters across the country, too. The Thinking Game event was the second meeting of IRL Movie Club, a nationwide initiative to connect independent film communities through in-person screenings and conversations.
Annie Roney, the founder and CEO of the documentary distribution agency ROCO films, is behind the cliub.
IRL’s premise is simple: For $5 at a participating arthouse theaters, attendees get to watch an independent movie and then stay for a discussion with the rest of the audience. There’s a video message from the filmmakers to get the ball rolling, too.
“One of our things we often say is we’re more than movies — we try to bring in filmmakers for post-screening discussions, or we have live performance or trivia,” Says Sloan of the screening at the 112-year old theater. “[IRL Movie club] has shifted our model in this really exciting way where it’s not necessarily about a whole audience listening to an expert onstage, it’s about that audience turning toward the person to their right or left or in front of them and having a conversation.”
Roney cites political scientist Robert Putnam for the idea behind her club. Putnam is famous for his writing on social capital, particularly the 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.
“He showed with data that when people stop gathering in community and talking to each other, democracy unravels,” Roney says. IRL’s first meeting happened on International Day of Democracy in September, just before the 2024 presidential election. They watched Join or Die, a 2024 documentary about Putnam.
“We don’t want to talk at people,” Roney says. “We want people to come together and talk to each other.” To join, not die.
Roney herself is a documentary filmmaker, so she’s well-acquainted with the issue of declining movie theater audiences, not to mention declining arthouse attendance, and she frequently thinks about the relationship between this decline and the state of our communities.
“Independent theaters who survived COVID are still standing because they’re really good at community engagement, they know their local community and they program well for that,” Roney says. She wants, therefore, to help keep them afloat.
“One of the things I really appreciated when Annie brought this to me is her understanding of the challenges arthouse theaters face,” Sloan says. “She wanted to make sure that this would be something that would benefit us, both financially and in a way that is mission-aligned.”
Through ROCO funding and the support of other donors, IRL subsidizes participating theaters’ event costs to keep the tickets at $5, and gives grants to the filmmakers of their selected film. The result means Sloan can focus on helping The Roxie “create spaces where there’s a deeper community engagement with cinema.” For participating IRL theaters across the country, she adds, “it’s not just about people watching films, but it’s through those shared conversations and experiences that we’re creating this sense of belonging.”
People who feel like they belong tend to come back — and sometimes with friends in tow. Roxie’s September IRL event took place in their smaller theater, which holds around 40 people. February’s meetup moved to the Big Roxie theater, which holds over 100. Nationally, IRL expanded its list of participating theaters from 23 to 67 between the two events.
IRL is still finalizing its plans for the third meetup, scheduled for sometime in May or June. “I know that there are over 400 independent arthouse cinemas in the country,” Roney says. “I’ll be happy when we’re in all 400 of them.”