This Millennial-Founded Movie Club Is for Senior Cinephiles Living in Isolation

Two years ago, 31-year-old Matt Starr and 28-year-old Ellie Sachs, both New York–based artists and filmmakers, remade the classic film Annie Hall. The idea for their film, titled My Annie Hall, was born out their volunteer work at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, as well as a film class they led there called Interpretive Cinema. Their movie was a modern retelling of Annie Hall, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton’s comedic love story set in Manhattan, and starred two senior citizens from the Lenox Hill retirement community on the Upper East Side. Ultimately, the project fueled Sachs and Starr’s passion for working with the elderly. “It was a transformative experience for both of us,” Starr explained to Vogue. “It opened up a whole new world of stories that we didn’t see being told elsewhere.” For Sachs, representation is paramount: “We both feel that there aren’t enough stories being told about older people in a way that feels empathetic and realistic.”

For the last year or so, Starr and Sachs have remained close with the stars of My Annie Hall, Harry Miller and Shula Chernick. Most recently, they have collaborated with Planned Parenthood and worked on a dystopian, futuristic exhibition called “Museum of Banned Objects.” However, once the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S. and severely threatened the elderly population, the pair knew that they needed to reach back out to this community in a different way.

When quarantine first began in New York, Sachs became “really engrossed” with watching movies—“more than usual,” Starr said. “We got to talking about how powerful movies are, especially when we’re socially isolated, and we immediately started thinking about all of the older people in this country and the anxiety and fear of being in a higher-risk group.”

Starr says that this led them to the idea of starting the Long Distance Movie Club, a virtual movie-watching group that meets every two weeks in an effort to not only engage seniors in a sense of community but also to help them find some escapism in the midst of self-isolation. Starr and Sachs began cold-calling senior centers around the country, from Boston to Alaska and Hawaii. Ultimately, they landed on two homes: Priya Living in Santa Clara, California, and Lake Parke in Camdenton, Missouri.

Currently, they have about 10 to 15 participants in each of the two homes and the meetings happen biweekly. Because Lake Parke is a small, family-owned facility and the residents are quarantined together, they watch the films and discuss them as a group. At Priya Living, the seniors join in individually from their own apartments via Zoom. They’ve watched Roman Holiday and From Here to Eternity with the residents at Lake Parke, and have focused on Bollywood classics for the Priya Living crowd, where the majority of seniors are Southeast Asian. “My favorite story from the seniors so far was from Mahesh Nihilani,” Starr says. “He told us about an early movie theater experience in India, where he used to visit a theater next to a huge river. In the middle of a film, a warning slide would appear on the screen reading, ‘The water is coming, please stand up,’ and everyone would have to jump onto the benches during high tide. Then the water would go back out to the river and another slide would come up reading, ‘The movie will resume now.” He adds, “I’d never heard anything like this; I absolutely love this story.” Starr says that their interactions with the movie club members have taught them a great deal. “Ellie and I wanted to come up with a list of older films that we thought would help unlock memories and personal histories,” he says.

One of Sachs’s and Starr’s most touching interactions with the members of the movie club involves a 94-year-old woman named Jean Waite who lives at Lake Parke (she is pictured in the clips here). “First off, she has really great comedic timing and has a very subtle, sly sense of humor,” Sachs explains. “Hearing Jean talk about her experience with World War II was incredibly moving⁠—she told us about how she made raincoats for men in the Navy and went on to make a little quip about how her husband never had a raincoat that didn’t leak after that.” Sachs also notes that this has really made her and Starr think more deeply about American history, as well as World War II in relation to this global pandemic. “I think a lot about how people were really galvanized by collective action, whether it was victory gardens or scrap metal drives,” she says. “It gives me some faith and hope in the collective action of staying home and social distancing.”

The movie club has also brought some much-needed joy to Starr and Sachs. “At Lake Parke, the group calls me and Matt their ‘New York friends,’” Sachs says. “It feels so special to create these meaningful relationships and I can’t wait to meet all of them IRL one day.” The experience has undoubtedly brought lightness and escapism to the people living at Lake Parke and Priya Living, but it’s also helped Starr and Sachs feel less alone during the quarantines. “One of the women from Priya Living,” Starr said, “has already extended an invitation to us for a home-cooked meal once this is all over.”

Originally Appeared on Vogue