Welcome to the Hard Light Newsletter!
We’ve already brought 10+ events to Richmond since coming together as a collective, and 2025 has started with a bang as we’ve scheduled six screenings in less than two months. We’ve built up quite an audience and sold out Afterglow and Secret Flowers at our last three events at those locations, and this past weekend we broke barriers for indie RVA theaters by bringing No Other Land to 250+ people the night before it won the Oscar.
We’re now excited to finally launch this next step in the Hard Light project: writing on the movies we’re scheduling, the new movies coming to theaters, and the classic movies that surprised us recently. These biweekly newsletters will be quick 5-7 minute reads coming to you during your Monday lunch breaks to catch you up on movie happenings, both locally and worldwide. Sometimes, we’ll give you a quick review of recent movies that we think are genuinely worth making time for (sorry Captain America: Bland New Franchise Entry; Hello All We Imagine as Light and Mickey 17!). Other times, we’ll include reviews of classic arthouse or auteurist movies that one of us recently watched and wants to share with the world. Finally, each entry will include a few things that our members have been into lately across all forms of media and a preview of upcoming events: both from us here at Hard Light Cinema and from our friends at local pop-ups. Some of our previews will include additional research or information that will help in your understanding or appreciation of the film and may not make it into our in-person intros, so these newsletters will be just as educational as they are entertaining.
What we’re promising is not simply clickbait scrawls that rehash popular opinions on popular movies. Since we all work other jobs, we’re not writing to pay the bills. Everything we send into your inbox will be motivated by genuine enthusiasm and passion. We’ll be far more likely to go outside of the canon and the megaplex because we’re not trying to appeal to a mass audience: we’re trying to appeal to our audience.
If this style of curated writing based on Hard Light’s central principles of highlighting under-seen and diverse arthouse cinema appeals to you, subscribe! If it will appeal to your friends or other cool people you know, share it! This is obviously the ground level with our first official biweekly newsletter coming out on March 17th covering our favorites of 2024, but we want to grow on this start and eventually provide long-form pieces with director retrospectives covering their oeuvre, mailbag pieces answering questions from our readers, and debates on the polarizing movies being released (“So what do you guys think about The Brutalist and The Substance?”).
We have some more exciting announcements on the horizon, but, for now, share this with your friends and encourage them to sign up. We’ll be back with our next newsletter on March 17th, and our next curated screening will be You Burn Me by Matías Piñeiro at Afterglow on March 28th at 7:30PM. It’ll be a real treat so come out and see us.
-Hard Light Editor, Warner West
Hard Light Cinema 