Garrett Park, MD

For more than 15 years,  Garrett Park Film Society offers residents, neighbors and friends the chance to get together, share a great 
meal and watch new/old, independent/mainline, thought provoking/just plain silly movies. We schedule about 8-9 events a year and usually have a crowd of 40-50 mostly adults. Films are almost always shown on a Friday night at Town Hall, using our 12- foot screen, new projector and Blu-Ray player and our big JBL speakers.  We always start with drinks and dinner, usually homemade by volunteers and pretty darn fabulous. The meal almost always follows the theme or the culture of the film, which means we’ll have Japanese food, beer and sake when we show a Japanese movie, etc. 

The vision of the Film Society is to enable us to get together as a community and spend time together. It’s about discussing our lives with friends; it’s not about discussing the “oeuvre” of the film or comparing ourselves with Sundance. We know you can go to a cinema plex to see new movies. And we know you can stay home and rent movies and show them on your flat screen TV. More than anything else, Film Society events are community events. They are a chance to get out of the house, but stay local. A chance to see some neighbors, eat something interesting and see a movie you might not go to or think of renting. And a chance to see what a community is made of. At the same time, we work hard to show movies that are engaging, under the radar or are timeless and fun to watch on a big screen. Licensing films costs anywhere from $200-300 for a single showing of a single film, which is why we encourage yearly memberships in the Film Society (starting at $30 per person), or $5 pp for a single show ($10 for the family) without membership. Dinners and drinks are charged separately (about $10 for dinner and $5 for wine). New residents get in free the first time they show up.