OffBeat Folk Film Club was set up to celebrate working lives, folk culture and community storytelling in Britain through film.


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OffBeat Folk Film
Festival 2025

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When we started The OffBeat Folk Film Club three years ago, we didn’t have very high expectations. The idea was to screen films about folk music and culture and invite a small handful of friends and family along to a screening. We showed two: Oss Oss Wee Oss! (1953) and Travelling for a Living (1966), a black-and-white documentary following the folk group The Watersons as they travel by bus from their shared home in Hull to perform in folk clubs and pubs across the country. We wanted to recreate the atmosphere of the folk clubs they were playing in, so we gave a short introduction before each film, included an intermission between them (even though their combined runtime is well under an hour), and chose to hold the screening at an old working men’s club, The Walthamstow Trades Hall. Despite our expectations and the fact the event looked practically empty with so few friends spread out across such a large dance floor, it was a success. In fact, it worked really well. 

These obscure documentaries made in far-off parts of Britain some 60 or 70 years ago, held the audience in a way we couldn’t have predicted. Even though few, if any, had heard of the Padstow May Day celebration or the Obby Oss, and even if no one had listened to The Watersons before, they felt a connection. The films resonated with them. They painted a portrait of Britain that was familiar but slightly out of reach. The films showed England not in a broad or nationalistic sense but through intimate, human stories that captured the essence of life on these islands. At a time when the shambles of post-Brexit, Conservative rule had reached a crescendo, the films presented an image of Britain that was historical but not nostalgic, patriotic but without the baggage of politics. They celebrated a joyful and eccentric culture of people who had little and made much of it, a message that felt especially poignant amid a cost-of-living crisis where many who were watching felt they had less and less. They created a feeling that was familiar and quintessentially British but also alien and out of reach. 

For us, this feeling, and the culture of everyday people was a far more relevant and compelling embodiment of ‘folk’ than the dances and songs shown in the films. We saw a parallel between then and now and wanted to use film to talk about it. Just as The Watersons used 19th-century ballads to articulate the struggles of the 1960s, we were using TV films, the storytelling medium of the 20th century, to communicate with a struggling, disaffected and disconnected contemporary audience. We wanted to show a progressive, depoliticised, and kinder vision of British identity, one that people could, dare we say it, feel proud of. And there was no shortage of films in the archives that did just that. Gentle television documentaries about coal miners and hill sheep farmers. About lighthouse keepers and wassailers. About the small, idiosyncratic traditions that make these islands at the edge of the earth so special and unique. 
Since that first event, we have hosted screenings in Walthamstow every other month, as well as at venues across London in between. What began as a small gathering of friends has grown into a feature of the landscape of the folk revival movement. We’ve managed to carve out a niche and stand out by being perhaps less preoccupied with tradition and the occult as we are with the innate character of the people of Britain. As our following has grown, we’ve looked harder at OffBeat’s aims and what we’re really about. What we originally saw as a series of screenings has evolved into something more significant. An exploration of what it means to document and preserve folk culture in a modern age.

We see this as our future. Not just curating old films but giving a platform to new films. Engaging with the past often means working with archives, and while we’ve used them before, we’ve also come up against the limits of their purpose. Their focus is so often the conservation of the material rather than celebrating the culture it portrays. Archives don’t always have the capacity or inclination to share what they are custodians of and, in an effort to protect, they can inadvertently gatekeep our collective culture. Even though old films are technically preserved, they are culturally dead. That doesn’t feel very folk to us. Nor, does the other end of the spectrum, ransacking folk culture to promote revival projects. What was once a living, working culture is now being emptied of meaning.

We want to do something else. To keep folk, as a culture of and about people, alive in whatever ways we can. Not by freezing it in the past or turning it into a product, but by giving it space to speak. 

That’s All Folk.