Free Film Club is exactly what it sounds like. The podcast, created by Magandjin (Brisbane) based friends Phoebe Faye, Tayla Lauren and Ursula, provides fun chats about films they find for free online. The idea of a podcast about film came from a night out with friends. Phoebe and Ursula, then acquaintances, quickly found their mutual love of cinema and toyed with the idea of taking an editing class together. When that didn’t come to fruition, they decided to create a podcast talking about movies, bringing Phoebe’s longtime friend Tayla along for the ride.

For listeners of the podcast, there is no subscription needed to a streaming service or a movie theater membership. The trio has scoured the internet for the best free, and non-sketchy, websites so people can watch all types of different movies for free. “I had been teaching at this small film academy, and I wanted to assign a film a week to the students who were all probably like 20 to 25, and I kind of realized at this time that I didn’t want to assume that they all had access to paid subscriptions,” Phoebe said. “I put together this big list for the 12 weeks that we had class, and that’s when I kind of was like, ‘Oh, there’s actually, like, so much really good cinema out there for free, this is awesome.’” It’s a challenge in today’s world to find a lot of free movies when there seems to be a new streaming service every day or the existing ones change and become a new bundle with other websites. “The early stages of the internet was going to be like, we’re going to have so many things available for free and accessible to people. And then now we’ve, like, paywalled as much as possible. It’s really changed,” Phoebe said. 

Even though it’s hard to find a lot of movies for free online, the hosts have taken care of the hard part and have a master spreadsheet of a diverse group of movies they want to watch and discuss. The podcast works with three simple steps: subscribe to the Substack or follow them on Instagram for the title of the next movie, take a week to watch the film, listen to the podcast for a serious but fun chat about the chosen movie. One of the podcast’s goals is to not only provide free links for people to watch the movies at home but to provide a diverse viewing experience, finding movies from all around the world with different themes, languages, storytelling ideas and more. “We also like to look at as many foreign films as we can as well and mix it up a bit. Because we don’t want to just do like white people classics. We also want to grab things from all around. It’s also just browsing places like the Internet Archive and going by like country or genre or year or director,” Ursula said.

The women behind the podcast have their own diverse experiences in the way that they fell in love with films, which gives them unique perspectives to discuss on the podcast. Phoebe and Tayla recall watching different types of movies when they were younger on Late Night SBS or going out to rent movies with their families, yet Ursula grew up only watching one or two movies when she was younger and then seeing more as she grew older. “It’d be like a Friday night ritual where the whole family would get in the car and you’d go to Blockbuster, you would find your two films for the week or the weekend that you could rent out, and it would just be this treasure trove of falling through the aisles and looking at all these titles and just finding something,” said Tayla. “And then you would go home, and then it’d be a fight to watch whatever movie you picked out. And so I think that ritual was just such a part of childhood. It was so cool.” 

The main goal behind Free Film Club has always been to share cinema with listeners of their podcast in an accessible way, with the hopes that people find their new favorite movie or get to watch a movie they may not have ever seen on their own time. However, it’s also provided a space for the hosts themselves to see different viewpoints and expand their own tastes. “I feel like I’m getting perspectives about movies that maybe I have seen a million times, and I just haven’t thought about things in that way. Not necessarily in a political way, but just things that I haven’t thought about or even considered,” said Ursula. “I also think just encouraging people to like cinema is so fun. It doesn’t have to be taken incredibly seriously all the time, but it also doesn’t have to just be funny all the time. It’s truly an art form that has so much potential.”

Words: Jessica Spiers

Photography: Free Film Club