Back in 2019, before lockdown and social distancing had reared their ugly heads, Cambridge Film Festival organised monthly screenings at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse in a series called ‘A Film I Love’. I invited well-known names with a connection to Cambridge to pick a film they love and I interviewed them to find out why the film has such significance before we all watched it.

Fast forward to 2020, the closure of cinemas and the cancellation of film festivals as we knew them. As a trustee of the Cambridge Film Festival, I was really chuffed that the team joined forces with FilmBath, Brighton CineCity and Cornwall festivals to create Amplify, an online offering of new releases, and I’m also really proud that we’ve continued ‘A Film I Love’ in online form.

As part of our ‘At Home’ series, we’ve invited film critics, broadcasters and festival organisers to pick a film and chat about it in a Zoom interview. If and when we’re able to obtain hosting rights to the film from the distributors, it’s available to watch at the Cambridge Film Festival’s website in a ‘pay what you can afford’ stream; we had the same ticketing structure for our IRL events and it feels important that we do the same in our ‘At Home’ offering.

I’ve been lucky enough during lockdown to interview some brilliant people about their brilliant film choices. Mark Kermode picked The Whalebone Box, Simon Mayo went for Amadeus, Girls on Film podcast host Anna Smith chose Booksmart and The Observer’s film critic Simran Hans selected the excellent documentary Time.

Over the coming weeks, my conversations with Radio Times film editor Andrew Collins, contributing editors to Empire magazine Amon Warmann and Beth Webb, FilmBath Festival Director and founder of F-Rated Holly Tarquini and other lovely people will be available to view here – so if you fancy watching a film and you’ve exhausted all your usual streaming services, have a look and hopefully you’ll find some inspiration!