IdeaMe: is an online platform, which helps creators, be they inventors, artists, or designers, among others, to finance their projects through crowd funding. Each week, the Indy features and promotes one project every week, with the aim of helping the creators finance and achieve their dreams. This week: Ciclos de Cine Para Vecinos, by Biblioteca Popular Eduardo Martedí.
Biblioteca Eduardo Martedi (Photo: Diego Cupolo)
“To spread those films, those directors and those ideas which as of yet are not widely known and seem to us that they would be of interest to others”.
Such is the goal of the Ciclos de Cine para Vecinos project, according to Martín Echenbaum, a spokesperson for the team at the Biblioteca Popular Eduardo Martedí that has proposed this project on Ideame.
The Biblioteca Popular Eduardo Martedí was founded in 2010 by a group of students from the University of Buenos Aires with the idea of “encouraging reading, education… but in a comprehensive way, not only to encourage the culture of reading – that is, the written word – but also a more comprehensive political education.”
The library – which today holds around 3,000 volumes – is housed in what was formerly the garage of the Spanish Cultural centre Centro Español de Sada y sus Contornos.
Martín explains that the library was founded with the hope of making books more accessible to all. Asking only “minimum requirements” for membership – such as a fee of $2 per month – the library seeks to confront challenges to the accessibility of books in Buenos Aires.
Martín observes several obstacles in this regard. First, he notes, “there is generally not much familiarity today with the concept of public libraries. You walk down the street and you don’t find a public library.” And second, he remarks that “books are very expensive”, and that because many books are imported to Argentina, “they come at a price that is vey difficult to access”.
While books are central to the library’s mission, however, Martín also observes that “we thought that with a library alone isn’t sufficient.”
Presentation at the library (Photo courtesy of Biblioteca Popular Eduardo Martedi)
In this spirit, the library not only offers its members the chance to borrow books, but also a wide range of activities. Taking advantage of the space of the Centro Español de Sada y sus Contornos, the team has organised “book presentations, discussions about a variety of themes, including literature, politics, history, anthropology, music presentations, poetry readings, theatre.”
Now, they would like to add one more activity to their agenda: Los ciclos de cine para vecinos, or Cinema Cycles for Neighbours. In order to make this project a reality, the group has turned to crowd funding on Ideame to raise money to purchase a projector and a screen.
The idea of the cinema cycles is that each cycle would be based around a particular theme; proposed themes to date include the Spanish civil war, World War I, and Italian cinema, among others.
Martín observes that the topics of the cycles are “themes that are important to us… and in which there is also an interesting cinematographic production that allows us to unite the two goals that we have: on the one hand, the artistic question, the cinema, the language; but also the political and cultural issue”.
He emphasises, “we’re not interested in having a projector and holding cinema cycles to show films that can be seen at the cinema, but rather to approach history, politics; these are the things that interest us”.
The themes, Martín says, “are very important historical events with which all of us have some familiarity, but if we accompany them with reading texts and watching films, we can see them in a new way, with new depth. We can take something away from all of this.”
To support the Ciclos de Cine Para Vecinos project, click here.
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