HALAS FILM GROUP and Local Film Archive
Halas Film Group was formed in 1985 by a small team of local home movie enthusiasts, based in the small town of Halesowen.
The aim was to make, show and collect films dealing with various aspects of Black Country life, in the home, at liesure and in the workplace.
Over the years besides our own productions, we have gathered together quite a large archive of films relating to Halesowen, Cradley and the Black country area. These date from the nineteen twenties and include hand nail making, chain making, button manufacture, heavy industry, Royal visits, celebrity visits, carnivals etc and many aspects of the social life of the district plus records of the many changes in and around Halesowen over the past sixty years or so.
In order to make our film archive acessible to local people we gave regular film shows at the Halesowen library theatre and these were always very well attended. As some of the older films were becoming too fragile for projection in 1997 we began to release some of this material on video
tape. In this way anyone interested in local history could build their own collection of these unique and often fascinating films, while the precious film origionals remain safe in our archive.
To date we have released six different titles on video which are available for purchase, and we plan to release more. A free illustrated leaflet describing the content of the video releases is available from Hallas Film Group.
Halas Film Group is a voluntary, non-profit making organisation affiliated to Dudley Arts Council. It is financed by the sale of vintage film videos etc. All profits from the sale of videos go towards the running of the group and to the production of new local interest films and videos. |
