Welcome to Chico Cinema Club
A gathering place for cinema in Chico, California.
Movies are better when we have someone to talk about them with.
Welcome to Chico Cinema Club, a community for movie lovers, film nerds, casual viewers, and anyone who believes there’s a little magic in sitting in a dark theater and experiencing a story unfold on the big screen.
We’re here to celebrate cinema in all its weird and wonderful forms: the classics, the cult favorites, independent films, international cinema, midnight movies, experimental oddities, and everything in between. Whether you spend your weekends digging through film history or just want to discover something new, there’s a seat for you here.
Come for the movies. Stay for the conversation.
Why We Started
Chico has a lot of creative energy, but we believe there’s room for an even bigger, more connected film community.
Chico Cinema Club started with a simple idea: bring people together through a shared love of movies. We wanted to create a space where film lovers could connect beyond the screen, discover films they might never have watched otherwise, and celebrate the art of cinema right here in our own community.
Cinema has always been more than entertainment. It’s art, history, culture, storytelling, experimentation, and sometimes a gloriously weird two hours that leave you wondering what on earth you just watched. Movies can challenge us, bring us together, introduce us to unfamiliar perspectives, and give us a common language even when we see the world differently.
We wanted to make more room for all of that in Chico.
What We Do
Chico Cinema Club is building a community around the shared experience of film.
Through meetups, events, screenings, collaborations, and conversations, we hope to create more opportunities for people to experience cinema together. We want to celebrate local film culture, spotlight overlooked and underappreciated movies, connect creative people, and make film appreciation accessible to anyone curious enough to join us.
From beloved classics to bizarre midnight discoveries, from conversations about filmmaking to simply gathering with other people who love movies, we're interested in all the ways cinema can bring a community together.
We're just getting started, and there's plenty more to come.
Our Goals for Chico
Build a stronger film community. Create opportunities for movie lovers to meet, connect, share recommendations, and find their people.
Celebrate cinema beyond the mainstream. Make space for independent, international, classic, experimental, queer, cult, and underrepresented films alongside the movies we already know and love.
Support Chico's creative and cultural spaces. Collaborate with local theaters, arts organizations, filmmakers, artists, and community groups to bring more film-related experiences to the area.
Make film appreciation accessible. Create welcoming opportunities for people to explore cinema regardless of their background, education, or knowledge of film history. You don't need a film degree to have something worth saying about a movie.
Keep the conversation going. Encourage curiosity, thoughtful discussion, different perspectives, and the kind of enthusiastic post-movie conversations that can last longer than the film itself.
Ultimately, we want Chico to be a place where cinema is not just something we watch, but something we actively celebrate together.
Why a Cinema Club Matters
In a world where so much of our entertainment happens alone, on our phones, or in front of a streaming queue that takes longer to navigate than the movie itself, there's something special about coming together to watch and discuss films.
Cinema gives us an opportunity to connect with stories beyond our own experiences. It can help us understand different cultures, explore complicated ideas, challenge assumptions, and see familiar things in entirely new ways. It can make us laugh, unsettle us, move us to tears, or send us down a rabbit hole of film trivia at two in the morning.
And when we share those experiences, something else happens: community.
A cinema club creates space for curiosity, conversation, discovery, and a little bit of friendly disagreement about whether that ending was brilliant or completely ridiculous. It gives people a reason to get out, meet someone new, support local arts, and find connection through a shared interest.
Small communities deserve big cultural lives. We believe Chico deserves opportunities to celebrate film in all its forms, and we hope Chico Cinema Club can help make that happen.
Grab a Seat. You're Invited.
Whether you're a lifelong cinephile, a horror obsessive, a lover of old Hollywood, an arthouse regular, or someone who just wants to watch more interesting movies with interesting people, we'd love to have you along.
We're building this one screening, one meetup, one conversation, and one wonderfully weird movie at a time.
Welcome to Chico Cinema Club. Let's make a little movie history of our own.