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From February, the Unity Theatre will begin hosting a new programme of documentary cinema, curated by Liverpool Doc Club - a project that responds to the city’s long absence of a dedicated arthouse, independent cinema, and to the wider erosion of shared cultural spaces across the North.
Liverpool was once home to a rich cinema culture. Today, despite its scale, creativity and international reputation, opportunities to watch carefully curated independent film in a communal setting are limited. This new programme doesn’t claim to fix that overnight - but it does mark something important: a return to the idea that cinema belongs in the heart of the city, not at its margins.
The screenings will take place at the Unity Theatre, a venue with a long radical history and a reputation for championing underrepresented voices. While the Unity is best known for theatre, music and live performance, this new season quietly reintroduces film as part of its wider role as a house of ideas, conversation and collective experience.
The programme opens with MOTHERBOARD on 11 February - a deeply personal documentary filmed over 20 years by BAFTA award-winning director Victoria Mapplebeck. Shot entirely on smartphones, the film traces the experience of raising a child alone, capturing the chaos, tenderness and contradictions of motherhood without sentimentality.
Unromanticised, funny and painfully honest, MOTHERBOARD resists the polished narratives often attached to parenting. Instead, it offers something rarer: recognition. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Mapplebeck.
In March, FOLKTALES (11 March) brings a very different kind of story to Liverpool audiences. Directed by Academy Award®-nominated filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the film follows a group of teenagers who choose to spend a “gap year” learning to survive in the Arctic wilderness, training sled dogs and living in close relationship with the land.
Shortlisted for the 2026 Oscars, FOLKTALES is both visually arresting and quietly philosophical - a meditation on adulthood, disconnection and the search for meaning in a hyper-accelerated world. The event will include a panel discussion with two local forest school leads, grounding the film’s themes in regional practice and experience.
Notably, neither film has previously been screened in Liverpool.
Tickets for the season are priced between £7 and £10 - a deliberate choice in a cultural landscape where cost increasingly determines who gets to participate. The programme is supported by Film Hub North with National Lottery funding on behalf of the BFI Film Audience Network, alongside backing from the Documentary Film Council.
Liverpool Doc Club’s first event - a sold-out screening of The Librarians at Liverpool Central Library in January - demonstrated a clear appetite for documentary cinema in the city. With plans already in place to continue regular screenings at the Unity from April onwards, the ambition is long-term: to re-establish independent cinema as a sustained, accessible presence rather than a one-off gesture.
The project is led by Imagine Futures CIC, a community interest company working across culture, creativity and education to expand access and opportunity. Their partnership with the Unity Theatre reflects a shared belief that cultural infrastructure matters - and that film, particularly documentary film, has a unique capacity to create space for reflection, empathy and discussion.
As Bruno Castro, curator at Liverpool Doc Club, puts it: documentary cinema has “extraordinary potential” - not just as entertainment, but as a way of engaging with what it means to be human now.
In Liverpool, that potential is finally being given room to breathe again.
Motherboard Tickets HERE
Folktales Tickets HERE
