The national campfire: why cinema still matters and Aussie films need a reboot

Cinema matters because it is one of the few remaining places where a national story can still become a shared public experience.

A film can be watched alone. It can be streamed, paused, skipped, minimised or consumed in fragments. Those forms of viewing now sit permanently within the screen ecology, and they have value. But they are not the same as cinema.

Cinema asks something different of an audience. It asks people to leave home, gather in a public place, give their attention, sit with strangers and experience a story at the same time. It turns viewing into participation. It gives stories scale, ceremony and consequence.

That is why cinema cannot be understood only as a commercial endpoint in a production chain. It is part of the public life of screen culture. It is where a film moves from being a funded object to being a social event. It is where stories are tested, shared, remembered and argued over. It is where national screen culture becomes visible to itself.

For Australian films, this matters profoundly. A national cinema is not created by production alone. It is created when films enter public circulation, when audiences have the opportunity to see them, when communities recognise themselves in them, and when the experience of watching becomes part of a broader cultural conversation.

The central question is therefore not only whether Australia can make films. It is whether Australia still has the public settings, release pathways and audience habits that allow those films to matter.

The idea of cinema as a national campfire should not be mistaken for nostalgia. The campfire is not an argument for returning to an earlier age of filmgoing. It is a description of what shared culture requires.

A campfire needs a place. It needs people gathered around it. It needs a story strong enough to hold attention. It needs light, warmth, ritual and memory. Cinema provides all of these things in modern civic form.

A cinema turns a film from private content into a public occasion. It allows strangers to laugh together, sit in silence together, be unsettled together and recognise something of themselves, their community or their country in the same moment.

That collective experience changes the meaning of a film. It gives the work a public dimension that cannot be replicated by private consumption alone. A film seen at home may be enjoyed, admired or forgotten. A film seen together can become part of the national imagination.

Public policy has long recognised the value of Australian stories. It supports development, production, talent, documentary, children's content, First Nations storytelling and works of national cultural significance.

That recognition is important. But it is incomplete if it stops at production.

Stories do not complete their public purpose when they are financed, shot, delivered or acquitted. They complete that purpose when they are seen, discussed, absorbed and carried into community memory.

Cinema is one of the principal places where that happens.

It is therefore more accurate to describe cinemas not simply as private businesses, but as cultural infrastructure. Like libraries, galleries, theatres, community halls and local festivals, cinemas provide a public setting for cultural participation. They serve commercial functions, but their public value is broader than their private revenue.

A cinema activates main streets and town centres. It supports the night-time economy. It creates local employment. It gives young people somewhere to go. It provides a platform for festivals, schools, seniors' programs, community fundraisers, local filmmakers, Q&As and special events. It gives regional and suburban communities access to cultural life without requiring them to travel to capital-city institutions.

In many places, the local cinema is one of the few cultural venues used regularly by a broad cross-section of the community. It is familiar, accessible and repeatable. It does not require specialist knowledge. It can serve families, teenagers, retirees, cinephiles, school groups, local councils and community organisations in the same week.

That breadth is part of its public value.

Cinema is popular culture, but it is also civic culture. It is one of the rare places where the popular and the public still meet.

A film may be available on a platform, but that does not mean audiences know it exists. It does not mean it has been given visibility, context, positioning or momentum. It does not mean it has entered public conversation. It does not mean communities have had the chance to encounter it together.

Digital availability can be vast and invisible at the same time.

Cinema solves a different problem. It creates public presence. A cinema booking is a signal. A session time is a call to gather. This is especially important for Australian films, which often compete against larger international titles with far greater marketing resources, stronger brand recognition and deeper audience awareness.

For these films, the problem is rarely only quality. It is visibility, positioning, timing, confidence and access.

If an Australian film is released without sufficient marketing support, without enough suitable sessions, without local engagement and without a pathway to build momentum, it may technically be available while remaining culturally absent.

That is the danger: A film can be made, completed, listed, available and still, in any meaningful public sense, it can remain unseen.

There is a particular value in seeing Australian stories together. When audiences gather around a local story, they do more than consume content. They participate in a shared act of recognition. They see accents, landscapes, humour, conflict, history, grief, absurdity and beauty that belong to this place. They encounter versions of the country that may affirm them, challenge them or complicate what they think they know.

That experience is not always comfortable. Nor should it be. National cinema is not simply a mirror of consensus. It is also a place of argument, discomfort, dissent and discovery.

But it requires an audience. A national story without an audience is not yet national in any meaningful sense. It may have been publicly funded. It may be artistically significant. It may deserve attention. But until it reaches people, it has not entered the shared cultural space that public funding is meant to serve.

This is why cinema has a role that cannot be reduced to box office alone. Box office matters. Commercial performance matters. Audience scale matters. But the public value of cinema is larger than the immediate transaction. A cinema screening can create conversation, local pride, media attention, educational use, festival life, community connection and long-term cultural memory.

The ticket price captures only part of that value. The rest lives in the people who came, the conversations they had afterwards, the communities that felt included, the filmmakers who saw their work meet an audience, and the national culture that became a little more visible to itself.

The national campfire does not burn only in capital-city arthouses or flagship festival venues.

It burns in regional towns, outer suburbs, independent multiplexes, family-run cinemas, community halls, restored picture palaces and local venues where the cinema is part of the rhythm of ordinary life.

These places matter because cultural access is not evenly distributed.

For many Australians, particularly in regional and outer-metropolitan communities, the local cinema is the most immediate and affordable form of regular cultural infrastructure. It may be the venue that hosts school excursions, local premieres, charity nights, seniors' screenings, film festivals and community events. It may be the place where young people first encounter cinema as something larger than a screen in the home.

If these venues weaken or close, the loss is not confined to exhibition revenue. It is a loss of cultural access, local identity and civic capacity.

This is especially important in communities that are already underserved by major cultural institutions. A cinema closure in a well-served inner-city area is a commercial loss. A cinema closure in a regional or outer-suburban area can be a cultural access loss for an entire community.

Public policy should recognise that distinction.

A national screen culture cannot depend only on production companies, festivals and streaming platforms. It also requires a geographically dispersed network of places where audiences can encounter screen culture in public. That network is fragile. It needs to be treated as infrastructure, not merely as market residue.

The market is essential to cinema. It brings discipline, audience feedback, commercial ambition and entrepreneurial energy. Cinemas are businesses, and they must remain businesses if they are to be sustainable. But the market alone will not necessarily protect the full public value of cinema.

The market will favour the films with the strongest immediate demand, the highest awareness, the largest marketing campaigns and the least perceived risk. That is rational. Cinemas must fill seats, pay staff, meet rent, service debt, upgrade equipment and survive volatile trading conditions.

But public cultural value does not always align neatly with short-term commercial certainty. Australian films, documentaries, First Nations stories, regional stories, culturally specific works, new filmmakers and formally ambitious films may require more careful release planning, stronger marketing support, longer audience development and more confident exhibition access than the market can provide unaided.

This does not mean every film should be protected from commercial reality. Nor does it mean public support should ignore audience behaviour. On the contrary, public support should be more audience-focused, not less. But it does mean that a purely market-led pathway will not reliably deliver the cultural outcomes public screen investment claims to value.

If Australia wants a diverse national cinema, it must support not only the making of films, but the conditions that allow those films to meet audiences.

The current public compact is incomplete.

Australia asks taxpayers to support screen production because national stories matter. It asks filmmakers to develop and deliver those stories. It asks producers to assemble finance. It asks agencies to assess cultural and creative value. It asks the public system to report on expenditure, activity and output.

But it does not ask enough of the system after the film is made. It does not consistently require audience strategy as a condition of support. It does not adequately fund marketing readiness. It does not sufficiently coordinate release planning. It does not adequately protect exhibition access. It does not systematically measure admissions, sessions, reach, regional availability or public outcomes.

As a result, the public compact can stop too early. The system can declare success at the point of production while the public purpose remains unresolved. A film can be funded, completed and reported as an output without ever being given a fair chance to become a public experience. That is a failure of alignment not intention. The system believes in Australian stories. But it has not yet built the full pathway required for those stories to gather an audience.

The campfire does not shine because a story was written. It shines because people came.

That is the part of screen culture Australia has allowed to weaken. We have invested in the making of stories, but not sufficiently in the gathering around them. We have funded production with precision and treated audience connection as an afterthought.

A national cinema culture needs the ordinary civic magic of people leaving their homes, sitting together in the dark and seeing a story become larger than themselves. This is not an argument against streaming, television or digital access. Those pathways are now essential parts of screen culture. But they do not replace the public function of cinema. They do not replace the value of a local venue, a shared audience, a scheduled event, a collective reaction and a story that becomes visible in community life. The task is not to choose between old and new forms of viewing. The task is to ensure that Australia does not lose the public form altogether.

If public policy accepts that Australian stories matter, it must accept that the public places where those stories are seen also matter. If the fire is to keep burning, Australia must support more than the making of films. It must support the places, pathways and public rituals through which films become part of national life.

A film that is made but not seen remains an object of production. A film that is seen together can become memory, argument, identity, affection, dissent, pride and belonging.

That is why cinema matters. That is why the campfire matters. And that is why it must be kept alight.