Olivia Colman and Australian actor Kate Box will lead an exclusive Q&A on May 13 to launch a national programme of community screenings of JIMPA, Sophie Hyde's new film, which left commercial cinemas at the end of last week.

The community programme is, by Australian arts standards, ambitious. JIMPA will screen in more than forty regional and metropolitan venues over the following six weeks, in a model deliberately designed to extend the cultural conversation around the film beyond its initial release window.

A model the industry is watching

Australian film distribution has long struggled with the gap between a film's commercial release and its eventual life on streaming. The community screening model, pioneered in part by smaller documentary distributors, has begun to be adopted by mid-budget feature films as a way of holding audience attention through that gap.

JIMPA is, in some ways, an ideal candidate for the model. Its themes — family, queerness, generational reckoning — invite the kind of conversation that benefits from a room of strangers and a moderator.

A national tour

Q&A guests will rotate through the tour, with the director and the lead actors confirmed for several of the larger metropolitan dates. Tickets, in the smaller venues, are already close to sold out.

"Films don't end when the cinemas close. They end when the conversations stop."

What it might mean for Australian film

If the community model works for a film of JIMPA's scale, it will quickly be copied. The Australian feature-film industry, long beset by distribution struggles, may have found a third act it can sell back to the next round of funders.

That, more than any single film's box-office number, would be the more lasting contribution.