Born in lockdown. Named after a prison. Still going.
The Bayley is a place. A former prison in Manchester — the building I used to live in. It served as a house of correction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, long before it became apartments. During the covid lockdowns of 2020, my then-boyfriend and I found ourselves feeling not entirely different from its original occupants. Trapped, restricted, with time on our hands and nowhere to go.
So we started a film club. The name felt well suited.
A director is drawn at random. We watch a selection of their films, write about them, discuss them. One director per month. No skipping. No cheating. The randomness is the point — it forces you into films and filmmakers you might never have chosen yourself, and that constraint turns out to be the most generative part of the whole exercise.
What began as private notes published quietly on my personal blog has slowly become something more considered. The Bayley Film Club is now a monthly practice — one director, a handful of reviews, a genuine attempt to say something honest about what I watched and how it landed.
The ratings use three dimensions — Anticipation, Enjoyment, and Retrospect — each scored out of five, for a maximum of fifteen. Retrospect is the most important one. It measures not how much you enjoyed watching, but how much the film has grown — or shrunk — in the time since. Some films earn their score in the room. Others take days to reveal themselves. A few never do.
If you are not sure where to start, let the archive decide for you — the director selector on the home page will land you somewhere at random. Or go directly to the rankings if you want my opinion first. Either way, you are welcome here.