Local Focus: Whanganui Confluence cinema and film company bringing together people and documentaries

Melita Farley and Kevin Double are the husband-and-wife team behind Confluence - a cinema, shared office, film-company social enterprise opposite the Davis Theatre in Whanganui.

"Social enterprise is a really broad definition," Farley said. "It's really about any business that is doing something that is of benefit to people or the environment or the community. There are some good business practices around how you run your finances, but the outcome is not solely - we are going to give our shareholders lots of money!"

Confluence is one of the city's hidden cultural gems.

"We run a cinema on Thursday and Friday nights for documentaries and mostly arthouse or independent films, she said. "We also have people coming in and doing workshops every now and then as well."

The building also houses their business, Double Farley Film Productions, and the couple are passionate about documenting local stories.

Their most recent full-length documentary Set In Stone is available online at www.setinstone.kiwi and they're currently making a documentary about the Hikitia steamship moored in Wellington city.

"I wanted to share all the stories I saw all around me when I came to New Zealand," Double said. "That's what I came here for, the stories, the culture of stories."

"As much as it would be great to bring everybody here and put them in Pākaitore when they put the monument back up, or down on the crane ship in Wellington, you can't do that. So the next best thing is to create some meaningful story to pictures and sound and basically put it together that way and that's what I do."

The couple specialise in education and documentary films. They have a wealth of knowledge and are happy to share it in person and via their films.

"There's quite a lot of evidence about how people learn from film," Farley said. "The thing about well-made films is that they tend to encourage you to be engrossed in the story. And actually, what we know about human beings is that they relate really well to stories. That's how we learnt from millennia ago.

"So if you encompass people in a story process, they are likely to learn something much more easily and really be engaged in the process."

The couple want to help other filmmakers navigate the process of bringing their films to the big screen and have learned a lot setting up the movie theatre.

"It was a really long and involved process of basically ringing up distributors and saying what do we need to do."

The name Confluence is fitting for a social enterprise aiming to bring people together.

"It's about the confluence of the rivers," Farley said. "The idea is that people come and flow together for a period of time, then they might leave, then they might come back around."

• For a movie programme, call in to Confluence or go to the website - www.confluence.kiwi

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