In Conversation With... Martha Boyd

Describe a day in the life of a Digital Marketing Coordinator.

My go-to task on a morning is checking that the website hasn’t exploded (thankfully it never has because Let’s Dance did a wonderful job building it, but always reassuring to check). Then I check our social accounts to see if we’ve got any urgent questions that need answering first thing and check my emails.

A lot of my role is about telling our lovely heritage cinema’s story and explaining why people should come see films with us, hire our venue, and/or make use of our Café and Community Space. So, my days often involve updating website pages, sending email newsletters, planning and creating our social media posts, coming up with ideas for journal posts to promote our unique Grade II listed building, its wonderful staff and volunteers, and our eclectic programme of films and events.

I’m also conscious that we’re a community cinema, so as much as I love writing and creating content, it’s not all about me – we want a wide variety of voices to feature on our journal and social media. So, my days also involve making friends with guest speakers, partners, suppliers and artists we’re working with to ask them for contributions. I also think of ideas to get our lovely team of staff and volunteers as involved as possible.

For example, this year was the first time we participated in the international Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair, so I asked the team to write about bleak films they’d recommend, just in case people wanted even more sources of despair than we had in our programme. You can read the piece here if you’re interested. I also love sharing our customers’ responses to films, so one of my favourite things to do is find their reviews of films they’ve seen with us on Letterboxd and take some screenshots to share in posts on our socials.

I also look at survey results, Google Analytics, social media analytics, ticket sales, email CTRs, etc. to try and figure out what our audience appreciates and what they’d like to see less of. Every day involves learning about things like the ever-changing social media algorithms and changing approaches to SEO. Meetings with colleagues also help to make sure they’re getting support with promoting things they’re especially keen for audiences not to miss. Our programmers share details with me of future films and seasons too, so I can start plotting in promotion ideas and timelines.

What three skills do you think are most important in your role?

 Organisation, communication and creativity.

What has been the highlight (to date) of your time at Leeds Heritage Theatres?

Long before I worked at HPPH, I wrote a poem in which I called someone “the Hyde Park Picture House of people,” because that was my idea of the ultimate compliment. Cringe, I know. I apologise! However, it did get me thinking about how I wouldn’t be the only one so inspired by our cinema that they’d have the urge to write about it. So, I thought it would be nice to run a poetry competition for National Poetry Day and our 110^th birthday, asking people to submit poems inspired by HPPH. We got some absolutely lovely responses, so reading these was the highlight of my time here. The winning poem by Jenna Isherwood was an especially heartwarming example of how meaningful the cinema is to our community because it was all about how much Bring Your Own Baby screenings meant to her. We then filmed the winning poets reading their poems and showed them on the big screen before films (way better than car ads!). I’m getting tearful just thinking about it. It was so lovely! You can read the winning poems here.

What’s your Letterboxd top four?

It changes so you can check back here to see my latest favourites, but my current top four are The Shop Around the Corner (an essential watch each Christmas), My Neighbour Totoro, Harvey and Sorry, Baby.

Hidden gem recommendation that you think people might not have seen?

Letterboxd tells me that less than 2000 people have logged The Babushkas of Chernobyl, so if you’ve not seen it, I highly recommend giving it a watch! It’s a fascinating documentary which shows how important home can be – so much so that even after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 meant their area was declared unlivable due to dangerous levels of radioactivity, some defiant babushkas returned home. Even at very old ages, these women are very impressively self-sufficient, many of them growing their own radioactive food. It’s one of the most interesting stories I’ve ever seen.

If you were to curate a strand at HPPH, what would the theme be, and what films would you feature?

I’d be tempted to celebrate old women on film since I love The Babushkas of Chernobyl so much and one of my other favourite documentaries is The Last of the Sea Women, which shows Korean women (even in their nineties) deep-sea diving for shellfish without oxygen. I also loved Agatha’s Almanac and How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, which would fit in well to the strand.

Or maybe a Food on Film strand would be fun, because I often find films with food you almost feel like you can taste to be some of the most memorable. It would be fun to partner with our favourite local eateries for eat-along screenings of First Cow with clafoutis, Ponyo with ramen, Paddington 2 with marmalade sandwiches, Holy Cow with Comté, My Favourite Cake with orange blossom cake, Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry with blackberries, Fremont with fortune cookies and The Golden Spurtle with a really comforting bowl of porridge.

Shout out to any other independent cinemas?

I’ve got a lot of family in Belfast and I’m a big fan of visiting Queen’s Film Theatre when I’m there. I also met a lovely person from their team on a course recently – always nice to know the people behind a place you like are lovely too! My sister went to university in Cardiff and we loved going to Chapter when I visited her. And I went to university in Norwich, where I loved Cinema City. It’s technically part of the Picturehouse chain, but it feels like the most independent-leaning of all the chains. I also love the Cottage Road Cinema in Headingley, which is somewhere my aunt took my cousins and I to lots when we were children, a fellow lovely Leeds heritage cinema.