Reel Love Online: Pouring Our Hearts Out on the Internet

In an effort to better engage our online community, ReSee invites you to take part in a Reel Love survey so we can include your voices in our evening’s discussion.

Our goal at ReSee Movies is to breathe life back into moviegoing culture by strengthening film communities—both globally and locally, online and off. We’re building reseemovies.com to be a space that connects cinephiles, cultural connoisseurs, and community-seekers to all the incredible event organizers curating intentional spaces across Berlin.

When it comes to our own ReSee-run communities, from the established ones like Reel Love and Films for Foodies to burgeoning ones like cinesonic, we’re constantly looking for ways to include, engage, and entertain as many of you as possible, to make sure you all feel seen and heard, and to create opportunities for meaningful connection. Nothing makes me prouder than seeing repeat guests strike up conversations with familiar faces. It’s what, more than anything else, gives me the affirmation that what we’re building matters to people.

But there’s a core group within our community that’s been eager to engage with our programming in a more meaningful way, but who haven’t gotten the same chances to—and that’s our online community members.

While cinemas still offer the purest, most pristine viewing environment and the clearest path to connecting with other movie lovers, building community around cinema in 2025 has got to include digital and online community-building. Whether we like it or not, movie watching has evolved to become an activity that many—and some studies would even say most people—prefer to experience at home, on their own or in small groups. But that preference doesn’t mean that streamers don’t want to be connected to other like-minded enthusiasts.  

It's a tough riddle to crack, but it’s one that I’m constantly turning over in my mind, looking for new angles that will help us grow and strengthen the ReSee community.

Inclusivity, Both Online and Off.

At the end of the day, ReSee events have a pretty simple goal: add an interactive element to our film screenings that create out-of-home experiences you could never get at home on streaming. We actually think that films should be made with this goal in mind, and that if theaters leaned into the communal experience, they could usher in a new Golden Age of moviegoing without cutting into their coveted streaming revenues.

But none of that means that we should alienate and exclude movie lovers who prefer to skip the public setting. Whether it’s because of cost, distance, social anxiety, or because you have the dopest home theater setup out there, plenty of you have good reasons for staying home. There’s still space for you in the ReSee Fam, and beginning with the next Reel Love event, we’re going to be flirting with a new format which we hope will bridge the gap between IRL and URL and give each of you a choice in how you engage with our community, no matter where you are.

Beginning An Online Relationship with ReSee

Typically, Reel Love screenings are accompanied by relaxed, open discussions of how the themes in the selected film relate to the challenges of modern romance. While we like to spice it up from time to time with some in-person fun and games, it’s usually the least social and the most introspective of our recurring event series… and that’s totally okay! For those looking for a livelier evening, our other event series are much more nightlife oriented.  

I’d say roughly half of our guests at Reel Love prefer to reflect on the themes on their own or to discuss the questions amongst friends. The other half is happy to chat with other hopeless romantics and hear some voices from outside their usual friend circle. However they choose to interact with our programming is fine by us, as long as they feel that we’ve enhanced their moviegoing experience somehow.

So here’s the idea: instead of waiting for the night of the event, we’re starting the conversation about our next film right now, online. No matter where you’re located nor what you’re doing on October 24th, we’re inviting you to make your voice heard and take part in the conversation (you should definitely still join us at the Filmrauschpalast if you’re in Berlin tho). Then, we’ll include voices from our online community in our evening’s programming. Finally, we’ll bring the conversation back online, close the loop, and give everyone a chance to look at how our Berlin community feels compared to our online one. And this month’s movie is sure to be a conversation starter.

This month’s film selection is A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a black-and-white Persian feminist vampire western—yes, you read that correctly. Appropriately, our theme for the evening will be “how to suck blood out of the patriarchy.”

Patriarchy is something that manifests in a multitude of nuanced, regional, and culturally specific ways, which makes it a critical social issue to look at from a variety of viewpoints. It’s also a conversation that can be tense, awkward, uncomfortable, or triggering for some folks, and they might prefer to have that conversation from within their own safe spaces.

So if you’d like to be a part of our latest and greatest online experiment, take our survey now, watch/re-watch A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and let us know what you think about our proposed new hybrid format.

This is Only the Beginning

While it may not be as easy to imagine an online accompaniment to a community dinner like the ones we have at Films for Foodies, and live music experiences like those at cinesonic technically only count when you’re, well… live, we’re still going to be racking our brains for new ways to connect all members of the ReSee fam. So stay tuned, send your suggestions, and know that, no matter where you are, we appreciate you being part of what we’re building here.