IN DEPTH
Reading to Recovery – a cinematic journey
A library book club that is helping homeless people with drug and alcohol addictions was “a story that needed telling”. The result is a prize-winning fi lm and here Bob Usherwood reveals the story behind the remarkable Reading to Recovery.
APART from Frederick Wiseman’s superb Ex Libris, which won the International Federation of Film Critics Prize at Cannes and had a running time of three-and-a-quarter hours, public libraries have not been well documented on the big screen. However, last year, a much shorter British fi lm, Reading to Recovery (2019) was also given an award. This was at the Recovery Street Film Festival, a unique event themed around addiction and recovery. This invited people directly or indirectly aff ected by addiction to make a fi lm and submit if for inclusion in the festival.
For Rohan Patel, a 20-year-old politics and sociology student at Leeds University with an interest in video, Lee’s Book Club at Westcotes Library in Leicester was “an incredible story that needed telling”, and he went on to produce a moving and uplifting piece of cinema which tells its inspiring story in just three minutes.
Above and beyond books The book club, named after its founder Lee Ayres, has objectives above and beyond those of other organisations with a similar name. The participants are homeless people, some recovering from drug or alcohol addiction. It all started when Lee Ayres, a homeless man and an avid reader who was already a regular library user, asked Matt Vaughan, the library manager: “What would I do if I wanted to start a reading group?” Lee, who has been homeless on and off
36 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Bob Usherwood is Emeritus Professor, The University of Sheffi eld.
for over fi ve years and is in active recovery, told me that, as “a homeless person … [he] wanted to help other people in the same situation.”
Matt, whose managerial responsibilities include community activities, developing networks and promotional events, was well placed to tell Lee how other reading groups in the service were organised. A former social worker, he was also keen to welcome homeless people to the library, but explained that they would be expected to comply with the existing rules and standards for behav- iour. He said that some in the library service did have concerns about alcohol and drugs but that the idea was generally supported and approved by management. He added that later, when the fi lm was made, there were some worries that publicity via media outlets might raise diffi cult questions for the library service.
The club started in December 2018 and is March 2020
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