The Duke of York’s cinema is to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1960s drama Cathy Come Home with a charity screening for a Brighton homelessness charity.
The cinema, at Preston Circus, Brighton, is to screen the film next Monday (10 October) which is World Homelessness Day.
The special screening will raise funds for the Brighton Housing Trust (BHT) advice centre in Queen’s Road, Brighton.
The charity said that Cathy Come Home told the story of Cathy, who lost her home, husband and eventually her children through the inflexibility of the British 1960s welfare system.
The film, directed by Ken Loach, was first screened as The Wednesday Play on BBC 1 in 1966.
Nikki Homewood, BHT’s director of advice and support services, said: “Our day centre, First Base, works with the visible homeless – those sleeping on the streets now.
“The Brighton Advice Centre works with people who are invisible, who you wouldn’t notice, but who are facing homelessness and major disruption to their lives and those of their children.
“Our advice centre prevents several hundred households from becoming homeless each year. Each case of homelessness we prevent saves the local authority £16,000.
“Through our Court Duty Scheme, a service not available to Cathy, we had a 93 per cent success rate over the last year in preventing homelessness for at least 28 days and usually forever.
“Events such as this screening are so important for the future of our advice centre. We receive invaluable funding from Brighton and Hove City Council and the Legal Aid Agency but BHT still has to invest £200,000 each year into supporting our advice centres in Brighton and Hove, Eastbourne and Hastings.
“I dread to think of the consequences if these advice services were not there.
“Advice services prevent homelessness and without them the invisible people we work with would soon become the visible homeless living on our streets.”
The film stars Carol White and Brighton-born Ray Brooks. The strong public reaction at the time helped garner support for Shelter, the housing charity which started coincidentally at about the same time. It also helped bring about the creation of another housing charity Crisis a year later.
The screening starts at 6.30pm next Monday (10 October).
