In all the stories about the breakdown of society, the one that gets left out is the real one: individuals have always understood themselves, and their communities, through narrative. Whether you look at cave drawings or listen to Beowulf, whether the whole village takes part in a mystery play or hears what happened to Odysseus, to Arthur or to Little Red Riding Hood, the stories we hear and invent are central to a coherent life. Hand it all over to the values of soap opera and advertising, and you drain away any hope of coherence.

As the film director Beeban Kidron puts it: “Kids are growing up with nothing in their heads – they don’t know any stories, and they have no stories to tell.” So she has set up FilmClub, to make good movies available in schools.

It’s a fantastic idea. Sixty thousand films from all over the world will be made available to children in participating schools. All the school has to do is join the scheme and order the movies. A stroke of genius has been to reclassify movies out of the tired old categories of romance, comedy, action, thriller, etc, and group them in different ways: simple A-Z, by suitability of age, and thematically, such as heroes, girl power, animals. If you click on Animals, you’ll find everything from The Jungle Book to Whale Rider. This thematic approach has proved enormously popular with the pilot schools, and will be the core of the national project that starts next week.

The barmy belief that the arts were either a luxury for a few, or a waste of time for everyone, has helped to get us into our present state of emotional and imaginative impoverishment. As Kidron says: “What do kids really need to cope with the modern world? They need to understand themselves, to be able to communicate, to be comfortable with, and tolerant of, difference, and to recognise that there is life beyond consumerism.”

FilmClub’s website encourages kids to write reviews of the films they have seen, and the pilot project reports that pupils who refused to write anything in class, or who wouldn’t write in English, are suddenly writing for the website. Similarly, kids who have been disruptive or silent in general class discussions are coming to the club and joining in. Teachers note that kids are sitting still and then opening up.

This should not be underestimated. Many children come from a home environment where no real conversations take place, and where the TV is always on, a relentless distraction that needs no focus. To watch a good film for 90 minutes without interruption is, for many kids, the beginning of meditative concentration. That capacity to concentrate will flow into other areas of their lives, as will the real desire to talk about what they have seen.

The scheme benefits children aged anywhere between 5 and 18. Kidron tells me of a group of sixth-formers who saw Hotel Rwanda and decided to tackle Gordon Brown about British foreign policy. Children who would never in a million years find the Marx Brothers by themselves voted Duck Soup their all-time favourite movie.

The project is not there to make kids watch creaky reruns of book classics they might be studying for exams – the point is to expose them to the best films outside the Hollywood money-machine. Not that Kidron is against mainstream movies or money – she directed Bridget Jones and the Edge of Reason, as well as the TV adaptation of my novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

But she has used her address book to pull in the favours, and persuaded actors, directors, lighting men, make-up artists and animal handlers to give up time to write for the website and to do school visits. She raised the money from government, from the Film Council, and negotiated huge discounts with the movie distributors and with the DVD suppliers, LoveFilm. “Yes, this costs several million,” she says, “but in pay-back terms, it’s not a lot of money to change a lot of lives.”

www.filmclub.org

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