A Two-Day Story Retreat for Anyone Who Has Ever Been Permanently Changed by a Great Film
There is always one film.
The one you watched at exactly the wrong age and it frightened you in ways you are still not entirely able to explain. Or the one that showed you a version of yourself you had never seen represented before — and felt, for the first time, genuinely seen. Or the one that was playing somewhere in the background of a moment when your life broke open, and somehow the images stayed long after everything else dissolved.
That film is not an accident.
In the decade Peter de Kuster has spent analysing thousands of stories — and studying the lives of the thousands of people who carry them — one pattern returns with a consistency that he can no longer treat as coincidence:
The film that moved us most deeply is almost always the film that most precisely mirrors the journey we are living.
The story we cannot stop thinking about is the story we are in.
The character we find most compelling is the archetype we most need to understand.
The scene we return to again and again — in memory, in conversation, in the way we describe our own experience — is the scene our life is trying to write.
What is The Film That Moved Me Retreat?
The Film That Moved Me is a two-day story retreat for a maximum of eight participants. Each person arrives with one film — the film that changed them, stayed with them, or keeps returning to them at unexpected moments. Over two days, Peter guides the group through a deep biographical analysis of what each person’s chosen film reveals about who they are and where they are in their journey right now.
This is not a film appreciation course. It is not a discussion group. It is a guided descent into the relationship between the stories we are drawn to and the story we are living — facilitated by someone who has spent ten years at precisely this intersection.
The two days:
Day One — The Screening and the Story
Each participant introduces their film: a brief description, the scene that matters most, the moment they first encountered it, and — as honestly as they can manage — why they chose it above all others.
Peter leads the group through a structural analysis of each film using the Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey as frameworks. What is the plot structure? Which archetype does the protagonist embody? Where is the shadow — the part of themselves the protagonist cannot yet see? What transformation is the film moving toward, and does it arrive?
But more than the film itself, Peter is listening for something else: the way each participant talks about it. The details they notice. The scenes they return to. The things they find impossible to explain but cannot leave out. These are the places where the film and the biography touch.
Day Two — The Mirror
Day Two turns the analysis around.
If Day One was about the film, Day Two is about you.
What does your choice of this particular film — out of every film ever made, at this particular moment in your life — tell you about where you are in your own journey? Where do you recognise yourself in the character you described? What does the protagonist’s struggle illuminate about your own? What is the film trying to tell you that you have not yet been ready to hear?
The day ends with each participant writing a personal Story Statement: one page capturing the insight from the film that they will carry forward — into their work, their creative practice, their leadership, or simply the way they understand what is happening in their own life right now.
Who this is for:
Filmmakers, screenwriters, and directors for whom story is the central material of their professional life.
Writers, novelists, and journalists who take narrative seriously and want to understand their own more clearly.
Coaches, therapists, and psychologists who work with narrative in their practice and want to experience the process from the inside.
HR professionals and organisational leaders who are curious about what film can reveal that conventional tools cannot.
And anyone — with any professional background — who is at a crossroads, in a creative block, in a period of transition, or simply sensing that something in their life needs to change but cannot yet name exactly what.
Investment: € 1295 excluding VAT per participant. Group size: maximum eight people per retreat. Format: Saturday and Sunday full days with breaks. Next retreat: October 2026. Retreats are organized in London, Amsterdam, New York, Paris and Rome in 2026. There is also an online retreat.
To reserve your place or to ask a question: peterdekuster2023@gmail.com
The film that moved you is trying to tell you something. This retreat helps you finally hear it.
The Film: Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988)
There is a film about the film that made you. Of course there is. It could only have been made by an Italian.
Cinema Paradiso is the story of Salvatore — Totò — a boy in a small Sicilian village whose entire inner life is shaped by the films he watches in the local cinema, projected by his surrogate father Alfredo, the old projectionist who becomes his mentor, his protector, and the person who gives him the most painful and most necessary gift of his life: the instruction to leave and never come back.
The film begins with Totò, now a successful film director in Rome, receiving word that Alfredo has died. He returns to his village for the first time in decades and sits with the memories — of the films, of the projector’s beam cutting through the dark, of the collective emotion of an entire village watching the same stories and feeling something together that they could never quite name alone.
This is what the Film That Moved Me Retreat begins with. Not with theory, not with framework, not with the Hero’s Journey mapped onto a whiteboard. It begins with the question Totò cannot stop asking himself: Why did those films do what they did to me? And the answer, when it comes, is never about the film. It is always about the life the film was shining into.
Alfredo tells Totò, at the most important moment: Life is not like in the movies. Life is much harder. And yet the films were the thing that made life bearable. Not because they lied — but because they showed, in the safe container of the dark and the screen and the shared breath of the audience, what was true and difficult and worth living for.
At the very end of the film, Alfredo leaves Totò a final gift: a reel of film containing all the kissing scenes that the local priest had ordered cut from every film shown in the village over the decades. Alfredo had saved them — every edited-out moment of tenderness, every love scene deemed too dangerous for the community to see. The reel is a compilation of everything that was suppressed, everything that was too true to be shown. When Totò watches it alone, he weeps.
That is what the Film That Moved Me Retreat uncovers: the reel of suppressed moments. The scenes from your own life that the film you chose is keeping safe until you are ready to watch them.