As you might expect for the head of the National Media Museum, Colin Philpott is evangelical about Bradford’s City of Film status. And his enthusiasm is infectious.

Sitting in his office on the top floor of the museum building, which affords panoramic views across the city he says: “I do genuinely think this is a fantastic opportunity for Bradford.”

As a member of the team that made the successful bid for the UNESCO designation, Colin was perhaps expecting a few raised eyebrows around the country when Bradford – not Hollywood, not Cannes, not Pinewood – won the honour last year.

In the event, he says, he read only one slightly sniffy piece in the national media. “The rest of it was very encouraging,” he says. “We even had supportive pieces in the LA Times.”

But if Bradford is going to make the most of being City of Film, it has to treat it like a marathon, not a sprint. He says, “The temptation was to immediately start organising events and getting things done as soon as we won the bid, but we didn’t want to go off half-cocked. This is a long-term thing – unless we mess it up – and we have to sustain it.”

Which is why, nine months after Bradford won the bid, the City of Film strategy is now only just being publicly unveiled.

Of course, it’s a many-faceted affair, with talk of organising glittering events, attracting film production companies to the area and branding the city with the film identity.

But, first and foremost, it’s about enjoying film. And that, says Colin, could have huge rewards.

“It was never about just having a few signs saying Bradford is City of Film, though those are going up now and they are important. Bradford is in a very important position right now, and I believe that there will be several benefits of City of Film.

“There will be cultural benefits, obviously. There will also be educational ones, and economic benefits, and the designation will work strongly towards improving Bradford’s image outside of the district.

“One very important aspect of the bid is to take cinema to people, to encourage people to enjoy films.”

The City of Film could quite literally be bringing cinema to the people with a planned programme of events to get right into the heart of the community.

There are possibly two generations of people who don’t remember that cinemas used to be on the doorstep, that seeing a film didn’t involve a trip out to a multiplex. Every community had at least one ‘fleapit’ cinema, and that’s the ethos that City of Film hopes to recreate, albeit with a very 21st century flavour.

For instance, there’s the “pop-up cinema” project – a travelling, mobile cinema that can set up shop pretty much anywhere, and show films in perhaps a cafe, a church hall, a community centre.

Colin says: “We want people to experience films in unexpected locations. We can project films on the side of buildings, for example.”

He believes that getting the people of Bradford behind the City of Film bid is vital to its success outside the district, and could be key to something that is very close to a lot of Bradfordians’ hearts, one way or another: regeneration.

Colin looks out from his windows at the Bradford skyline, where a handful of cranes can be seen working on building projects, and says: “We tend to focus on regeneration as involving the physical aspects of the city, the bricks and mortar, and of course that is very important.

“We believe that film can be used as one of the major tools of regeneration, that the City of Film can contribute to Bradford’s regeneration in terms of what I’ve mentioned before – the cultural aspect, education, image.

“We can use the City of Film to achieve something of real value, and our first task is to get the people of Bradford behind it, then the wider Yorkshire region, and then...”

Today Yorkshire, tomorrow the world? Possibly, because Colin’s ambition is boundless. “I’m not saying we could get the BAFTAs in Bradford next year but… who knows? There are a lot of major film-related events that could be held in Bradford. Why shouldn’t the BAFTAs be held here in the future?”

The previous nine months might have been a fairly low-key time for Bradford as the City of Film on the face of it, but that doesn’t mean those who are responsible for taking it forward have been resting on their laurels. Taking the long view, Colin and his colleagues have been working towards the launch event, which takes place while attention is already focused on Bradford’s International Film Festival.

Go and ask 100 people in, say, London where the UNESCO City of Film is and the results might not be impressive. But as the City of Film machine begins to crank up, it might not be too long before the answer “Bradford” trips off a huge percentage of those tongues.

“The reason we were successful in our bid was that UNESCO saw the potential in Bradford, saw what we could make of it,” says Colin.

And, he says, the best way for the people of Bradford to support the City of Film is to simply show the world just how much we enjoy film in all its aspects.