Localising content through partnerships, events and added extras that are specific to the place and people in each independent cinema is a personalised way of connecting artists and audiences. Building a brand for the local community to identify with also builds loyal audiences through a focused economy of efforts. Finally, and using design, activities and content to shape your cinema towards its local audience and community requires active listening.
The afternoon’s session on re-energising your business model focused more on localisation than global perspective. Grass roots and community engagement was, for each of the speakers, an effective strategy for strengthening both audience loyalty and audience growth. Christof Papousek, CEO for Lichtspieltheater Betriebs-GmbH in Austria highlighted the importance and appetite of audiences “to watch and listen to stories from their own countries as well,” a trend that the network has seen increase in post-pandemic years. Sometimes, Papousek said, “small local films can outperform bigger films.”
Stephanie Silverman, Executive Director at Belcourt Theater in Nashville, agreed, outlining how programming helped them build audience loyalty, especially across younger demographics. Silverman also talked about programming according to hyper-local needs such as the heat in Nashville during the summer. Owing to the SAG-AFTRA strikes, the Belcourt needed to plug a programming gap where new releases were scarce. They staged a season of films called 1999, showing 25 films made in that year across a full month, spanning their full audience from children’s content to midnight movies. By leaning heavily into wrap around sessions such as seminars on the turn of the century cinema to a writing workshop called ‘Cringe Club’ that followed a screening of Ten Things I Hate About You, the cinema sold 9,000 tickets across three ticketing types; single sessions, five movie passes and full season passes.
Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro, Director of the Duplex Cinema and the Atalante Distribution Company, also spoke about the need for developing local audiences, so that the communities identify with the cinema, especially important in Spain, which has never had much support from state policy. One of the most successful initiatives for Cordeiro has been in consulting audiences directly, allowing them to request films and even to turn the theatre into a space of their own. Mixing their content with the cinema’s curated content widens sensibilities and is a way of learning through listening.
Michael Gubbins surmised, “Audiences expect more than they ever expected before so we have to be in a position to use the mechanisms for listening to audiences. You have to relinquish some control, so it’s not top-down, and by listening you can do your curation more effectively. Not giving it up but finding new ways of bringing audiences in.”
Agreeing with Ramiro about the need for support, Christof Papousek called for the creation an incentive for cinemas outside of the network to take national and non-national European films, to widen distribution for non-blockbuster films, which helps build cinema-going habits.
Sylvie Presa, Executive Director at Studio 43 discussed the design process that led to renovating a multiplex space into an independent cinema space that focuses on young audiences through workshops, education and training. Studio 43 work with 20 18-25-year-olds each year to produce short film content and podcasts that they share on social media and in the cinema, making the theatre their own. Working on the idea of “transmission” with their youth workshop participants, Studio 43 is building an active community.
Answering what the first panel discussion of the day asked – How do we change audience behaviours? – the panelists in this second session placed their emphasis on an active process that nurtures the cinephiles of tomorrow, not just waiting for them to develop. “If time is the challenge,” Gubbins mused, “then we have to get the design, events and localised content right: shaping the cinema towards the audience.”
Re-energising your business model doesn’t have to be an entire venue remodel (although that has proved successful for Studio 43), but it does require: some hyper-localisation; community as something that you actively build; an element of branding – exploited across all the various ways in which you work, both online and in real life – and localising content through active listening to what the audience want, including them in the process, not just the final result.
Photos courtesy of Gediminas Gražys