Collaboration between local and regional cinemas, with focused distribution and marketing strategies are needed to bolster the already evident growth in cinema-going in the Baltic region. While animations and local productions are aiding growth, US films continue to dominate a market that has a history of striving for independence.
Eda Koppel, Tallinn & Baltic Event Project Manager for Tallinn Black Nights Film opened the session by showing the growth of State financial support for the film industry in the three countries in the region; Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. While admissions haven’t quite recovered to their peak 2018 levels, post-pandemic growth has been steady.
Estonia leads the region overall but figures are down significantly for local films – they are the only country of the three to lose screens post-pandemic while Latvia and Lithuanian have experienced growth in screen numbers. Though market shares grew in 2018, the current challenge post-pandemic includes a significant reduction in distribution and marketing strategies to connect with audiences. Common to all three Baltic countries is that US films continue to dominate the market.
Koppell outlined the need for support, therefore, for cultural diversity, recognising the role that film festivals play in providing a platform for such films. Cross collaboration from distribution and marketing investment with exhibition is crucial for making Baltic films more visible for local audiences.
Miglė Morkūnaitė, Head of Theatrical Marketing and Distribution for ACME Film Baltics was optimistic, saying that the Lithuanian box office prediction for the year is to end on an all-time high, up 17%. Latvia is looking at a similar result to 2023 and Estonia is set for a 12% increase compared with last year. The differences correlate directly to the performance and share of national films. Morkūnaitė cited Latvia’s upwards box office trend since September with the release of Latvian co-produced animation Flow (Gints Zilbalodis), a film that has had a positive impact across the region.
The big regional trend, she said, is that independent animations work very well, even the mediocre ones, so long as they are dated well and have reasonable distributor efforts to promote the films. Gintaras Plytnikas, CEO for Forum Cinemas in Lithuania also spoke about the significance and high market share of animations and national films in Lithuania over the past 30 years, marking the importance of local films for impact on the local market. Media partnerships with television channels, and influencer and brand partnerships – either locally or across the region with large supermarket chains, for example – also play a big part in boosting the results, reach and engagement significantly, Morkūnaitė said. For small markets such as the Baltic region, such collaborative efforts provide visible results. Aligning release plans, estimates and budgets helps with targeted strategies. Negotiation power is also important for costs saving, although there are, of course, cultural and linguistic differences to take into account.
Rights issues in relation to regional sales were raised by Algirdas Ramaška, CEO of Vilnius Film Festival and Kino Pavasaris Distribution. A Russian influence on the markets remains, especially in Lithuania, he said. Sales agents are often selling the rights Russia with, since a ban on buying for Russia, many of the majors are buying independent content for all of the territories around Russia including Ukrainian, Baltic and Georgian rights. This creates an ethical conflict for countries in support of Ukraine and who do not want to do business with Russia, extending sometimes to films that are funded by European Union. Ramaška said it is, legally, a very hard to solve. Buying films for small markets is at the behest of the sales agents who want to sell territories rather than to individual countries in the region.
Māris Prombergs, Director at Kino Bize agreed, saying that subtitling is also a key issue, with many contracts from European distributors specifying that the films bought for Latvia will come with Latvian and Russian subtitles. “Is there still a percentage of the population who need this?” he asked, citing how audiences have been writing on social media to complain about the subs especially during a time of war against Ukraine. Prombergs said they ask for English subtitles as the secondary option because they have a large audience of international students and other migrants for whom English is the most accessible language. “Why would a French company ask us to have Russian subtitles on our films?” he asked, “One day we might have local and English subtitles, that for us, as a cinema, would make much more sense.”
Kristi Porila, Head of Cinema and Programmer for Thule Kino in Estonia, said another issue they face is the sheer quantity of production that leaves cinemas as the “back-end” in the value chain. “Cinemas need to support the European films, and the films need to be very good – not just average – to perform,” she said. “There are too many distributors and it’s too easy to buy films now. But should we? Why do we do it? Either we want to just earn money, or we actually want to make a difference in the world. I think we all should think about what we screen and why we do that.”
In answer to this, in Lithuania, at least, Ramaška cited their model of combining festivals with distribution, “We found that there is potential to have more screenings during and after the festival if we buy the film. It’s about taking care of our audience.” Ramaška sees the cinephilic nature of talking about and processing the emotions and impact of a film socially as equally important to putting it on the big screen in the first instance. Festivals have an important role to play in building the cinema-going habit and in making European films popular among a wider audience. He also spoke about how the festival has been able to de-stigmatise documentary films which, in Lithuania, perform poorly if categorised as such.
Photos courtesy of Gediminas Gražys