Last month, we sent our Marketing Officer Sami Abdul-Razzak to attend Europa Cinemas’ Audience Development and Innovation Lab in Bologna, which took place alongside this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival. In this blog, Sami highlights some of the ideas that have stuck with him since returning home.
Europa Cinemas’ Bologna Lab takes place every year at the end of June, and this iteration of the programme welcomed 39 participants from 20 countries. At a base level, it provides an open space to meet others working in film exhibition across Europe, discuss common issues, and share experiences and learning. It’s also a great opportunity to eat lots of pasta, and I took that opportunity.
I was there both as a participant and to present some of the ICO’s work in making the sector more inclusive (for example, through our FEDS scheme and our jobs board policy and recruitment guidance, as well as some of the changes we’ve implemented in our own recruitment processes). While the mere idea of watching myself on video sends cold sweats running down my neck, if you’re interested in viewing a recording of this session (and most of the other sessions from the Lab), you can do so on the Europa Cinemas YouTube channel.
Throughout the five-day programme, we saw presentations from the course leaders (Watershed’s Madeleine Probst and Rex Filmtheater’s Mustafa El Mesaoudi), a series of guest speakers, and the other participants. If you’d like to read a comprehensive rundown of everything that was covered, then Europa Cinemas has published a series of blogs that do that. I won’t try to do the same here, but I thought I’d share a few things that have stuck with me since returning home.
Investing in creative content
The first session of the Lab was a presentation from Kino Rotterdam’s Züleyha Azman & Baris Azman about their approach to creating content that shows off both their programme and the general vibe of the venue.
Kino has created over 180 custom trailers over the past eight years. An example is for their recent Taiwan New Wave: Lives Less Ordinary season, which highlighted nine films from the period. They made a beautiful bespoke trailer for this, which they used in the cinema, on their website, and on Instagram (which is the social platform they focus their efforts on currently). They then produced snippets from each film to use on Instagram to promote the individual screenings, you can see their Instagram Reels here.
They also created a couple of original posters for the season (which you can see in another nice Reel here), copies of which were printed and sold at the cinema. This one was designed by Baris, but they sometimes work with local artists on these (I’ll share another example of cinemas doing that in the next section).
Züleyha & Baris also create ‘moving wallpapers’ for their cinema screens, which was something I hadn’t encountered before. Instead of a holding slide or a trailer with details of an upcoming season or screening, these are aesthetically pleasing clips consisting of long, static shots from the film with some minimal branding added. They find that audiences are more likely to share these on their socials than if it were a bog-standard holding slide.
In a similarly meditative vein, Züleyha shared her approach to social media – which includes posting short, observational clips that showcase the everyday goings on in the cinema (such as staff putting up posters, chatting in the street outside, or working in the kitchen). Here’s a nice example from their Instagram. As well as being a welcome change of pace from the more frenetic content often produced for social media, it seems like a good way of giving people a sense of your venue before their first visit.
Overall, Züleyha and Baris’s message was that if you have the means, it’s worthwhile to invest in skilled staff to produce creative content – people who are given time to spend on creating artistic materials and building a sense of place for your cinema.
Working with creatives in your community
Later that day we heard from Verena Stackelberg, Founder and Managing Director of Wolf Kino in Berlin. The story of Wolf began in 2011, when Verena first set foot in the building – which in its past lives had been a bookbinding workshop, a laundromat, a bakery, a tobacco shop, and a brothel. Through a €55,000 crowdfunding campaign, the building was transformed into one of the liveliest cinemas in the city, opening in March 2017.
Since its launch, Verena and the team have put a lot of work into building a consistent identity for the venue – and wolfish imagery can be found in various guises through the cinema’s website, social media, merchandise and artworks.
What stuck with me most were the original film posters Wolf has been producing on a monthly basis since 2018. These are created by a local graphic designer, or occasionally their in-house artist, and are distributed with their monthly printed programme. The poster is always for a new release and the artist’s fee is covered by the distributor. Although it includes some subtle Wolf branding, it doesn’t include information specific to their cinema and so can be used more widely by the distributor as alternative artwork. Not only do their audiences enjoy collecting them and sharing them on social media, local artists now get in touch with Wolf to ask to do the next one, and earlier this year they held an exhibition of the posters in the cinema! Here’s a few recent examples I particularly liked:
Handing over control
A recurring theme throughout the Lab was the potential benefits of giving your staff ownership over their work and the cinema more widely. Whether it’s handing over your TikTok to your front-of-house staff to curate, or giving your café manager autonomy over its business decisions, audiences are more likely to respond to something that feels authentic and your staff will be more invested in their work and making the cinema a success.
Nataša Šimunov, Cinema Manager at Kino Valli in Pula, shared learnings from their Kino 15+ project, a programming group by and for young people. While there is a mentorship element that provides the young programmers with insight into the nitty gritty of the programming process, the young people have ownership over the events: they choose the films, create the marketing materials, and even decide on the pricing (€3). On average they get 90 attendees per screening, and the young programmer’s Instagram page has more followers than the cinema’s own!
A new film canon
Young audiences and how to engage them with independent cinema was a common concern amongst the cohort, and Anna Ramzerová of Kino Aero in Prague shared their ongoing programming project which aims to refresh the traditional film canon. At the end of the Lab we were tasked with submitting three films to be part of a ‘new film canon’, one which we thought would appeal to a new generation of cinephiles (Hollywood films were not allowed, though a few rebellious spirits pushed some through).
The top five most-voted for titles were: City of God, Spirited Away, Dogtooth, Y Tu Mamá También, and Daisies. The full selection is pretty wide-ranging, and I’ve put it into a Letterboxd list for you to peruse here (and yes dear reader, fear not, Bean [1999] made the cut).
A ghost story
I will end this blog with a story to chill even the most robust soul. Wolfgang Pielmeier from Stadkino in Vienna explained how they run monthly 6am screenings on weekdays, which attract 200-300 people each time (!), as they enjoy watching a film before heading to work. What can explain this? Is it a curious quirk of the Viennese? Do they wake at the crack of dawn to ponder the benefits of gegenpressing? Or is this a thus far under-explored programming opportunity that could be replicated elsewhere? Whatever the reasons behind their success, I think the visible shudder from the programmer-projectionist sitting next to me (as they realised what time they’d have to wake up to deliver such a screening) illustrates that your colleagues may need some convincing if you’re keen to try this in your cinema.