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DISTRIBUTION Spain

El Cosmonauta lands thanks to an unusual distribution model

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- The film premiered in Madrid yesterday, and will be available online, on television and through VoD from May 18

On Tuesday May 14, the commercial journey of one of the most unusual Spanish cinema projects, El Cosmonauta, kicked off with a premiere in Madrid. With a storyline on the race for space in the 1970s in the USSR, the film is the first Spanish film to be financed through crowdfunding. Its release date of May 18 is based on the concept of day-and-date, in which the film will be distributed simultaneously across a variety of platforms, from cinemas, to video on demand, online and television. El Cosmonauta’s secret is another one entirely though.

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The film’s particularity is the community that production team Riot Cinema Collective was able to assemble around the project, from when the idea was first announced, before a screenplay existed, up until the sale of its premiere’s tickets online. Step by step, and thanks to active use of social networks, it was able to get 4,500 micro-philanthropists involved, bringing €450,000 of the overall €860,000 film’s budget. 

A red carpet was laid out yesterday on Madrid’s Plaza de Callao for the film’s premiere. This will not be the only cinema venue where the film will be screened. All that needs to be done to get the film in a movie theatre is request it. If the cinema charges no entrance fee, no money will go back to production, if it does charge an entrance fee, half of that money will go to the film’s production. The film will thus be screened in Italy (Bologna), the United States (Seattle), Ecuador (Cuenca), the Ukraine (Kiev), Canada (Montreal and Toronto), Russia (Moscow) and the United Kingdom (London). Other Spanish cities will start screening the film in the upcoming weeks, including Barcelona, Valencia, Seville and San Sebastian.

Following a desire for “spectators to see our film when, how and where they want,” as director Nicolás Alcalá put it, the film will be available simultaneously across a number of mediums: cinemas, Internet (on the official website and on video on demand platforms such as Yomvi) and television (in Spain on Canal+).

El Cosmonauta is also a trans-media project, with 32 web-episodes created around the project, as well as a book and an enormous amount of making of material, which will compliment the paid for versions. 

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(Translated from Spanish)

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