On the eve of the 3rd edition of MyMetaStories (read our article), Daniela Elstner, the managing director of Unifrance, the agency responsible for promoting French film abroad, gave us her viewpoint on an unprecedented experiment.

Cineuropa: How was your experience of the festival unfolding within Minecraft during the first two editions of MyMetaStories?
Daniela Elstner: The really good news is that we’re attracting people, we’re seeing an excellent rate of gamers going to see films in virtual cinemas and influencers are playing the game. So there’s a real avenue to pursue in terms of the work that needs to be put in around films, which wouldn’t be that expensive for distributors to implement, and they’d have a lot to gain from promoting cinema within that universe. It wouldn’t be very complicated because we’ve already developed tools for it. So we’re thinking about how to make it a permanent thing, not necessarily involving us, but so that the MyMetaStories brand endures.

How many of these gamers won over by MyMetaStories will subsequently go to cinemas in real life? We’ve got no idea, but we’re equally unsure over the effectiveness of promoting films via posters in the subway, for example. And it’s first and foremost another way of going out looking for an audience, a young audience which we often tend to underestimate and see as a waste, but the cinema success enjoyed by films such as Consent [+leggi anche:
recensione
scheda film] (which went viral on TikTok) and Beating Hearts [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
scheda film] (which wasn’t specifically geared towards young people, with the latter ultimately favouring Mallory Wanecque and Malik Frikah over Adèle Exarchopoulos and François Civil) proves the opposite to be true.

What about the impact influencers have on these experiments?
It’s enormous. It’s actually thanks to them that we attract our community, given that if we had lots of financial resources to promote cinema on Minecraft, we probably wouldn’t need them. But since we don’t have a sufficient amount, we have to use other means. That said, the influencers we choose don’t do product placement like they would for a shampoo. They come from the gaming world and they’re paid according to the hours they spend playing with their communities. And we’ve found some really passionate people who got involved above and beyond our expectations.

Over and above immediate, measurable results, is this just a way of making cinema trendier?
Yes. It’s about making film more accessible, showing that it’s not just a dusty old thing for old people, but that it’s capable of reinventing itself, especially given the short films in the selection which explore issues affecting young people. We make the effort to put ourselves on their level, to speak their language and use their codes, to make it fun without any kind of obligation (because they can exit whenever they want), and provide them with an opportunity to be surprised and to discover, through mini-games, that cinema is a whole other world (involving film sets, locations, countries, etc.). There’s no magic recipe. We have to dare to experiment. Without Creative Europe – Media, we wouldn’t have been able to conduct this experiment, which allowed us to test lots of different things. Museums are ahead of the game in this respect, but now is the time to go looking for these young gamers, especially since they tend to carry on playing far beyond the age of thirty.

How have film industry professionals reacted to this Minecraft experience?
In three years, things have really changed, and all short film producers are now really enthusiastic about the Minecraft experiment. Arte were also immediately happy for MyMetaStories to screen the animated series Samuel within Minecraft. And when I approached Sony over the trailer for A Magnificent Life [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Sylvain Chomet
scheda film] by Sylvain Chomet, they were a little taken aback to begin with, but eventually they got their heads around the project and agreed to commit. Minecraft is virgin territory for all film professionals, and no-one has any real bearings. And when it comes to the artists and directors, they’re all really interested.

What’s your assessment of the festival’s online arm?
The aim was to create an online European festival, which didn’t exist beforehand. But the conclusion we drew was pretty radical: given all the online possibilities which have been in existence since Covid, it doesn’t hold much interest. If you’re Netflix with bags of cash, for example, you can do it, but when you’re alone at our level… It might make sense if all European companies like Unifrance - each with their own budget and political engagement - joined forces to organise an enormous festival with a little bit of publicity. But a European festival steered solely by Unifrance which doesn’t specialise in this area, couldn’t really work. Because we’ve struggled to make ourselves seen in a world where platforms and their incredibly wide offerings reign supreme. We also looked at making certain feature films available for free (but with geoblocking enabled) on YouTube, but the rightsholders vetoed it due to piracy risks. With feature films, you have to work hard with clearly identified platforms who rightsholders know and who they feel comfortable with.