Launched online on 6 October, the festival MyMetaStories (read the article) will land tomorrow and stay for three days in the metaverse, in its own dedicated universe on Minecraft (270 millions of players worldwide). We met up with Daniela Elstner, executive director of Unifrance, the agency of the international promotion of French cinema and audiovisual content, who heads this new initiative.

Cineuropa: Where did the idea to promote young European cinema on Minecraft, in the metaverse, come from? 
Daniela Elstner: Initially, there was simply the idea to transpose MyFrenchFilmFestival whose mechanisms are perfectly under control, into a festival for young European cinema. But simply reproducing the event seemed to us a little too easy, and because we are always thinking in parallel about young audiences, who are the audience of the future, the metaverse quickly emerged as a promising territory. Because there was no question of speculating with public money, nor of paying in bitcoin, and after exploring several possibilities, what seemed to us like the ideal space was Minecraft, a construction game and a universe that brings together players aged 8 to 30 (with more than 30% of them women). With the help of good specialists, this idea became a reality little by little.

What does this MyMetaStories City look like, practically speaking?
It wasn’t possible to simply put a cinema in Minecraft and tell young people to go see what’s happening there. We therefore created mini-games in the film world but strongly inspired by the playing techniques of Minecraft. The main quest is to look for an actor who has disappeared from a shoot, through encounters with members of the team, from the producer to the boom operator, the screenwriter to the camerawoman, etc. But in order to play, the player needs to watch the film first because there are clues hidden in it. We therefore enter a playful terrain whose codes are familiar to Minecraft players, but we then suggest to them, as in any real cinema, a real three-day programme: the films screen at a certain time, you need to get a ticket, you enter the screening room, the lights go down, you sit next to other avatars, etc. And the 13 screening rooms are customised in the style of the 13 short films in the programme (which are subtitles in six languages). However, we will do a different test on the last day, since the films will be accessible without a fixed screening time. We’ve also approached some influencers (famous Minecraft streamers such as Aypierre and The Guill84 in France, Shadoune666 for Spanish speakers and Nihachu for English speakers) so that they might enter the MyMetaStories universe together with their communities.

What are your goals for this first edition?
We want to see whether integrating the codes of young people creates a "hype" then a desire to see the feature films of the festival (prizes for winning the games are packs to watch the films). Ultimately, in fact, we would like the prize to be tickets for screenings in IRL cinemas, but that’s a bit too complicated to set up for this first edition because MyMetaStories is a worldwide festival. Globally speaking, we want to tell young people about cinema in an entertaining way, we don’t want them to get the impression that it is a recommendation for adult cinephiles: to speak to them with their own words, with their influencers, in their world. There already were screening rooms in the metaverse, but they didn’t have anything to screen. Our virtual cinema experience is also conceived to remind players of the existence of real cinemas, of course. It actually wouldn’t have been possible without the support of Europe Creative MEDIA because there is always some reluctance when people try to innovate, to plunge into the unknown. With the data on players, their country, their age, etc., we will be able to analyse what works. But we are also betting on the fan club aspect of it and this is why the idea for MyMetaStories started from MyFrenchFilmFestival, which now gathers a very large network seeking French and European cinema, innovation, and exchange.