The European Work in Progress (EWIP) and International Film Distribution Summit (IFDS) industry events are bringing fresh, new dynamics to the Filmfest Hamburg Industry Days by presenting European arthouse film projects as well as hosting distributors and world sales agents. More than 250 industry reps attended the two events, which also offered the opportunity to discuss challenges and changes in the ever-evolving film and media landscape.

European producers and distributors are all in the same boat when it comes to the promotion and marketing of their movies, stated the speakers at the opening panel, “A New Path for European Film Distribution in the Post-social-media Era”. Indeed, declining reach, rising advertising costs and the dominance of a select few global platforms are making it incredibly difficult to connect with audiences through social media, as Fabian Massah, head of Filmfest Hamburg Industry Days, pointed out. Anne-Cécile Roland, head of Acquisitions at Pyramide, said that social media requires ever-growing P&A fees. For the French distributor, it’s also important to target local audiences in small cities with ads in newspapers and initiatives linked to cinemas. “We are using all of these tools to access the world of cinephiles.” The French platform AlloCiné enables the distributor to keep track of all of the data. “We also share our data with distributors in our union.”

Meanwhile, it is currently not an option for Filmfest Hamburg to share or exchange any data. “We are trying to arouse interest in our film programme on Instagram, but we don’t share any data. I think we have to be careful with that,” stated Malika Rabahallah, director of Filmfest Hamburg.

“Audiences were often tired of only getting information that focuses on mainstream titles. Therefore, they skipped the precious small films that we present. The curiosity faded away,” said Felix Grassmann, CEO of Hamburg-based arthouse cinema Abaton, who sees the subscription model as a way to bring people back to the cinema. “This really works out for them because it doesn’t cost them more if they go to the cinema every day. The audience even comes and watches small documentaries they’ve hardly ever heard of.”

Social media is very important, emphasised German film journalist Rüdiger Suchsland. “I think the start of the decline of the old idea of arthouse films, cinemas and reviews was at the beginning of digitisation. It killed it all, and invented a new kind of cinema and a new kind of film review. It used to be very much divided between reviewing and film criticism on one hand, and PR on the other. Now, it’s mixing. From the point of view of a festival or a world sales agent, we should be helping your PR. But in the long run, we should be aware that there is a big danger of destroying the whole system that we used to call ‘film culture’.”

There is also a huge difference between the audience response in the cinema and the one on social media. When a filmmaker in the audience mentioned that his film had only 3,500 theatrical viewers but about one million clicks on YouTube and 100,000 likes on Instagram, exhibitor Grassmann explained that one click does not equate to a cinemagoer. 

Indeed, there is a need for European cinema to create new models that address audiences more directly above and beyond the algorithms. According to Anne-Cécile Roland, every movie is a prototype: “We have to design the whole campaign around each film,” she summed up.