- The American French Film Festival opened Monday in Hollywood.
- The festival is intended to show Hollywood the best of French productions.
- Cineworld, the second-largest movie theater chain, seems set for major restructuring.
Monday saw the start of the American French Film Festival in Hollywood, which was accompanied by worries about the steep decline in cinema attendance in France and the US since the pandemic.
At the 26th edition of the festival designed to showcase the best French productions to Hollywood, director Jean-Jacques Annaud told AFP that “There´s no hiding the fact: cinema is experiencing a real upheaval.”
He said before the North American premiere of his most recent film “Notre-Dame On Fire” that cinemas are in “people who have equipped themselves with large screens during confinement… cinemas are in great difficulty and the industry is in the process of switching to (streaming) platforms.”
“There is a whole category of so-called intermediate films which risk no longer having their place on the big screen,” he said.
Movie theatres on both sides of the Atlantic are having trouble drawing crowds.
The National Association of Theatre Owners estimates that since the pandemic, 500 theatres have shuttered in the United States.
Additionally, the Wall Street Journal reports that Cineworld, the British company that owns Regal Cinemas, the second-largest chain of movie theatres in the United States, appears to be planning a significant restructure as it gets ready to declare bankruptcy.
According to the most recent statistics from the National Center for Cinema, attendance in France had its worst September since 1980, with ticket sales down 34% from September 2019—before the pandemic.
“It´s always worrying to see that attendance has dropped and it´s struggling to pick up again,” director Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar, who is presenting her film “Divertimento” at the festival, told AFP.
“We have to go find our audience,” she added. “The emotion we have in a movie theater will never be the same as in front of a TV or a telephone.”
The festival, formerly known as COLCOA, presents 75 French movies and TV shows for its 26th edition, several of them are being presented for the first time in North America.
Francois Truffart, the festival’s director, claims that digital channels enable French works to reach a new audience in the United States.
“There is a whole new generation that loves French films and European and Asian series,” he said.
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