Experiential events are vital to keep audiences coming to arthouse cinemas, according to a selection of arthouse exhibition heads spanning the UK, USA, Poland and the United Arab Emirates.
“Releases aren’t working for us,” said Butheina Kazim, founder of Dubai’s Cinema Akil, the first arthouse cinema in the Gulf region. “We really have to rely heavily on ‘eventising’ every release. We’ve just increased the number of special focus weeks and retrospectives tremendously since we reopened [post-pandemic], because that’s the only thing that creates a certain urgency.
“We used to run a film for a maximum of three weeks, that was our threshold. Now anything over a two-week period, we are automatically at a loss.”
Kazim was speaking on a panel at the UK pavilion in Cannes alongside Glasgow Film’s Allison Gardner; Peggy Johnson from The Loft Cinema in Tuscon, Arizona; and Marlena Gabryszewska from the Arthouse Cinemas Association, Poland, with the BFI’s head of UK audiences Ben Luxford moderating.
”We have discovered, as time has gone by, first run films, like Triangle Of Sadness, we have Beau Is Afraid showing right now, they’re just not performing the way we would expect them to,” said Johnson. ”So we’ve programmed special events almost every day of the week, and they’re doing really well – pre-pandemic numbers, selling out, making $5,000 or $6,000 on a single screening when we might not make that for a whole week of a first run film.”
Gardner has noted younger audiences are now the key demographic filling up the Glasgow Film Theatre. “They love format, so we’re doing a Wes Anderson season in the run up to Asteroid City,” said Gardner. “They love classic cinema on the big screen, that younger audience has a hunger for [it].”
“The arthouse audience has changed and become younger, more ephemeral, more adventurous,” agreed Kazim.
In 2022, Kazim’s cinema pivoted its offering to lean into this audience. “We’ve tried every possible use of the space as a community space,” said Kazim.“We’ve invited people to come in and take it over. We’ve run cinema meditation sessions, we’ve run stand-up comedy shows, we’ve done rentals and photo shoots. We’ve invited filmmakers who are making TikTok videos to come in and show their film during off-peak hours on the big screen. We let the cinema live in the hands of the audience.”
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