Small cinemas crisis, exhibitors are mobilizing
Less than a month ago, the Christmas period ended, which for cinemas all over the world is a period of “high season” and of higher revenues. Considering that Christmas 2020 was happy at the appeal, he had looked at these days as the real springboard for a restart of Italian cinema, with the expectation of an audience ready to pour in and find themselves in the hall, eager to watch a film on the big screen, both in small cinemas and multiplexes. Unfortunately, however, this never came, or rather it dropped by 75% compared to 2019. A crisis that exacerbates the very hard one already underway. Previously, cinemas had been closed for a year and a half: when the first cases of Covid were discovered in Italy in 2020, on 24 February the cinemas were obliged to close, before all the other establishments and when still one might think that the epidemic was transient. When the theaters reopened in September 2021 they now looked like ghost places. A year and a half black hole in which cinema has suffered enormous economic time wasters. The most affected were skilled workers in the sector, many and with many types of jobs, who suddenly lost their jobs; film festivals, such as the canceled Cannes 2020 edition; the film industry in general due to the impossibility of making films and thus producing new new and new fuel for the seventh art. The damage was not only economic, but also cultural, and it was the final thrust to the art of cinema, already not very fit under water since the pandemic. In order for there to be a twist in the course of the plot, which has been profoundly dramatic up to now, we are clamoring for help from our trade associations, because they can help us put together new communication strategies, try to obtain more funds and subsidies for the safety of workers, establish rules that also put the exhibitor at the center, often overwhelmed by not very functional logics, insert a “window” that regulates once and for all the release time of a film between theaters and platforms (which now does not exceeds thirty days and it is really too little). More needs to be done and it needs to be done now. We also shout loudly to the State not to lose sight of us once again, unless in Italy a future of the “cinema place” is desired. We ask to extend and integrate the work support measures, from the extension of the extraordinary fund for Covid-19, to the possibility of access to shock absorbers, to income support measures, drawing on all the necessary tools, until the peak phase of the pandemic income will not be exceeded. Elena Zanni, director of Fulgor and Settebello cinema Rimini Roberto Naccari, director of Supercinema Santarcangelo Alessandra Biondi, director of multiplex Abbondanza Gambettola
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