Ale Kino

Ale Kino! says “yes, we made it!”

If you insist, we could certainly line up a few ways in which the wretched year 2020 made a positive contribution to humanity. The answers will not only be in slowing down the pace of life, or reducing harmful emissions, but also in enlarging our daily vocabulary. We all know now what is a hybrid festival (or we pretend to). But how did we experience these hybrid events and what did we learn from them? The Ale Kino! festival looked for answers in an online meeting on 2 December, under the meaningful and rightly triumphant title “Yes, we made it!”. The start of the Ale Kino! festival always announces the end of another festival year, and the urge to look back and reflect. Which was now needed more than ever. “A collective festival therapy session”, is how one of the participants described this meeting. The concept: approximately 15 festivals all had 4 minutes to answer three crucial questions about their successes and challenges. Afterwards a report was published, from which we collected these striking conclusions and quotes.

“We never had so much school attendance before, finally reaching out to those schools that are geographically located too far away to attend the festival. Now these schools are telling us that ‘we hope that you’ll do it again next year, so that we can participate again’.” In many cases there was a significant increase in festival audiences. Often these new participants came from small or isolated villages, or from regions that were not covered within the festival’s normal outreach. “These are the people we want to keep in our future editions.” It will be difficult to answer to everyone’s needs and find the right balance so that no audience – locals nor newcomers – should feel neglected.

Online discussions and young audience panels were often very intense, as if teenagers felt more at ease in their home environment. “It didn’t feel like a festival if I didn’t see children queuing in front of the auditorium. Our young audience sees the cinema as ‘their space’ – ‘the cinema is ours’ – and this year we had none of that.”

Online festivals might help you to discover the extreme loyalty of your regular audience: “Whatever the format will be in the future, we should never neglect our local audiences.” “We’ve tried out many things in this edition, and some of it I want to continue.” Almost every festival considers implementing parts of the online experience in future editions, bringing the best of both worlds together. “Having the cinemas closed was bad news, but the schools closing was even worse.”

If the biggest challenge was “how to recreate a specific festival atmosphere in an online environment?” all festivals found ways to do so. Find the full report here. “Yes, we made it!” took place in the framework of “Ale Kino! Industry/Education Pro”.