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Post: Manager of Italy’s oldest cinema writes to Minister Franceschini about the future of theaters

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At a still very difficult moment for the film business in Italy, Alessandro Giacobbe, who manages Sivori in Genoa through Alesbet, wrote an open letter to the Minister of Culture. Here is the text.

Alessandro Giacobbe is the managing director Academy 2, a distribution company specializing in quality cinema. But Jacob, through Alesbet, which he heads, is also an operator: he is a manager Italy’s oldest cinema, Sivori in Genoa.
And as an exhibitor, but also just as a film enthusiast, he decided to write lhectare open to Minister of Culture Dario Franceschinireal a call on the government to take steps to secure the future of a sector under enormous strain due to the pandemicand in particular to those smaller and smaller cinemas that throughout Italy offer quality cinema out of touch with the commercial mainstream.
This is the text of the letter that we received and are happy to publish.

LETTER TO MINISTER FRANCHINI FROM THE OLDEST CINEMA IN ITALY

Honorable Minister Franceschini,
For more than twenty years, our company has had the honor and burden of managing Italy’s oldest cinema hall, the Sivori Hall in Genoa, which in 1896 projected the first moving images of the Lumiere brothers and has remained true to its mission ever since. distribution of the seventh art, and also be known in the news, because in 1892 it was the venue for the founding meeting of the Italian Socialist Party.
Today, the Sivori cinema, along with the other historical cinemas we operate in Genoa, some of which, such as the Sivori, with its ultra-century history behind it, are in serious danger of being interrupted, as are hundreds of other Italian cinemas run by small Italian companies. companies. , which are a network that guarantees the diversity and diversity of the cultural offer and strives to differentiate the offer to the public from the multiplex networks operated mainly by international investment funds.
Nearly a thousand cinemas are urban and provincial cinemas struggling to survive and run mainly by exhibitors who are cultural operators and organize meetings, reviews, debates, cooperation with schools, and closely follow the structural and technological adaptation to keep pace with the needs . viewers, but who need to re-accustom the public to watching films produced for the hall and exclusively for exploitation for an adequate period of time, which can never be the subject of an agreement between participants in the supply chain, divided by needs that have little to do with the socio-cultural sphere, on which your ministry must invoke, intervening autonomously with a reasonable regulation setting an interval of 180 days between entering the hall and subsequent exploits, at least for the transitional period after the emergency (albeit with some reasonable exceptions).
Just as exhibitors have proven to be sensible and cooperative during the pandemic, one would expect similar engagement from creators, manufacturers and distributors for an agreement that offers space exclusivity for the time needed to rebuild habits. a public today inundated with advertising that promotes films simultaneously with the cinema and on the platform for a very short period of time and that discourages cinema visits because the first exploitation is necessarily more expensive than the second and is justified only by the restoration of exceptional screening times. several months, not just a few weeks.
The eventual disappearance of cinemas that promote quality cinema will also entail the decline of those independent publishing and distribution houses that bring to Italy dozens of films that have won awards at the most important international festivals and that already today find it difficult to find an outlet in this form of salt. , is less and less present in the area.
Looking at cinemas and related ones, we are talking about the risk of losing tens of thousands of jobs and witnessing an unprecedented cultural impoverishment in favor of supply homogenization.
Minister, we would like the oldest cinema in Italy to be able to celebrate other milestones in the name of the diversity of the cultural offer, along with other thousands of Italian structures, and should not be subject to market logic, we need a policy that returns the audience in theaters even more than we need financial support for advertising campaigns that would have been futile without a decisive turn to the exploitation history policy.
Make a bold choice and ensure Cinema in Cinemas is the future.
Regards and good work!

Alessandro Giacobbe

President Alesbet S.r.l.

Source: Coming Soon

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