- Fernando Lara will coordinate the meeting on “The Future of Theatrical Distribution” with the participation of some thirty distributors and the main film exhibition chains
The Valladolid International Film Festival will host for the fifth time ‘Find Distribution at Seminci’, an initiative designed so that Spanish independent and auteur film distributors have an opportunity to learn about films that still lack distribution in Spain and to purchase their exhibition rights. Within the framework of this scheme, a new expert meeting on “The Future of Theatrical Distribution ” will take place, coordinated by former director of Seminci Fernando Lara, on Wednesday, October 27.
‘Find Distribution at Seminci’, which will run between October 26 and 28, allows previously accredited film industry professionals to attend private screenings and acquire the rights to films programmed at the festival that have not yet secured their release in Spain. The initiative’s goal is to facilitate the theatrical exhibition of arthouse movies, as happened in the festival’s latest edition with Preparations to Be Together For an Unknown Period of Time, a film which landed in Valladolid without a Spanish distributor and whose exhibition rights were acquired thanks to this arrangement (eventually the movie bagged last year’s Gold Spike). The initiative was launched in 2017 and its purpose is for the Valladolid festival to serve as a spur to national and international auteur cinema, which often finds it difficult to gain exposure to theatrical audiences.
Regarding the expert gathering on the 27th, this will bring together some thirty representatives of the main Spanish independent distributors, in addition to the major exhibition chains, in order to analyse the current situation and future prospects of the sector. The event will first hold a closed-door session in the morning and, later in the day, a round table attended by the public where the main conclusions will be announced and discussed.
The round table panel, which will start at 5:00 p.m. in Teatro Calderón’s Hall of Mirrors, will be chaired by former director of Seminci Fernando Lara and formed by film exhibitor Enrique González Macho; ADICINE’s director Miguel Morales; the chief executive of Próxima, Silvia Lobo; and the president of the Exhibitors Federation (FECE), Juan Ramón Gómez Fabra.
In previous editions, the focus has been on issues such as the proliferation of new exhibition platforms, the promotion of arthouse cinema in educational institutions or the collaboration between auteur film festivals and independent distribution in a context of technological and digital transformation of the film medium that particularly affects movie theatres.
