Country Focus: Italy

Schermi di Qualità improving results for Italian, European titles

by  Camillo de Marco

28/05/2010 - Over the last year, 214 Italian and European participating films garnered eight million admissions from 672 screens through the Schermi di Qualità (“Quality Screens”) project promoted by AGIS with exhibitors associations and financed by the Ministry of Culture (MiBAC) through Arcus with €3.5m a year.

The project’s fourth edition – the results of which presented yesterday – registered a 28% increase in spectators. "This means that the project is working so we’ll ask the General Direction for Cinema to for more help”, said Paolo Protti, president of ANEC.

Nicola Borrelli, Director General of Cinema at MiBAC confirmed: “I believe strongly in this project because it involves the important exhibition sector and helps promote quality Italian films. We have no intention of reducing our contribution to Schermi di Qualità, but are actually studying a way to be directly involved”.

According to a research by Cattid/Sapienza University of Rome presented yesterday to the press, numerous Italian and European films that are less "visible" to wider audiences took in over 75% of their gross from the project’s theatres.

Daniele Luchetti’s Our Life [trailer], starring Cannes award winner Elio Germano, received half of its gross from Schermi di Qualità theatres over the last few days. Other films that registered great results were Giorgio Diritti’s The Man Who Will Come [trailer, film focus] (74%), Citto Maselli’s Le ombre rosse (83%) and Pietro Marcello’s The Mouth of the World [trailer, film focus] (73.5%).

European films include Welcome [trailer, film focus] (84% of its box office came from Schermi di Qualità), The White Ribbon [trailer, film focus] (81%), Soul Kitchen [trailer] (77.5%) and Looking for Eric [trailer, film focus] (76%). In the Promisoft chart of Schermi di Qualità films released from June 2009-April 2010, there are four Italian titles and an Italian co-production among the top five: first up was Giuseppe Tornatore’s Baarìa [trailer], followed by Radu Mihaileanu’s The Concert [trailer, film focus] (France/Romania/Belgium/Italy), Paolo Virzì’s La prima cosa bella [trailer], Ferzan Ozpetek’s Loose Cannons [trailer] and Carlo Verdone’s Io, loro e Lara [trailer].

“Schermi di Qualità contributed to increasing the market share of domestic films to over 30% in the past few months,” said ANICA president Riccardo Tozzi. “Distributors are increasingly more oriented towards releasing films on fewer screens, but for a longer period of time”.