18/04/2006

With the 10th French Film Festival in Budapest opening this Tuesday, Cineuropa met up with Joël Chapron, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe at Unifrance, who told us about the excellent performance of French films in Hungary.

“With 6% of the market, French films are the second most popular films shown in Hungary after US productions and are vying for second place with domestic films, which are currently gaining ground. Even if the best years for French films in Hungary were 2003 and 2004, they also performed very well in 2005 with the release of 19 French language films, and 13 French films in a foreign language.

It seems as if the work of Unifrance in Hungary over recent years has bore fruit, with eight Hungarian distributors buying French films in the first quarter of 2006 and the distribution of six features so far this year. Comedies are the most popular genre of films, as French cinema still benefits from its historical image of mass appeal, and Hungarian cinemagoers were brought up with Louis de Funès and Pierre Richard, like almost all filmgoers in the former Communist bloc.

”Hungarian distributors are now pressing for French films to be released in combinations of a higher number of prints. Currently, a major French feature is released on 25 to 30 prints, which is a lot for a small country of 10 million. And one French film in two is released in theatres outside Budapest. In fact, once there are more than five prints, the film is released in the rest of the country. Last year, 13 of the 19 French language features distributed were released on more than 5 prints, thus French films are being screened in half of the country. The short term outlook is good, with more than half of the 10 films programmed this year at the French Film Festival in Budapest scheduled to be released by this summer.”

(Translated from French)