After more than a year since the measures that instituted the quarantine caused by Covid-19 were enacted, the data is disastrous. According to information from Canacine, audience attendance in Mexico fell by more than 80%. Only 64 million movie tickets were sold during 2020 against more than 350 million in 2019. We fell four places going from fourth to eighth place worldwide in ticket sales and our country fell from tenth to thirteenth place in terms of percentage of the box office world.
However, the platforms took off (more than they had already taken off): streaming hours increased exponentially; Mexicans consumed more content, movies and series from Netflix or Amazon, YouTube videos and TikTok than ever; for long.
The confinement brought us closer to our personal microscreens and this time we even became filmmakers, documentary makers and photographers. The number of personal channels skyrocketed, not to mention the videoconferencing boom, which took us all, even the most seasoned in technology, by surprise, as the new way of doing everything that previously implied interacting in the same space with the others outside of our inner core: from family reunion to work, having meetings or giving or taking classes.
The glamor of cinema, cameras, lighting, unreachable stars, crews, and bloated budgets gave way to video calling; to Instagram Story and Zoom call from the kitchen; to the dog or the baby intruders in the seriousness of a session of Congress or a court; the teacher who falls asleep or the judge with the face of a cat.
Oh, and by the way, theaters have reopened, a long time ago, in fact, but they’re almost always empty. They appear to be reasonably safe; the circulation of the air and the distance with the other spectators make them a space with less risk. Faced with this paradigm shift, the old ritual of meeting with dozens of strangers in a dark room to share images and sounds meticulously cared for and polished to create a cinematographic work and an experience of collective catharsis, seem like something from the last century, or the year before last. , to be more exact.
Will we be able to reconnect with those old rituals? Will we find time between our video calls and podcasts to go to a movie theater? Will we succumb to the comfort of streaming the series and movies always available on our personal screens?
Cinema will not die, the need to tell stories will continue. The industry needs full rooms. For Mexican filmmakers it is imperative to have the possibility of premiering their films, whether in independent circuits or pompous commercial premieres, in small or large theaters and networks. When you go to the cinema you contribute, with a few pesos, because most of it goes to the distributors or exhibitors (but that’s another issue), to the creators, writers, actors, photographers, makeup artists, hairdressers, illuminators, sound engineers and the Thousands of families who live from this profession, have a reason to get up in the morning to do their work.
@pabloaura
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