Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

/ARTS WEEKLY/LATIN AMERICA: Microcinemas and Digital Alternatives

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, May 10 2005 (IPS) - Digital technologies and microcinemas are providing an alternative for getting non-commercial films distributed and screened more widely in Latin America, while offering lower-cost options for independent filmmakers to produce their works.

Hundreds of films made in the past few decades by filmmakers in countries like Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Cuba or Brazil, that have been packed away in moth balls, could begin to reach a much broader audience thanks to digital technology.

In addition, the entire production process could be digitalised, from the filming to the screening.

The initiative is promoted by Grupo Chaski (which means "messenger" in the Quechua indigenous language), a film collective from Peru.

"When you radically change technology, everything changes," Swiss producer Stefan Kaspar, who has lived in Peru since 1978, told IPS. "The way of thinking also changes. All of a sudden, we have the chance to bring films closer to the people."

Kaspar, a member of Grupo Chaski, was talking about microcinemas.

After more than 20 years of working to bring "Latin American films to Latin American people," the group began in 2004 to promote the creation of a network of microcinemas in Peru.

The aim is to ultimately set up these small alternative outlets throughout the entire national territory.

All that is needed to install a microcinema is a room full of chairs, a video projector, a DVD player, a sound system and a screen, at a total cost that has dropped from 5,000 dollars a few years ago to 2,500 dollars today.

The network in Peru so far consists of 25 microcinemas, where this year’s programme for the bi-monthly screenings includes a feature-length film, a short, a documentary and a children’s movie.

Some of the microcinemas are run by people who might turn them into for-profit microenterprises, while others have been made possible thanks to the cooperation of municipal authorities, and several are linked to non-governmental organisations or educational institutions.

Grupo Chaski was founded in 1982 by a group of five filmmakers in Peru with the aim of producing films and distributing and exhibiting their own works as well as foreign films in slum neighbourhoods around Lima or remote rural communities.

Kaspar, one of the original members of Chaski, who has produced films like ‘Gregorio’ (1985), says independent filmmakers should look towards digital production, distribution and screening.

IPS interviewed the filmmaker during the third annual edition of the International Non-Budget Film Festival, held Apr. 18-24 in the eastern Cuban city of Gibara.

The new possibilities opened up by digital technologies cut publicity costs to a bare minimum. "The word gets around mouth to mouth," said Kaspar, pointing to the group’s first experience, which involved a travelling exhibit of Peruvian and Swiss films.

"People like the idea, and they also like the cost of the tickets, which can be no higher than two ‘sols’ (60 cents of a dollar) – seven times cheaper than the cost of admission to a multi-screen cinema," said the filmmaker.

When Chaski released ‘Gregorio’, whose cast was mainly made up of street children and other non-actors, it was seen by one million spectators in Peru. Four years later, ‘Juliana’ (another film about street children) drew a total audience of just 630,000, and in 1995 only 94,000 people came out to see ‘Go, Run, Fly’.

Kaspar said the strong impact of ‘Gregorio’, which follows the descent of a poor boy from the Andean highlands into street life in Lima was possible because a decentralised national network of 230 cinemas still existed back then in Peru.

But today all that is left are 33 multi-screen cinemas, 31 of which are located in five neighbourhoods in Lima.

"Wherever a supermarket is built, they put in a multi-screen movie theatre as well. These are concentrated in upper middle-class neighbourhoods, a phenomenon that turns films into just one more commodity for fast, easy, superficial consumption," he said.

As in other countries in the region, many people in Peru have stopped going out to the movies, partly due to the availability of home videos, but also because neighbourhood movie theatres have disappeared, and admission prices for the one that remain have soared.

As in cinemas around the world, 95 percent of the movies shown in the multi-screen theatres in Peru come from Hollywood. A mere four percent come from Latin America and just one percent from Europe.

But the popularity of ‘Gregorio’ was a demonstration of the public’s interest in nationally-produced films that show life in Latin America in all of its diversity, said Kaspar.

He noted, however, that there are many hurdles standing in the way of the distribution of films produced in Latin America, which average around 150 feature-length works a year, "at least 20 percent of which are cinematographic jewels."

Nevertheless, the microcinemas and digital technologies offer a new chance to make the region’s little-known filmmaking treasures more widely available as part of "a decentralised effort to bring our films to the people, wherever they are working, and in cooperation with their own community organisations," said Kaspar.