How to get grannies to cinema and other tricks
“Auf Wiedersehen Finnland” is a historical documentary on Finnish women that left to Germany during the II world war. It has had good publicity and a nice amount of spectators since February 2010. Still, one of the biggest problems for the producers was to get the target audience – elder ladies – to the theaters.
Photo: Virpi Suutari
– We assumed the documentary will have regional interest in Finland. Many elder women are active, but they’re not cinema heavy users. Internet wasn’t very useful for us, not to mention Facebook. We couldn’t even sell screenings beforehand for women organizations, because we weren’t able to get screening times in advance. So, we hoped that newspapers and television would note the film, and fortunately they did, described producer Cilla Werning in Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankylä in June.
Virpi Suutari, the already successful director of the documentary was convinced about the film’s theater potential, although the numbers of spectators of documentaries have been relatively low recently. Nevertheless, the commercial distributors didn’t even want to discuss about distributing documentaries.
The production company, For Real Productions, decided to distribute the film through Suomen elokuvakontakti.
– In my opinion, the most reasonable way of marketing documentaries is through grassroot level. Of course, there have been successful documents for bigger audience this spring, but a historical documentary is a bit different, Werning thinks.
Photo: Heikki Färm
How to get the film to theaters
For Real Productions started to produce Auf Wiedersehen Finnland in the end of 2008 with a 330 000 euro budget. It got national support from Yle, SES and AVEK.
– The budget was quite big: the archive material and filming costs in Norway and Germany were enormous. Nevertheless, after Doc Point festival in January 2010 we encountered a disappointment. We didn’t manage to get additional support from Finnish Film Foundation (SES) to cover up the theatrical distribution costs, Cilla Werning tells.
According to SES, the documentary wasn’t a real theater film to be distributed.
– We should have known about our film’s theater possibilities already in the production phase. It was quite a tough moment, she admits.
There was also a lot of pondering about the distribution strategy: a digital copy or a 35 millimeter copy?
– A 35 millimeter copy is very expensive, so we chose digital. The problem is that digital theaters are enormous and we didn’t get evening screening times. We didn’t get any minimum compensation from the theaters either, only percentage of the income. In that way, it was far less risky for theaters, Werning describes.
Better times ahead
Auf Wiedersehen Finnland premiered in February 10th and progressed little by little to different kind of cities in Finland.
– We’ve had only three copies whole time, so we didn’t want go to big cities at once, Werning explains.
The biggest surprise waited in Rovaniemi, Lapland. The documentary got almost 1 500 spectators and the screenings were not even in the theater, but in arctic centre Arktikum.
Despite the difficulties, Cilla Werning believes there will be more documentaries like Auf Wiedersehen Finnland in coming years.
– I’m quite convinced that smaller documentaries will benefit from the success of documentaries aimed for bigger audiences, like for example Reindeer spotting and Miesten vuoro/Steam of life, she concludes.