«Our partnership with Venice Film Festival is based on promotion and communication», Gianluca Guzzo, founder and CEO of MYmovies explains. This is the eleventh year in a row that the movie portal handles the virtual theatre of the Venice Film Festival that streams a selection of movies from Orizzonti, Out of competition, Extra, Venice Days and Biennale College – Cinema. The URL is www.mymovies.it/ondemand/biennalecinema/ and includes a library of movies previously shown in Venice between 2007 and 2021. The movies of Venezia 79 are available for 5 days until the sell-out of the 2500 seats of the virtual theatre.
«We started to face the first lockdown. We shortly arrived to offer 5000 movies a year», Guzzo says about the metamorphosis of MYmovies that is no more just a movie magazine and database but is now also a “streaming platform for cinephiles” both free and TVOD.
«It was March 2020, we were all stuck in our houses, and we understood that there was an audience that was orphan of that art-house cinema that was not available on the streaming services. Then we started working with distributors to “screen” a movie per night ». Working with the festival was the natural consequence:
«In 2020 we offered our service to 80 Italian festivals. In 2021 were 140. This year festivals are much less because the restrictions connected with the pandemic are ended, the virtual theatre is interesting only for events with more international oriented», Guzzo explains. Venice, but also Far East, Science+Fiction, Shorts, Trieste Film Festival, Festival dei Popoli, Korea Film Festival, Biografilm, 16corto e il festival del cinema muto di Pordenone, the latter the only one that can be broadcasted out of the Italian network:
«Pordenone is a case history», Guzzo says, «New York is the place with most viewers during the festival, followed by London and then Pordenone!».
This year Italian cinema is suffering at the box office. What did you learn about Italian production from your experience?
«Last year the film that performed best was Ariaferma which was also a good success in theatres. I believe that MYMovies can promote independent art-house cinema, especially Italian cinema. This year we have great expectations from Risuleo, Roberta Torre and Ghezzi».
