Film New Europe, along with Europa Cinemas, has been carrying out this focus for some time taking into consideration the challenges each cinema faces and the successes they achieve. The selection of Kino Mediteran comes after 2016 proved to be a very successful year. The Kino Mediteran project is a shared project between Mediterranean Film Festival Split and all the host towns, and in 2016 it joined the Europa Cinemas network.

Kino Mediteran’s journey began in 2012, with 33 screening in 11 cities and attracted 4000 viewers. In 2016, 102 European and foreign films were shown in 517 screenings visited by 23 561 viewers. In 2015, cinemas in Bol, Hvar, Imotski, Komiža and Pirovec were digitalized, while last year cinemas in Supetar, Jelsa and Lastovo were added to the list.

‘Considering we organize cinema programmes in small towns and island villages, where there hadn’t been theatres in decades, our greatest challenge was developing a public. Generations of youth never had the habit of or opportunity to see a movie in their own town. Furthermore, an additional challenge was that more than half of our repertoire consisted of independent films.

Our project is carried out in very small communities – our biggest town has a population of 9000, while the rest have less than 3000. During the tourist season these numbers grow, as do the number of viewers. That is why we need to work especially hard to attract viewers during the winter months. We are very pleased that both the number of screenings and the number of viewers is increasing during winter, and our project is growing and is visibly improving,’ said Alen Mutinić, Kino Mediteran project intiator and director of the Mediterranean Film Festival Split, in an interview for FNE.

As for the project’s future, Mutinić says, ‘Our goal is to equip two or three more cinemas and secure DCP technology for our travelling cinema because some towns are simply too small to set up a cinema in. A travelling cinema equipped with DCP technology would enable us to offer more regular and better quality screenings in those smaller places.’

For more on Kino Mediteran click here, while the whole interview can be found here.