"In Africa, My French Film Festival is completely free"
Detail of the official poster of the My French Film Festival 2021, from January 15 to February 15.
© My French Film Festival 2021
Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow
8 min
The largest French-speaking online film festival opens this Friday, January 15 on MyFrenchFilmFestival.com and 60 partner platforms around the world.
The 11th edition hopes to surpass last year's phenomenal success: twelve million views in 200 territories.
Interview with Quentin Deleau, Head of Digital Development at Unifrance.
Publicity
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My French Film Festival is the unique brand of Unifrance, the agency for the promotion of French cinema abroad, to promote the seventh art in the form of an online festival around the world.
And online, French cinema is not experiencing a crisis.
While cinemas remain closed all over the world, the 2021 edition of the My French Film Festival offers cinephiles ten short and ten feature films in competition, including
Adolescentes
by Sébastien Lifshitz,
You deserve a love
by Hafsia Herzi or
Heroes never die
from Aude Léa Rapin with Adèle Haenel.
And there will also be virtual reality films, for example
François Vautier's
Experience 1.4.9
.
Movie rentals start from € 1.99, but in Africa all 30 movies will be offered for free for one month, as in Russia, Poland, Romania and South Korea.
RFI
: In ten years, MyFrenchFilmFestival has become the largest French-speaking online film festival in the world.
Many scheduled films are seen more in your home than in theaters.
How do you explain this dazzling success
?
Quentin Deleau
:
The success of the festival is mainly due to two things.
On the one hand, the diversity of the offer of films offered to Internet users around the world, because we are on the best of young French-speaking cinema, and that in a variety of genres: comedies, fictions, thrillers, animated films, documentaries… On the other hand, the fact that the films are available not only on the festival platform, but also on more than 60 partner platforms around the world: global, local platforms… Thus, we multiply the access points to the festival and we reach the largest possible audience.
What does winning the prize in the MyFrenchFilmFestival competition represent for a film
?
The festival awards five prizes, including the Audience Award, Best Short Film, International Press and the International Jury Grand Prize for Best Feature Film, endowed with 15,000 euros.
This helps to prepare the next film.
Many young directors presented their first or second film at MyFrenchFilmFestival and have since had great success in theaters.
And that's all we want.
It's an online festival, but we're not competing with the venue.
We offer the best of young French-speaking cinema to people who do not necessarily have access to this type of cinema or even to cinemas.
So, it's a chance to work with young directors ready to show their films on small screens, even if nothing replaces the cinema, so that later on their film could potentially be released in even more theaters. international.
MyFrenchFilmFestival does not have a red carpet, or parade of international stars, or world premieres, and yet, with twelve million views during the 2020 edition, you could say that you are doing almost as much for the influence of French cinema. in the world as the Cannes Film Festival.
[Laughs] No, we will never do as much as the Cannes Film Festival.
But, this festival makes it possible to give access to this type of cinema to people who, normally, do not necessarily see this type of films.
This is what makes it possible to democratize access to French and Francophone cinema, because we also show Belgian, Swiss and Canadian films.
Part of the festival is free everywhere, in some areas of the world all feature films are also free, for example on the African continent. How many African moviegoers will be able to watch your films for free
?
In Africa, the festival is completely free in all African countries from the MyFrenchFilmFestival.com access.
Last year, among the twelve million views generated, there were 500,000 generated in Africa.
And there is also access to partner platforms, including TV5Mondeplus throughout Africa and Orange in Côte d'Ivoire.
All the films in our selection have subtitles in ten languages, which is interesting for Portuguese-speaking, English-speaking countries, etc.
Your audience in Africa, how has it evolved in recent years
?
The number of views has increased in recent years.
And, more than in other areas of the world, there has been a lot of viewing on cell phones.
The majority of viewing takes place in French-speaking countries particularly attached to the French language, such as Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, but also the countries of the Maghreb.
All the films in the selection are in French and subtitled in ten languages (Spanish, Portuguese, English, Italian, German, Russian, Japanese…).
Since its creation, the festival has always supported the success of French cinema in theaters online. With the closure of cinemas following the coronavirus, are you worried that My French Film Festival will be increasingly considered as a competitor of cinemas
?
We really don't want to be seen as a competition for theaters.
My French Film Festival is organized by Unifrance, the organization promoting French cinema internationally which, for 70 years, has helped films to be released in theaters.
And we have been helping films to be released on platforms for ten years, but not in competition with theaters.
This year, some films are blocked in certain countries, because they will soon be released in theaters.
We don't bypass the rooms.
But most of the films are going to be unreleased in some countries, because they haven't been sold in those countries and they won't be released there, even after theaters reopen.
So we allow the public in these countries to discover these films.
And we show these films in full respect of the media chronology of the various regulations on site.
When we see today the incredible increase in frequentation of platforms, the unexpected success of Disney +, the decision of the Hollywood studio Warner to release its seventeen 2021 films simultaneously in theaters and on its HBO Max platform, the announcement of Netflix to release 70 films this year, the principle of media chronology is under pressure everywhere or has already become obsolete. Is cinema escaping theaters
?
I really don't hope so.
It is true, the decision of certain majors to go directly to digital… I hope that it is only related to the current situation and that it will not permanently change the landscape of the rooms.
Fortunately, in France, we are not there yet, but the situation is worrying and we must support the cinemas.
And that's what we do with our partners, cinemas, French distributors, etc.
An online festival, like My French Film Festival, does not have the objective of reducing the strength of the venue at all.
In 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic, you recorded 12 million “
entries
”.
What are your ambitions for 2021
?
What we want is to find many new international partner platforms.
And this mission, we are in the process of achieving it.
We already have many new partner platforms in South-East Asia, Indonesia, Canada, Africa, Brazil, Europe, Japan… The success of the festival is also the success of our partner platforms, because - au- Beyond the success of My French Film Festival on these platforms -, we want to make these platforms understand that French and Francophone cinema has enormous value so that throughout the year, they continue to buy and broadcast films. French.
This is what will be our success, in addition to the millions of views we will do this year.
►
To read also:
The new digital frontiers of the Cannes Film Festival 2020
►
11th edition of the My French Film Festival, from January 15 to February 15
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