- Closed for several days, the Marseille neighborhood cinema La Baleine has decided to continue to exist… online.
- Films on VOD will be offered on the cinema's website, with a program chosen by its teams, as usual.
Despite the restrictions linked to the coronavirus health crisis, La Baleine does not want to sink. The small Marseilles cinema, opened a little over a year ago in the city center, has decided to innovate and offer its viewers ... Online screenings.
From this Wednesday, day of cinema outings, this small neighborhood cinema offers on its website, on VOD, a real program of a few films less known to the general public, like its programming in normal times. Each session is accessible for a price of four euros. In this way, faced with competition from streaming platforms, La Baleine hopes to be able to survive and keep a link with the people of Marseilles.
Keep in touch with spectators
"The principle is to allow a cinema like ours to continue to be in contact with the spectators to make recommendations to them," explains Thomas Ordonneau, director of the Whale. We offer a look, a programming, which is the role of a cinema. "Thus, the cinema puts for example in the" poster "the documentary by Marseille Jean-Robert Viallet Des hommes, released a few weeks ago and which offers an immersion in the Baumettes prison. A program that will change every week, Wednesday, as usual.
"The content that Netflix offers is a bit like a Spanish inn, insists Thomas Ordonneau. They put a lot of content that corresponds to Netflix's target according to an algorithm, whereas our programming is our choices, the films that we want to defend and that we like to show. "
Support cinema
According to Thomas Ordonneau, the maneuver is not so commercial, since the cinema only receives about one euro per download. For the Whale, these online sessions are also a way of supporting the film industry, which has been hit hard by the confinement guidelines,
"We are also film distributors, recalls Thomas Ordonneau. We thus decided to release online today the film Monsieur Deligny, Vagabond efficient, which we distribute. It was to have its national release in theaters these days but we have took the initiative to put it online without waiting for formal authorization. We sent a letter to the CNC to notify them, asking them for an exceptional exemption. " Hope, perhaps, for the many more or more modest films which were initially to be shown in the coming weeks at the cinema.
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