Mr Bausch, you run the Arthouse cinemas in Frankfurt and the Casino cinema in Aschaffenburg.

Now you are in Venice at the film festival.

What is the mood?

Eva Maria Magel

Senior cultural editor of the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Very good, because the program is promising this year, it also promises to attract a larger audience.

The atmosphere at the festival is very good.

A festival like this is building up, especially when, like in Venice, it is taking place again without restrictions like before the pandemic and there are many visitors.

You will not only meet filmmakers there, but also cinema operators.

Do they see it that way too?

Everyone is hoping that the long, warm summer ends and we can return to a new cinematic normal.

What should the new normal look like?

The reality is: We had to struggle with the long-lasting warm weather and with the fact that after the corona restrictions, a wide range of leisure activities were possible again, from festivals and concerts to family visits and vacations.

Well, cinema always has a dent in the summer.

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Cinema currently not on the screen

Hasn't there been a whole wave of new and good films coming out since you can play again?

Yes.

We opened in July 2021, and the numbers were really good - despite the corona-related capacity restrictions that still existed at the time.

We had so many guests that we couldn't even get them to the cinema.

After the summer, however, that ebbed away last year.

We didn't start spring this year with visitor numbers as usual.

The current statistics show: Ticket sales have fallen sharply, in the first half of the year 30 percent less than in the same period in 2019. Does Frankfurt reflect the finding exactly, or are there exceptions?

In general, you can see that there are differences between urban and rural areas.

It also depends on the program.

If 30 percent fewer guests come to the art house cinema in the country, that's a more difficult situation than in the city.

You can say: Anyone who has played the bigger films like "Top Gun" or "Batman", in the cinemas with family offers and blockbusters, works on a very good level, almost like in 2019. We have a in our cinemas in Frankfurt different audience and have therefore continued to focus on cinematic art and art house films.

So why don't people come or come less often?

In my perception, cinema is simply not on the radar at the moment.

Because there are so many options.

That's my feeling.

If the weather is bad, we immediately see that the number of visitors increases.

This was also the case last weekend, when Doris Dörrie's "Freibad" was almost always sold out.

Do you wish for a really rainy autumn?

There is one major concern among all colleagues: what if it turns out to be another difficult autumn and if there are even corona restrictions again.

However, the hope is that the guests will miss us and remember what they used to do in the autumn when the weather was bad: they went to the cinema.

Number of spontaneous visits increases

Are there any good films in the coming season?

Yes, very good.

All in all, there are many films for program cinemas, even if the outstanding German productions are currently missing.

There are also the big arthouse films, the arthouse blockbusters so to speak, that were screened at the film festivals, for example the Cannes winner "Triangle of Sadness" and many smaller European productions.

But today it is much more difficult for them to get through to the guests.