From Beltrade to Cinema Troisi, the single-screen cinema attracts young people and becomes a community
From North to South, single-screen realities aim to hold together identity and economic sustainability by continuing to focus on quality programming and a more familiar relationship between audiences and exhibitors
Keeping the pieces together, sticking to one's own figure, engaging in dialogue with distributors and ensuring economic sustainability, remains the great challenge of the single screen realities. A goal they approach in different ways.
Beltrade, quality conquers the young
There are those who, like the Cinema Beltrade in Milan, rely on an identity impervious to passing trends. "Our cinema has been bucking the positive trend for some time: in 2019 we had made around 57 thousand admissions, in 2023 70 thousand, in 2024 just over 97 thousand and this year around 98 thousand. Weighty figures for a 200-seat reality," notes Paola Corti, co-curator, together with Monica Naldi, of the arthouse theatre that was born as a parish cinema. "What sets us apart is that we focus so much on subtitled language films and a multi-programming push. We have an audience that is largely young to whom we reserve reduced price policies and, although we are technological behind the scenes, we are keen to remain an old-fashioned cinema: we are very attentive to the quality of the projection, but then, for example, we do not assign seats in the auditorium and we manage everything in a family way and with little construction".
Because the difference with multiplexes is there and it is evident: "There are many single-screen cinemas in Italy where in the box office or at least in charge of the management, there are always people who are passionate about cinema," Corti continues. "So it's a bit like with food: 'We are not a boutique that costs a lot of money, we are the delicatessen, the baker under the house to whom people turn because they know they will find quality products and a place where they can have a chat with the manager. And these days there is a great return to realities of this kind, even in the cinema sector'. Realities which, like the Beltrade, also aim to be prodigal on the front of the programme schedule that they propose to users with a strategy that also helps in some ways to contain friction with distributors: "I think that the single-screen cinemas must be generous with respect to the number of shows that they put on the programme and, in this way, as a consequence, also the distribution becomes more conciliatory towards the exhibitors, in a positive dialectic that manages to protect the interests of both parties".
The possibility of multi-programming remains, according to Corti, the pivot on which to leverage to attract viewers and, consequently, revenues. In a perspective that continues to see films as products to be consumed slowly, escaping the frenetic and voracious rhythms imposed by daily routine. "Proposing several different films in a day allows you, on the one hand, to guarantee as much good cinema as possible and, on the other, to please people with different tastes.
To avoid the shocks, clear of economic subsidies, there is certainly a need "on the distribution side, to recalibrate the pace of film releases, loosening them up to allow for better promotion as well. On the exhibition side, equally less frenzy: more confidence in the value of collective viewing, without too much fear of competition from platforms. The cinema is not a supermarket and bringing people to the cinema preserves the magic of the encounter with the story on the screen and between the people watching it".
