BEST YOUNG AUDIENCE ACTIVITIES:
MOVIEZONE, (NETHERLANDS)


What is more natural than wanting to help young people to discover cinema d’auteur? That is the aim of the Moviezone programme, which today comprises 35 theatres across the Netherlands.

Credit for the initiative goes to Henk Camping, who runs the T’Hoogt cinema in Utrecht. For him, ensuring future audiences meant making a concerted effort to expand his public to include young people. “I started wondering why young people didn’t go to art house cinemas on their own. The answer was not long in coming: maybe commercial cinema is all they know.” For Camping it was clear that to get young people to see art house films, exhibitors would have to make them more appealing. First he got the idea of starting up a cine-club for adolescents and offering attractive prices. “The key to getting young people to risk seeing new films is the price,” Camping explains.

In 1996 he contacted several colleagues and let them in on his plan. Together they created the Moviezone programme. The idea was simple: on Friday afternoons the theatres would screen films open to the general public, but young people would pay just € 3. Not long afterwards the initiative counted 19 theatres.

Today it has expanded to a network of 35 theatres that share financial support and initiatives for presenting films to young audiences. The movies tour the country from September to June. Each film is presented in the same cinema for two weeks. In all, 20 films are shown per season. Some of the latest titles were In this World by Michael Winterbottom, Goodbye Lenin! by Wolfgang Becker and Noi the Albino by Dagur Kári. Short films are shown before each screening. For the most part these are animation films chosen in association with the Holland Animation Film Festival.

In this way, Moviezone has become a key player in the Dutch art house scene. Art house cinemas also use the programme to bring their films to school children. Schools receive the programme and can set up special screenings for their classes. Moviezone has achieved its goal, and as Henk Camping aptly puts it, “the cinemas have opened their doors to young audiences.”

(November 2004)

<b>www.moviezone.nl</b>