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Films need to be given longer runs, they added.

The struggle to reach cinema audiences in the wake of the pandemic was one of the main subjects under discussion at Doclisboa’s panel, ‘State of the Art Audience Development: practices, methods and tools in different windows,’ staged in collaboration with Creative Europe Media.

“During the pandemic, there have been three moments of confrontation and we are now in the third,” said programmer and filmmaker Christopher Small from Prague -based platform DAfilms.com, the Czech-based streaming arm of Doc Alliance. The first, he suggested, was in March 2020 when “everybody realised they...

The pandemic, although disastrous for most parts of the economy, had one minor upside: a boost in online viewing. The number of subscribers of Portugal’s VOD platform Filmin, for example, has tripled compared with last year, due in part to the lockdown. “We grew as much in three months as we forecast for two years,” Filmin Portugal manager Anette Dujisin told Variety. Classic films have played a major part in driving that growth.

Despite challenges with local classics, Filmin is seeing growing success with heritage films and catalog titles as well as new releases. Filmin has received constant requests from subscribers – even loud demands from some – for more classic films since the service went online in 2016, Dujisin said.

The feedback affirms “that a VOD platform dedicated to independent cinema is not complete without a certain body of classical films,” Dujisin said. “So since the beginning we have been making...