Argentina has become one of the world’s first countries in the world, after France, to add cinema to its primary school curriculum.
Move forms part of a drive to increase cinema theater audiences for movies in general and for Argentine cinema in particular. Launched in August, the program, Schools Go To the Cinema, builds on an agreement signed during French president Francois Hollande’s visit to Argentina in February by Argentina’s go-ahead INCAA Film Institute–the same government agency which created movie market Ventana Sur with the Cannes Festival and Cannes Film Market in 2009–and France’s CNC film agency and the French Institute.
Up-and-running in seven of Argentina’s 24 provinces, including Cordoba and Salta, the Argentine initiative sees primary school students being taken to cinema theaters to watch Argentine films, and classes where they are taught the basics of how to analyze movies.
Preliminary conclusions from the Schools Go to the Cinema initiative will be discussed at the 2016 Ventana Sur market, which runs Nov. 29 through Dec. 3, with the aim of establishing strategies for 2017, INCAA president Alejandro Calcetta said at Spain’s San Sebastian Fest.
The cinema curriculum has to be discussed with the governments of each and every Argentine province, he added. The initial reaction has, however, been highly positive, Cacetta said. “We have been able to put the logistics into place and launch in just two months, which is great,” he added.
“The children have often seen very little cinema, and, of what they have seen, very few Argentine films.” Cacetta said. “The films they have seen are normally viewed online.”
“The proposals are really very interesting,” Cacetta said. Punching a 13% market share for Argentine films in 2016, Argentina, with Brazil, is the only country in Latin America where its own national films regularly get a double-digit slice of total box office grosses.
The cine curriculum initiative is conceived “as a long-term program which we hope to scale up over time so that it becomes part of state policy,” Cacetta commented. It was no coincidence that France, which launched its own school cinema lessons in 1989, has one of the biggest domestic shares of any national cinema in Europe–34.6% this year through August, according to CNC statistics.
“I come from production. 10-to-15 years ago, the major concern was production. But now the production sector is mature, virtually guaranteeing a quantity of quality films,” Cacetta argued.
He added: “The focus and real work has now got to be on distribution and exhibition. If we only produce but can’t show our films, we will become a cinema cemetery.”
The INCAA will announce regulation addressing movie development and distribution in Argentina, establishing a cinema support system for every phase of a film’s industry cycle.