After four months of travelling successfully around the world, the multi award-winning "4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days" is only now set to open in its home territory, Romania. The hard-hitting movie will open at the Bucharest National Theatre (that's one premiere I'd like to attend) before moving to other venues. There are also reports that the film will be shown outside major towns in mobile cinemas, a move which is interesting.
The reason I mention this is to underline the difficulty of coordinating movie releases in Europe. Although the 25 countries are technically a single market, only the major studios actually enable Europe-wide releases. All the countries act like separate markets. There are large distributors and movie chains such as UGC and Kinepolis, of course, but every movie has to find a local distributor and start individual campaigns that fit around the majors' releases.
Another way to look at this as writers is that although you always hope that you are writing something with global appeal, you are largely dealing with a series of local audiences. It's also interesting to note that many of the most successful European films have been intensely local. This has been true of "Billy Elliot", "Goodbye Lenin", "L'auberge espagnol", "Adam & Paul", "12:08 East of Bucharest" and now "4 Months".
For more about "4 Months...", visit the blog.
UPDATE: Nov 25. "4 Months..." was awarded the Bronze Horse for Best Film 2007 at this year's 10-day Stockholm film festival ending Sunday November 25.
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