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Coronavirus

After COVID-19 Cut, Global Film Industry Looks To Bounce Back

Inside a cinema complex in Slovenia
Inside a cinema complex in Slovenia

No crisis has ever hit the entire film industry as badly as the coronavirus lockdown. With sets empty, movie premieres postponed, screenings canceled and box offices closed, the global film industry has been largely frozen in time — and revenue. Even as activity is gradually resuming, it will take time for the movie business to recover and when it does, the cinema landscape may never be quite the same – either on set or on screens.

The Cannes Film Festival unveiled its 56 Official Selection titles by live stream Wednesday evening in Paris, two weeks after the 2020 Cannes edition was originally due to run on its iconic red carpet. Despite the lack of physical event and the delay, the Festival's chief Thierry Frémaux told Le Monde that COVID-19 couldn't be allowed to destroy the event completely. "If the Festival couldn't take its usual form, we needed to present it another way — but never would it disappear."

Only 20% of the cinema can be used at a time, which is far from profitable.

Meanwhile in India, the country's signature musical-and-drama driven film industry has also been hit hard by the Covid-19 crisis. According to the country's top producers, distributors and actors, Bollywood will take at least two years to recover financially from the coronavirus pandemic, which is threatening big-ticket projects and putting tens of thousands of jobs at risk.

That's why some Bollywood background dancers – an indispensable part of Hindi films – have urged the film fraternity to help them in these difficult times, reported the daily Hindustan Times.

A video featuring some of them holding placards, emphasizing that they ‘work on a per day income basis' and some have to support entire families, has gone viral.

No festival but drive-in cinemas in Cannes — Photo: L.Urman/Starface/ZUMA

On the smaller art-house cinema circuit, there's a different calculation, post-coronavirus. In Hamburg, as reported in Die Welt, movie theaters that have been closed since mid-March are now beginning to reopen under strict hygiene and social distancing requirements. With the regulation to keep a minimum distance of 1.5 meters, only 20% of the cinema can be used at a time, which is far from profitable.

Opening overnight does not make any sense since there are no new attractive films nor commercials for refinancing, points out Felix Grassmann, who runs the Abaton arthouse cinema.

Although a few movie theaters found a way to keep their audiences happy by setting up drive-in cinemas, operators agree that these are not a real alternative to the cinema halls. says Hans-Peter Jansen, who runs four cinemas in Hamburg. "It is an interim solution. You can't watch films properly in the car, the sound is bad and you can't see anything when it rains." Although economically, the operators of art house cinemas can write off the year 2020, they are optimistic about the future. After all, happy-ends usually prevail in the cinema.

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Society

What's Spoiling The Kids: The Big Tech v. Bad Parenting Debate

Without an extended family network, modern parents have sought to raise happy kids in a "hostile" world. It's a tall order, when youngsters absorb the fears (and devices) around them like a sponge.

Image of a kid wearing a blue striped sweater, using an ipad.

Children exposed to technology at a very young age are prominent today.

Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — A 2021 report from the United States (the Youth Risk Behavior Survey) found that 42% of the country's high-school students persistently felt sad and 22% had thought about suicide. In other words, almost half of the country's young people are living in despair and a fifth of them have thought about killing themselves.

Such chilling figures are unprecedented in history. Many have suggested that this might be the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but sadly, we can see depression has deeper causes, and the pandemic merely illustrated its complexity.

I have written before on possible links between severe depression and the time young people spend on social media. But this is just one aspect of the problem. Today, young people suffer frequent and intense emotional crises, and not just for all the hours spent staring at a screen. Another, possibly more important cause may lie in changes to the family composition and authority patterns at home.

Firstly: Families today have fewer members, who communicate less among themselves.

Young people marry at a later age, have fewer children and many opt for personal projects and pets instead of having children. Families are more diverse and flexible. In many countries, the number of children per woman is close to or less than one (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong among others).

In Colombia, women have on average 1.9 children, compared to 7.6 in 1970. Worldwide, women aged 15 to 49 years have on average 2.4 children, or half the average figure for 1970. The changes are much more pronounced in cities and among middle and upper-income groups.

Of further concern today is the decline in communication time at home, notably between parents and children. This is difficult to quantify, but reasons may include fewer household members, pervasive use of screens, mothers going to work, microwave ovens that have eliminated family cooking and meals and, thanks to new technologies, an increase in time spent on work, even at home. Our society is addicted to work and devotes little time to minors.

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