Consuelo Castillo Ulloa: "Streaming taught us that there are other audiences"

Three years ago this agency was born to consolidate the distribution of Colombian cinema. After presenting 54 films, it is now committed to the Latin market and the search for audiences other than the traditional ones.

Doc: Co was born three years ago to strengthen the distribution and exhibition of national cinema. How much have they achieved?

In these years we have experienced a process of maturation. In 2018 we had to prepare and understand that we needed a union job, while in 2019 and 2020 we had to think about how to make a sustainable company and make the films we distribute profitable. The dream we had that films made in the country would be seen in theaters had to be surrounded by an ecosystem that would generate money.

From what was initially raised, what do you need to accomplish?

Get to commercial movie theaters. Two years ago we had the unconditional support of Cine Colombia, but that path was cut short by the pandemic. Our goal is to dismantle the thought that Colombian cinema is niche. This topic is still under construction and, due to the situation we are currently experiencing, we had to react and join the online exhibition.

It is always difficult to distribute and show films that are not produced by Hollywood. What did the market show you in these years?

Something wonderful that we discovered is that in independent cinemas (not multiplex) spectators can accumulate and, for example, Homo botanicus is one of our highest-grossing films at the Cinemateca de Bogotá. To get there we had to understand that we should not be afraid of the first weekend, that in commercial cinemas it is vital because, if it does not attract a good number of viewers, they do not program the film the following week. With Doc: Co we managed to build long strategies, lasting four months, in which we added viewers; so we have been able to extend the life of a movie beyond the first week.

Did the pandemic force them to come to the exhibition ‘online’?

Streaming has taught us a lot of things, since we made a wonderful union with Retina Latina, Mowies, Boonet and Cinema Paraíso, our films can be seen on these platforms, and also in the virtual rooms of the Cinemateca de Bogotá and the Museum of Modern Art of Medellín (MAMM). This format became very important and in 2020 we did 75 private screenings of our films at the hands of film festivals and compensation funds … We have tried to create a model that has nothing to do with the traditional Hollywood one and we know that we cannot last three months in movie theaters and then online, because we lose all the momentum of the strategy. I must also say that public television in Colombia has helped us in our business model, because last year we sold the films to all those channels.

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Now that you don’t see “streaming” as the enemy, what have you learned from the format?

Well, streaming taught us that there are other audiences that we did not imagine. When we made the premiere of Fait Live at the Bogotá Cinematheque, there were spectators in Cartagena, a city where the film would surely not have been shown in traditional theaters. It was very strong to show that we were not serving a wide audience … In Ramiriquí, for example, people met many times last year to see Sumercé together … It was something we could not believe; We discovered that the world was bigger than we imagined. That challenged us, because the spectator of Lázaro, who was on average the elderly, did not know how to buy online and we had to support that management.

Have you thought about internationalizing Doc: Co?

Yes, it was the third item on the agenda when we started. We made an agreement with the Cinemateca of Nicaragua to permanently exhibit Colombian films, we also built a collaborative network with the Retina Latina platforms and the Peruvian Film Library, and the Ochoymedio rooms of Ecuador, the Bolivian Cinematheque (Bolivia) and Cinema Paraíso de Colombia to celebrate our third anniversary. Likewise, we consolidated an alliance with the French Embassy in Colombia to forge the creation of a Latin American exhibition network, in which both the exhibition windows, as well as the film producers and distributors, gain greater visibility in the region. It is an alliance whose objective is the consolidation of a Latin American film industry. We believe that the path of Doc: Co is to extend borders.