They are more on a national scale than for fiction. Documentaries are released on few copies in theaters in France, about 50-60, so 30-40 cities, however well supported by the press. Thus when they arrive in VoD, they become accessible to 60% of France for the first time. This allows them to reach more people, the audience of documentaries are in the end less Parisian than that for fiction, at least on our platform. And the strength of the documentaries is also to be able to interest other types of public than the film-lovers. So the movies that work are those with themes that are not only circumscribed to the cinema cues. This is valid for documentaries on artists like Janis by Amy Berg or Vivian Maier by Charlie Siskel and John Maloof or on societal topics such as Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro or Mariana Otero’s Like an Open Sky.

What can documentaries hope for from new viewing practices?

Physical video still has significant weight in the documentary market compared to digital, the transformation rate is still 10%, where normally it is around 2% for the rest of the market. On the digital, especially on TVoD, the documentaries suffer from the rise of catch-up TV. In fiction, except for Arte, nobody does catch-up with movies. This practice made the audience feel that paying for a documentary was not “normal”. On the other hand, the emergence of the SVoD has shown that within a subscription offer, where the consumer does not have the feeling of paying again, the documentary, but also short films or more experimental works, are more watched. The success of a platform like Tënk or even documentaries on Netflix or in our UnCut offer shows it well: there is an audience for this type of work.

Is collaboration the future of European VoD / SVoD?

Historically, UniversCiné and Eurovod, an association that we run, have always been strongly supported by the European Union and the MEDIA program. Moreover, today, in this idea of ​​the European single market, there is a strong desire to Europeanise some VoD / SVoD platforms. We can see it with Netflix, when buying a film, it’s still easier to pay it off on 190 territories than on only one. With Eurovod, we are trying to gather and grow together to become a real European VoD union. The challenge is to improve the distribution of arthouse and documentary films, which are often limited to a few territories. The idea is to, thanks to the low cost of online techniques and advertising, make this type of cinema more accessible within Europe, including by joining forces more with festivals.