138.506 Spectators at DocsBarcelona

Take a look at the photo above. Taken by the photographer F Fagregas: A concert with The Boss, Bruce Springsteen at Nou Camp. Where I have been several times with Joan Gonzalez, director of DocsBarcelona. Last night at the award ceremony he announced that the audience for DocsBarcelona 2020 Online was so big that the famous stadium for Barca i.e., where Messi plays, where Ronaldinho and Laudrup have played, would have been too small as it can “only” room a bit more than 90.000. The number of spectators for DocsBarcelona online, available for viewers in Spain, was 138.506! Of course it is not totally comparable but the amount of cinemagoers at the festival four years ago was 10.000 and 2 years ago the number passed 25.000 cinemagoers. Mr. Data, as Gonzalez sometimes calls himself, was right when he wrote that this forms a giant step for the documentary genre and he continued that the online will stay, NOT as the first priority, that will still be to show the festival films in the cinemas, but as a means to reach new audiences, to create a documentary culture!

It would be interesting to know, of course, from where in Spain the audience comes. Gonzalez, on the basis of twitters, if I got it right, said that he thinks 60% are from Catalonia, 40 % from the rest of Spain.

From me, as Head of Programming, I am happy to see artistic, personal documentaries like “Winter Journey”, “Songs of Repression”, “Advocate”, “Rising from the Tsunami” and “Vivos” attract more than 4000 spectators in the few days they were available. The winner – b/w, experiment in editing, for many “special” – had close to 2500 spectators.

Long live the art of documentary cinema.

www.docsbarcelona.com