Sustainable Cinema

 <www.sustainablecinema.org> is a not-for-profit organization. It promotes compacts between local audiences and local movie makers, in other words — local movies for local audiences.

The phrase, “sustainable cinema” was coined in 2001 by Austin Burbridge to describe a compact between an audience and movie makers, which is the opposite of the cinema of exploitation, for example, Hollywood.

The story of sustainable cinema is like sustainable development. What is the problem? Local cinema squeezed out by BigMedia. Local cinemas have been sandbagged by big media corporations — “BigMedia”. BigMedia controls distribution — theater chains, television stations — and thereby influences or even controls the shape and content of stories. BigMedia needs big profits and economies of scale. It encourages —

• Standardization: one movie that works in all markets; and
• Spectacle: capital-intensive spectacles which cannot be matched by producers in local markets without access to vast amounts of capital, credit, and technology