21/06/2013 - In the context of its partnership with Europa distribution, Cineuropa has interviewed some European distributors, in order to know how the film has been distributed throughout Europe.

Why did you decide to distribute More than honey?

We have a long documentary tradition and one particularly oriented towards documentaries on nature and environmental problems. At the time, we distributed the films Darwin's Nightmare and We Feed the World. These films, which can obviously not be reduced to a narrative of the life of bees, have a broad vision of the world and focus on the effects of industrialisation, of pollution. Thus, we really foster a specific tradition in our subjects and we have released several films in this very field. We have truly developed in recent years a network, which is not necessarily a network of moviegoers, but rather a network of people interested in the content of the films we distribute. Obviously, many documentaries that could rather be described as reports have a quite essential content, but they are not ready for a life as feature film. On the other hand, what we really enjoyed in the film, besides its fascinating subject, was to find there a real filmmaker work. Witnessing this kind of combination in this genre of film is rare enough for us to have been stroke and probably justifies why we enjoyed the film immensely. This film bears, without a doubt, the signature of a true professional director who tried and succeeded not only in treating artistically a subject that concerns us all, but also in using the adequate language of both, commercial and communication/marketing for one to mention this problem of dying bees in Belgium and in Europe in general. A film that sticks closer than ever to the news.

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What were the decision criteria for the release dates and how did you plan the release of More than honey?

 Unfortunately, in Belgium we always depend on the French release. We cannot release the film before them and often, it is even stipulated in the contracts. So you need to be pragmatic. At the same time, we have been in contact from the beginning on with some politicians, people who are active at the European level. Thus we knew that there would be some action at the European Commission. It is in this context that we decided to look for a date in early spring, just when we knew there would be an interest, not only for the film but for the content in general and the bees problematic in general. This is why we choose this release date. Obviously, we also invited the director to accompany the release. In each city, we had a partner from the Nature/Ecologic field and a preview. So we toured with the director and I think that we really touched many people. Right now, we refer everyone to the website in order to organise more private screenings, as I said, outside the cinema circuit, with Blu-ray that have been done specifically for those private screenings.

What was the film release budget? How do you plan this?

 Obviously, there is the general budget like for a regular press campaign and communication support. Still, we decided not to promote it as a multiplex commercial film with a big campaign but rather to invest time and money in our partnership with associations. I do not know if the budget is complete but to give you an idea, we had a budget – just for Belgium – of around €30,000/40,000.

What kind of audience did you target and how?

 We noticed with this kind of film that whether they work or not in the movie theatre, from the moment you work within a certain type of network, there are however a lot of requests for private screenings. Personally, I took care of the marketing and communication of the film. We obviously made ​​the classic communication campaign for a film, but what we have especially done is to create a website that we strongly promoted vis-à-vis movie goers, of course, but also vis-à-vis our partners and some associations that have nothing to do with cinema but rather with nature. We worked with "Nature et Progrès," with "Les Amis de la Terre," with "Natuurpunt" in Flanders and with many other associations. So many actually, that I had no idea of their existence when I started on this film on the beekeeping world. We also worked with universities, since there are few academic centres in Belgium that do research on the death of bees, which is the topic of the film. So what we really highlighted is the possibility of organising – outside the traditional channels of distribution – private sessions starting with thirty, forty, or fifty people. Of course, we offered the possibility to book this kind of screening on the website. That worked very well.

Did you change the poster or the trailer for the campaign in your country? Did the name of the movie change?

 Our poster and our trailer are different than the ones used in France. We have been contacted because there were several versions: the producers had a different version for the German-speaking Switzerland and for the French-speaking Switzerland. I think we had a choice of three versions of the trailer and the poster. We decided, then we made an adjustment ourselves. We also released the film under its original title More than honey. We also put the words "bees" and "men" in the subtitle, just to keep it associated with the French release and benefit from the French press [the French release title is Des Abeilles et des Hommes].

Did you undertake a campaign on social networks?

 I was targeting social networks, Facebook pages that we have at Imagine [the distributor], but it is mostly the website itself that we promoted through Google adverts and Facebook ads. This way, we could target our audience very specifically and we quickly noticed that people found the website by themselves, especially during the two or three weeks before the release and the two or three weeks after the release. We clearly witnessed that the use of the website and also the number of bookings increased tremendously. The work was very specific, very technical, so that our website in Belgium appears first in the weeks before and after the release. We definitely saw that it was working, that there has been a concrete result. Moreover, we still have several requests per day for private screenings, which enable this film to live through many debate-evenings and thanks to many guests.

Did you get reviews about the movie from beekeepers or people working in the ecologic sector?

 Yes, absolutely, and we are really talking about thousands of people who have seen the film in the meantime, either in theatres or in the room they rented for a projection.

We often had requests. For example, we had several projections at the European Commission or at the Parliament, precisely where the film had been presented.

They do not have digital equipment, so we sent them a Blu-ray that they would send back ​​after the screening. This allowed quite unusual projections. We also clearly noticed that many ecological associations were very interested in seeing the film, for example in their office. So, we really wanted to meet this demand since we found that there was a market. It is true that it takes a lot more hard work from a distributor, but I think we really did what we had to do as a distributor, that is to say, seek an audience, find it and reach it with all the available means.

I think it really worked well with our partners, they have also published extensively on the film in the weeks before its release. There were often ads in magazine to inform people about this particular side of the distribution: "If you want to see the film, and not necessarily in a cinema, it is possible, because we can do that also for your association."