Genre characteristics indicate further commonalities such as strong domestic performance of local films that are either straight comedies or genre hybrids with comedic aspects (see genre profiles for Lithuania & Denmark in Bengesser & Nielsen 2024). This is also borne out by recent domestic box office draws of 2025, such as Southern Chronicles (2024) - local premiere in January 2025 – which became the best performing domestic film in modern Lithuania (app. 412K admissions). Similarly, the two domestic top-performers in Denmark in 2025 were Checkered Ninja 3 (2025) (app. 777K adm. in 2025) and The Last Viking (2025) (app. 724K adm. in 2025). All of these titles are comedies while simultaneously subscribing to other genre conventions.

Commonalities aside, the data also clearly shows that the domestic market share remains significantly higher in Denmark compared to Lithuania. There are many potential answers as to why that is the case. In the following, we will explore the importance of cinema infrastructure as an overlooked causal mechanism (Gomery & Allen 1985) impacting the cultural resonance-avenue generally and domestic market share characteristics in particular.

4.1 Cinema infrastructure – an overview

There are many differences as regards cinema infrastructure in Lithuania and Denmark. First of all, there is a striking difference in terms of the number of cinemas. As of January 2026, there are 170 cinemas in Denmark and only 22 in Lithuania. With a population half the size of Denmark’s spread out across an area 50% larger, some differences are to be expected.

However, geodemographic factors themselves do not explain differences of this magnitude. One could just as well, for instance, expect more cinemas in rural areas in Lithuania than in Denmark in order to service a more dispersed population. There are, of course, important cultural-historical and economic reasons as to why the cinema landscapes are so different, for instance the collapse of the state-run cinema sector in Lithuania in the late 80s and early 90s, and the transitioning of many commercially run cinemas in Denmark to community-run cinemas. However, this article focuses on the existing cinema infrastructure rather than its historical causes.

To give the reader a better understanding of how cinemas are spread across the two countries, we have produced an interactive map that marks existing cinemas on a map showing the population density in 100mx100m quadrants (fig. 4.2). Quadrant maps also allow

for demographic data points to be added, but for the purposes of this article, it mainly stimulates reflections on cinema and population distribution. In the case of Lithuania, it offers a possibility to consider prospective cinema sites: Which urban areas are underserved? How far do audiences have to travel to find the nearest cinema? Viewing the map featuring “cultural centers” in Lithuania gives you the possibility of exploring to what extent cultural centers ‘substitute’ for a cinema? In the case of Denmark, there are very few empty spots on the map save for a few places on the Western coast of Jutland and in Northern Funen, but these areas are also thinly populated. It is more surprising to see that many small villages have cinemas whereas substantially bigger towns nearby do not. This speaks to the coincidental nature of which cinemas were picked up by enthusiasts or local communities, and which were not. In both cases, this has important implications for audience mobility that we will return to later.

Almost without exception, all the 170 cinemas in Denmark operate as traditional cinemas in the sense that they show films on a daily basis or at least several times a week. This is also the case for the 22 cinemas in Lithuania, but not for its cultural centers (and other screening venues).

There are also significant differences as regards the composition of different types of cinemas. Raats et al (2024), in their study of the cinema infrastructure in Flanders and Brussels, distinguish between multiplex cinemas, independent commercial cinemas, and art cinemas. They furthermore identify cultural centers and so-called cultural exhibitors, e.g., cinematheques and specialty theatres that show, e.g., film classics, experimental films, cult films. The latter focuses on second-run films and is therefore less important for the purposes of this article, but we will return to the role of cultural centers in the Lithuanian case. The taxonomy offered by Raats et al works reasonably well as a basis, but some qualifying additions to their definitions and an additional category of cinemas are important in the context of this particular study. For this analysis we will propose the following taxonomy:

Comparing the cinema landscape in Denmark to that of Lithuania, there are differences in all categories. According to the Baltic Film, Facts & Figures, nine of Lithuania’s cinemas are characterized as multiplex cinemas. They all fit the above definition and include Forum Cinemas, Apollo Cinemas, Multikino (Vue), and Cinamon Mega – all of which have foreign owners. These nine cinemas constitute more than 70% of all cinema screens in Lithuania. In Denmark, multiplexes as defined above would typically be member of the sub-union for Firstrun cinemas in larger cities (Da. Foreningen af premierebiografer, FP). These include the cinemas run by Nordisk Film (23) and Vue (3) which account for just shy of 40% of all screens in Denmark. With its 23 cinemas and more than 150 screens, Nordisk Film is not only a clear market leader, but also a domestically based, vertically integrated company the likes of which does not exist in Lithuania. As regards art cinemas, there are at least a dozen art cinemas in Denmark compared to about a handful of art cinemas in Lithuania with the additional difference that the art cinemas in Denmark are distributed across a substantially higher number of cities.

Without underestimating the important differences as regards the multiplex and art cinema landscapes in Lithuania and Denmark, the most significant difference lies elsewhere, namely as regards community-run cinemas, independent commercial cinemas and culture centers.

Approximately half of the 170 cinemas in Denmark are community-run cinemas most often owned by the local municipality. These cinemas exist in Lithuania as well, but they are very few in number. Although these particular cinemas themselves rely substantially on volunteer work (Karlsen 2025) and without a doubt fulfill important cultural and social functions they arguably also serve important economic functions in the Danish film ecosystem. In addition, there is also a high number of independent commercial cinemas in Denmark, including a few domestic mini-chains such as the MovieHouse, Biografkompagniet and Big Bio cinemas. Altogether the cinema landscape in Denmark is more diversified than that of Lithuania.

The more important factor, however, concerns the geographical coverage of cinemas in Denmark versus that of Lithuania. Correlating addresses and population statistics shows that no less than 74 of the Danish cinemas are in villages/towns with less than 10.000 inhabitants (see fig. 4.3). In comparison, there are no cinemas in Lithuania in villages/towns with less than 10.000 inhabitants and only four cinemas in cities with less than 30.000 inhabitants, one of which, Naglis Cinema in Palanga, is undergoing multi-year reconstruction work (Infes nd).

On the other hand, some rural areas in Lithuania are served by cultural centers or similar facilities that have screening facilities. These cultural centers typically only show films once a week, fortnight or month but are included by the Lithuanian Film Centre in the Baltic Film, Facts and Figures within the category of “screening places” (e.g. 2025, p. 6). Building on an overview provided by the distributor, ACME Film, we have geolocated all of these screening places as well and parceled them out into their respective city size for comparison (see the second slide in fig. 4.3). We will return to these cultural centers later when looking at the domestic admissions for Southern Chronicles (2024) to test to what extent these compensate for the lack of cinemas in rural areas.

As fig. 4.4 illustrates that there is also a high concentration of cinema screens in the larger urban areas in Lithuania, with more than 80% of the cinema screens being in cities with more than 100.000 inhabitants, whereas the cinema screens are more evenly distributed across differently sized cities in Denmark.

The geographical distribution of cinemas is a particularly important parameter because there are significant differences (at least in Denmark) as regards the performance of local titles in cinemas in differently sized cities.

4.2 Domestic films in rural cinemas - Denmark

An essential component of the high domestic market share in Denmark is the strong performance of domestic titles in rural cinemas. Analyses based on databases provided by Statistics Denmark show that across a ten-year period (2015-2024), the domestic market share is 42.7% in cities with less than 10.000 inhabitants, whereas it is 22.9% in the capital region (author’s calculation, see fig. 4.5). The general pattern is “the smaller the city, the higher the domestic market share”. Second, cinemas in smaller cities are not insignificant in terms of overall admissions to local films (also included in fig. 4.5). On average, for the ten-year period (2015-2024), cinemas in cities with less than 30.000 inhabitants represent 868.000 yearly admissions to domestic films alone, a remarkable share of 28.5% of all admissions to domestic films (fig. 4.5). Consequently, the near lack of cinemas in those kinds of cities in Lithuania raises important questions as to what a differently envisioned cinema infrastructure might accomplish for domestic cultural resonance-oriented films in Lithuania.

Beyond the boost these cinemas give to admissions to local films, it is also worth noting that cinemas in smaller cities are not irrelevant to the overall admissions, including both national and non-national titles. Across the ten-year period of 2015-2024, the share of admissions to all films is actually higher for cinemas in cities with less than 30.000 inhabitants (app. 21.4%) than in the three cities with 100.000-499.999 inhabitants (18.9%) (fig. 6). Economically, ticket prices are typically lower in community-run cinemas compared to multiplexes in the larger cities, and a larger proportion of tickets are arguable sold at a discount through membership of Biografklub Danmark (Karlsen 2025). Nonetheless, cinemas in small cities are not insignificant from a box office perspective either.

As evidenced in figs. 4.3-4.6, the existence and state of cinemas in smaller cities is important and can make particularly significant contributions to the cultural resonance-avenue.

If we turn our eye to Denmark to uncover why local films do so well in rural cinemas, we should first acknowledge that the more than 100 cinemas in cities with below 30.000 inhabitants include both independent commercial cinemas and even two multiplexes run by Nordisk in Frederikssund and Nykøbing Falster. Nonetheless, particularly in cities with less than 10.000 inhabitants, the large majority of cinemas belong to the Union of Smaller and Medium-Sized Cinemas (FMMB). The sub-union currently constitutes a membership basis of 83 cinemas in Denmark, the large majority of which are placed in rural areas. To get a better sense of the repertoire and overall characteristics of these cinemas, we conducted an interview with the head of the sub-union, Carsten Karlsen.

Karlsen describes the key audience of community-run cinemas as children up until 11-12 years and adults above 30, with a stronger orientation towards female audiences (Karlsen 2025). Given that many of these cinemas only have one screen (see fig. 4.4), they not only face tough choices regarding what films they program but also regarding how long they run a title. Both in Denmark and Lithuania, the average number of screens per cinema is generally lower the smaller the city, except for the larger capital areas of Vilnius and Copenhagen that have a more diverse combination of cinema types. The lower number of available screens in rural cinemas present different challenges as regards which films to program. If cinemas in smaller cities show predominantly local films compared to for instance, US blockbusters, this may of course explain differences regarding domestic market share. It has not been possible

to collect data for a full repertoire analysis of screenings across differently sized cities but interviews (e.g. Ladegaard 2023) and sample analyses in Denmark suggest that these cinemas generally run big-budget international films just as the multiplexes in larger cities – a point confirmed by Karlsen (2025). Karlsen also confirms the popularity of domestic titles in his sub-union of cinemas but hypothesizes that the largest repertoire differences between small-town cinemas and cinemas in the larger cities is less evident in the split of national/non-national titles than it is regards the total number of films that they run and the run length of national vs non-national titles. As Karlsen puts it, “you water the flowers that grow” – and in his sub-union, these flowers are often national titles (Karlsen 2025).

4.3 Domestic films in rural cinemas – Lithuania

As evidenced in the case of Denmark, the existence and state of cinemas in smaller cities is important and can make particularly significant contributions to the cultural resonance avenue.

The cultural resonance-avenue obviously also relies on funding infrastructure such as the Market Scheme at the Danish Film Institute, broadcaster investment, strong local distributors with marketing clout, and the ability to provide solid Minimum Guarantees. Not to

mention a production community with the will and skillset to produce films that connect with wide audiences on the basis of cultural-historical proximity and specificity, including culturally anchored IP. However, with a relatively high domestic market share and a recent repertoire of both critically acclaimed and commercially successful films (some without production support from the Lithuanian Film Center), one might say that the Lithuanian ecosystem has already showcased that the main problems lie elsewhere.

According to film producer Kestutis Drazdauskas, the disconnect in Lithuania relates more to cinema infrastructure than to funding or production patterns:

In Lithuania, we have an issue of limitations of available screens. If you make a film in Lithuanian, you will be fighting against Hollywood productions, against other countries’ productions on the same premises. […] You just don’t have a wide enough pipe. […]

The cinema infrastructure in Lithuania is run privately. It’s mostly multiplexes. They have their owners outside of Lithuania, and they are programmed to cater to Hollywood masters essentially. I brought up this issue that we are financing - publicly

– Lithuanian films, but we don’t have the right tools to actually show them to the audiences because most of the screens are concentrated in the biggest cities, and although we have like 50 municipalities in Lithuania, only around ten, I think, were showing films on a regular basis.

This led Drazdauskas to propose a chain of public cinemas in 2014, suggesting that if properly set up (not unlike the way community-run cinemas typically function in Denmark), cinemas in many mid-sized cities would be able to stay afloat (ibid.). For various reasons, this has not materialized (ibid.). What the comparison to cinema infrastructure in Denmark adds to these policy reflections is the particular impact such an initiative might have with regards to the cultural resonance-avenue.

We saw that there are on average 868.000 yearly admissions to local films in Denmark in cinemas in cities with less than 30.000 inhabitants. The near lack of cinemas in those kinds of cities in Lithuania leads one to ask if Lithuania, if equipped with a cinema infrastructure akin to the Danish one, would generate (adjusting for population size) an additional 400- 450.000 yearly admissions to local films?

Unfortunately, we do not have as granular admissions data for Lithuania as we do for Denmark, and even if we did, discretionary measures would prevent us from presenting the data in a one-to-one comparison. However, with the kind contribution of producer Lukas Trimonis of Nafta Film and Miglė Morkūnaitė & Ernestas Žiaukas of ACME Distribution, we can reflect on these matters with the aid of Southern Chronicles (2024) as a test case. With its 412K admissions, Southern Chronicles was not only the top-performing film in domestic cinemas in 2025 (premiered January of 2025) but also the best performing film in modern Lithuania. Worth noting is also that Southern Chronicles had a run in all of the 21 cinemas currently in operation in Lithuania and screened in more cultural center/screening venues than are officially registered by the Lithuanian Film Centre. Relative to population size, the 412K admissions of Southern Chronicles are remarkable and it is the film that comes closest to maxing out the potential of a local title in the current cinema landscape of Lithuania. It is thus a very good candidate for testing the limits of the cinema infrastructure in Lithuania.

Briefly stated, Southern Chronicles is a coming-of-age comedy-drama set in the early 90s, a few years after Lithuania’s independence. Adapted from a best-selling novel by Rimantas Kmita’s, the film tells the story of 17-year-old Rimantas (Dziugas Grinys) navigating life in the post-Soviet Lithuania of the 1990s. Initially captivated by rugby, music, and the streets, his perspective begins to shift after meeting Monika (Digna Kulionyte), a girl from a middle-class background who introduces him to literature, culture, and a different way of viewing the world. In terms of audience demographics, the film is cleverly positioned in the way that it both has a youthful coming-of-age vibe but is simultaneously a period piece set in an era that many mature audiences can remember. When asked about the phenomenal success of the film, Lukas Trimonis speculates that the success of the film relies exactly on its wide demographic appeal: I think the only way to have this amount of audience in Lithuania is because this film was relevant to a very wide group of people meaning that it was enjoyed by youth - teenagers, late teenagers – and also was seen by retired people and [audiences] in between[…] I don’t know what the attractive point was for each segment but from a bit of social media monitoring, it seemed that younger audiences were really driven and taken by the first love story and this (early post-)Soviet world that they haven’t lived through is a bit exotic. For others it was a bit more nostalgia. (Trimonis 2026) Trimonis’ hypothesis seems probable to this author. Consequently, a breakdown of the admissions for Southern Chronicles provided by ACME films not only gives us an interesting view into the admissions patterns of that particular film but given its uniquely broad appeal and wide release also a chance to reflect on what its admissions can tell us about the cinema infrastructure in Lithuania.

Looking at the breakdown of admissions, we see for instance that cultural centers pick up 5.8% of the admissions and an additional 2.5% come from cinemas in cities with less than 30.000 inhabitants. To get a sense of how this compares to the Danish case, we include data showing how the admissions of the average Danish film is distributed across differently sized cities for the entire 2015-2024-period. For discretionary reasons, the admissions data for Southern Chronicles is aggregated slightly differently than the Danish data but we clearly see that 8.3% of the total admissions from cinemas and cultural centers in cities with less than 30.000 inhabitants is far below the 28.5% that the average Danish film took in from smalltown cinemas in equivalently sized cities across the 2015-2024-period.

4.4 Conclusion

The analyses presented here lead to a range of conclusions that have important policy implications both for the Lithuanian and the Danish film ecosystems, particularly as relates to the ways in which these are geared towards what we term the cultural resonance-avenue. From the perspective of the Lithuanian film ecosystem, the comparison suggests that cultural center screenings do not – from an admissions perspective - compensate for the lack of rural cinemas, and hence strengthen the case for Drazdauskas’ public chain of cinemasproposal.

The refurbished Naglis cinema project is an example of this type of policy intervention though obviously just one cinema. Establishing multiple cinemas or alternately restructuring multiple existing screening venues to community-run cinemas with regular screenings is of course a tall task with e.g. financial, technical, organizational, even political obstacles (Drazdauskas 2024, Karlsen 2025).

We will never know how Southern Chronicles would have performed with a better cinema infrastructure, but we can see that it requires more from both a marketing and audience perspective to counteract the meagre cinema infrastructure of Lithuania. Essentially, it requires substantial “training” of audiences. First of all, it requires more mobility on the part of the audience. Miglė Morkūnaitė of ACME suggests that audiences “who live in small towns close to bigger cities often go to those big cities for shopping, and sometimes visit the cinema there as well” (2026). One might – as indicated by Drazdauskas – ask if shopping mall multiplexes are the best fit for establishing or enhancing the communal experience associated with many cultural resonance films (Šiber 2024, Karlsen 2025) but at least the technical screening standards will be high, and some multiplexes do make more than a rhetorical effort to serve as ‘the house of local films’. Second, audiences in rural communities have to accept a limited choice of films. Third, they also have to act fast given that they often only have access to a film on single screen venue that may only screen films once a month.

We did see that Southern Chronicles to some extent appears to supersede many of the obstacles that the cinema infrastructure lays out in front of it but it may be – as also indicated by Trimonis – that Southern Chronicles is highly unusual, meaning that one cannot expect recurring films with this remarkable type of cross-demographic appeal. Fourth, rural audiences will also have to accept lower technical standards in their local screening venue.

For instance, only a handful of the cultural centers in Lithuania have DCP screening facilities (ACME 2026). If one cannot change the cinema infrastructure, the policy focus would instead be to establish measures aimed at counteracting these obstacles, e.g., through special pools aimed at launching and marketing films and building activities around screenings (e.g. talks, events, cinema bus screenings) or upgrading the screening facilities.

Still, the cinema infrastructure capacity ceiling may disincentivize some of these initiatives. Furthermore, some technical logics (e.g. concerning sound) make it difficult to establish multi-functional screening facilities (Drazdauskas 2025, Karlsen 2025).

For the Danish case, the policy landscape looks very different. Considering alternative cinema infrastructures, e.g. in Lithuania, it is important to acknowledge the importance of rural cinema infrastructure and not take it for granted. If the cultural-resonance avenue is a policy priority, it is important to nourish – e.g. through production and distribution/marketing support - the types of productions that resonate with local audiences in community-run cinemas. However, it is important to look beyond production funding. The Film Act of 1997 explicitly mentions the objective of promoting not only film production but also “film culture” and “cinema culture”. It is indeed important to look beyond funding measures for films to cultural resonance-dynamics more broadly speaking. The quantitative data tells us that is as much the Danish film ecosystem that needs the provinces as vice versa.

Given the general post-COVID drop in admissions in the streaming era, it may seem counterintuitive to bring more cinemas into the world or to invest significantly in upholding the current cinema infrastructure. Nonetheless, this is in fact what this research points towards.

In short, a three-tier argument seems key. On the one hand, the analyses suggests that cinema infrastructure in rural communities is financially significant to both producers and distributors even though a significant number of these cinemas themselves are not necessarily for-profit enterprises.

A second key argument for cinemas in rural communities is their civil society functions (Karlsen 2025). The social and cultural functions of cinemas in rural communities have been important at other stages in history (see e.g. Kau & Dinesen 1983, Sjöholm 2003, Asbjørnsen & Solum 2008). However, there are important reasons to revisit these functions. First of all, following the post-COVID decrease in admissions, all cinemas – not only community-run cinemas - are facing increasing pressures to build activities around theatrical releases and to expand their activities beyond merely screening films. This entails running loyalty programmes for seniors, children, and young audiences; eventifying film screenings through e.g. talks, panels, lectures, food/beverage servings, musical performances. It also involves expanding their programming activities to e.g. opera, orchestral performances, sport events et cetera. Many community-run cinemas are deeply involved in these activities already. The community-runs cinemas remind Karlsen of the local waterworks, in that they are so far removed from each other that they are not in direct competition and can apply what he refers to as a ‘share and steal’ ethos (Karlsen 2025).

Second, our digital media culture is undergoing significant audience fragmentation undercutting the cultural forum function traditionally performed by public service media. The trajectory of legacy media into the digital realm has many implications for political polarization, media and trust, the importance of publicist media in digital public spheres for instance.

Particularly considering the rich associated activities that community-run cinemas are often undertaking (Karlsen 2025), there is an obvious potential for cinemas in general and community-run cinemas in particular to (re-)establish spaces for social cohesion and/or democratic dialogue and to take on some of the functions traditionally associated with village and town halls.

When asked about the key challenges facing community-run cinemas, Karlsen emphasizes two key areas: one concerns financial means, the other concerns volunteer culture. The Danish Film Institute’s pool for cinema upgrades is currently only open to art cinemas.

Community-run cinemas must instead pursue other options. Given the financial pressure on most municipality budgets, this typically means private funds. The challenge for community-run cinemas is that the investment per sold ticket for new projectors or sound installation for instance is typically higher in these cinemas compared to for instance urban multiplexes.

Many community-run cinemas also do not have a concessions set-up to shoulder these expenses. For Karlsen, any kind of financial support mechanism has the benefit of freeing up human resources to organize the activities involved in running a community-run cinema, including those with clear civil society functions (Karlsen 2025).

The second challenge highlighted by Karlsen concerns volunteer culture, e.g. the challenge of recruiting, organizing and motivating volunteers. Community-building volunteer culture itself is changing (Karlsen 2025). What limits the individual cinema is effectively the community of volunteers that it has managed to organize. Cinema owners can in some cases be “city kings” (Karlsen 2025) and are not necessarily equipped with these organizational skills and insights into contemporary volunteer culture. However, there is a growing body of research on volunteering and given the importance of volunteer culture for community-run cinemas, upskilling courses are an obvious option which for instance the Danish Film Institute could help fund, for instance through Danske Biografer, the national organization body of cinemas.

4.5 Methodology

Key resources consulted in this article include the “Biografer & Film” database at Statistics Denmark. We thank Senior Advisor, Cecilie Bryld Fjællegaard, for ongoing correspondence about the database and their admissions qualification process. Cinema addresses have been collected from the Danish Cinema Union (Danske Biografer), supplemented by manual searches and contributions by Carsten Karlsen. City population (January 2025) has been collected from Statistics Denmark (”BY3: Befolkningen 1. januar efter byområder, landdistrikter og folketal, areal og befolkningstæthed”). Also thanks to Dorte Wiedemann from FAFID, the Danish distributor organization, for clarifying their admissions collection process, and to Sonja Overgaard Olsen (Danish Cinema Union) for helpful documents.

The Danish Cinema Union is divided into sub-unions. These do not fully overlap with the taxonomy suggested in this article but serve as a useful compass. The three cinemas in Greenland and three in the Faroese Islands are represented in these sub-unions but are not included in the 170 for methodological reasons. Lithuanian cinemas are not organized in similar fashion. A few cinemas in Denmark refer to themselves as “culture houses” or “cultural centers”, but they are not cultural centers in the same way as those in Lithuania. Their “culture house” denomination alludes to them being multifunctional sites that include for instance theatre/musical performances but save for a few exceptions, they still screen films on a regular basis.

For the analysis of cinema infrastructure in Lithuania, Austė Jucytė of the Lithuanian Film Center (LFC) oversees cinema and cultural center registration for e.g. the Baltic Film, Facts and Figures and the European Audiovisual Observatory. She has been very helpful as data provider and sparring partner. Some sources set specific quantitative thresholds for when a cinema is counted as a multiplex (e.g. EAO’s 8+ screens). We weigh qualitative dimensions higher. Lists of cultural centers & and similar venues that screen films in Lithuania have been kindly provided by both the distributor ACME and LFC. The ACME list matches the LFC data for 2024 and is therefore used in this article. LFC’s cultural center registration may vary slightly from year to year. Addresses have been manually searched and geolocated on the basis of these lists. Manual searches for 2025-film screenings in cultural centers were conducted for app. 40% of the venues for validity check. Venues were placed in their respective city size on the basis of population data from Statistics Lithuania crossreferenced with city statistics provided by citypopulation.de/en/lithuania/cities/.

Examples of what Raats et al (2024) refer to as cultural exhibitors such as Husets Biograf in Copenhagen are not members of the Danish Cinema Union and not included in the 170 cinemas. The Lithuanian Film Center in their tabulation of “screening places” (beyond cinemas) include venues that could belong in either the cultural center or the cultural exhibitor-category (e.g. screening places in art galleries). Raats et al (2024) also list film clubs. These are not included in this study.

A number of expert interviews inform the analysis:

• Carsten Karlsen (Head of The Union for Smaller and Medium-Sized Cinemas). Online interview by Jakob Isak Nielsen, December 12, 2025.

• Lukas Trimonis (producer). Online interview by Jakob Isak Nielsen, January 9, 2026.

• Kestutis Drazdauskas (producer). Interviewed by Marius Øfsti & Jakob Isak Nielsen, stakeholder workshop in Zagreb, November 4, 2024.

• Miglė Morkūnaitė (ACME). Email correspondence January 2026.

• Ivor Šiber (producer, distributor). Interviewed by Jakob Isak Nielsen & Marius Øfsti, Zagreb, November 6, 2024.

• Claus Ladegaard (CEO of the Danish Film Institute at the time of the interview).

Interviewed by Jakob Isak Nielsen, Copenhagen, 21 September 2023.

By Małgorzata Kotlińska & Marta Materska-Samek

Table 7.1 functions as our comparative coding frame: the three cases are read through these dimensions and then synthesized in the cross-case discussion (Section 7.5).

7.3 Findings: three ecosystems of collective agility

This chapter compares three small-market film ecosystems—Estonia, Portugal, and Flanders— as distinct configurations of collective agility that respond differently to structural constraints while sharing a common need to balance cultural and market logics. Estonia exemplifies a long-term, institution-building path that couples internationalisation and capacity building with strong festival and VoD infrastructures, creating dense networking and learning platforms for professionals. Portugal, by contrast, is marked by pronounced dependence on state support and highly concentrated distribution, which pushes collective adaptation into culturally oriented circuits, relational “micro-agility” among smaller distributors and exhibitors, and long-horizon audience and literacy policies. Flanders stands out with a more robust production base and international circulation capacity, supported by a sophisticated policy toolkit that combines tax shelter instruments, regional funds, and VoD investment obligations, enabling hybrid firm profiles and coordinated responses to platformisation.

Across these cases, core similarities include the centrality of public policy, the strategic use of intermediaries (festivals, funds, VoD, and exhibition platforms), and the hybridization of roles, while key differences lie in their dominant orientations (cultural-resonance vs. production–service portfolios), degree of dependence on single intermediaries, and the balance between domestic audience-building and export-focused competitiveness.

7.4 Case narratives / Ecosystem profiles

Estonia: Agility through institutional “scaffolding” and networking platforms

Estonia is characterized by a market development strategy based on long-term strengthening of competencies and institutions. It explicitly notes that since the early 2000s “the focus has been on internationalisation, professionalisation, capacity building and institutional strengthening” (Ibrus, 2024). This systemic character is crucial for collective agility: the ecosystem creates conditions in which professionals can combine roles and move quickly between projects (national cinema, co-productions, services). A particularly important role is played by festival infrastructure as a mechanism of learning and resource matching.

The portrait emphasizes the impact of the Black Nights Film Festival, whose industry platform “facilitates networking and joint projects” between Estonian and international professionals (Ibrus, 2024). In the logic of collective agility, the festival functions as a network hub: it shortens relational distances, supports the diffusion of market and co-production knowledge, and acts as a “switching institution” connecting local resources to transnational circulation.

A second pillar is the development of instruments supporting service production and internationalization (e.g., cash rebate). From the perspective of collective agility, this strengthens flexibility and resilience (revenue, transfer of practices), but it also entails potential costs in the form of pressure toward service work at the expense of national production (Ibrus, 2024).

An important complement to Estonia’s collective-agility configuration is its digital infrastructure for audience development and education. The Good Practice example from Estonia describes Arkaader.ee as a joint initiative of the Estonian Film Institute and the

Estonian Film Archive, operating as an SVOD/TVOD environment for national cinema, with curated collections and a dedicated interface for teachers. In collective-agility terms, the platform functions as a “learning intermediary”: by lowering access barriers and providing guided pathways, it connects long-term audience building with institutional objectives of sustaining language and culture through audiovisual circulation. Importantly, this domestic accessibility orientation is reinforced by public-policy expectations that publicly supported films remain available via national VoD channels—strengthening reach at home, but also making a key competitiveness trade-off visible: Estonia’s continuing challenge is international visibility and circulation abroad, reflected in limited cinematic exports and comparatively weak international VoD distribution. This linkage is further elaborated in the companion VoD-focused chapter in this deliverable, enabling cross-referencing between audience development infrastructures and distribution competitiveness.

Portugal: agility under strong state dependence and distribution concentration

The Portuguese case foregrounds the structural dependence of production on public funding: film activity “relies almost entirely on state support” (Graça, 2024). From the orientations-model perspective, this implies that policy priorities are primarily geared toward

“cinematic art” and cultural value rather than market expansion as a dominant goal. This configuration produces a specific type of collective agility: the ecosystem adapts through the ability to assemble projects within public instruments, negotiate shifting policy priorities mainly geared towards ”cinematic art” (including audience development), and “keep circulation going” despite weak demand for national cinema (Graça, 2024).

At the same time, the portrait highlights chronic demand constraints and a strong concentration of power in circulation. In the distribution section, it emphasizes concentration: the largest operator holds around 60% of admissions (Graça, 2024). For collective agility and competitiveness, this means that adaptation and audience development often occur alongside mainstream infrastructure—through festival circuits, arthouse distribution, educational activities, and long-term programs—rather than through broad access to mass-market screens. This issue is discussed in more depth by Marius Øfsti and André Graca in chapter 5, enabling an explicit cross-link between Portugal’s circulation structure and competitiveness dynamics.

Importantly, these constraints can also make adaptation hard and contested, not merely “agile.” Collective processes involve actors with partially misaligned incentives and success criteria (e.g., cultural-policy objectives, distributors’ need for scale and visibility, exhibitors’ commercial programming logic). As a result, “collective agility” may rely on negotiated compromises and may generate uneven outcomes across stakeholders, even when cooperation is strong.

Crescine research shows that “micro-agility” in Portugal is relational and hybrid: distribution is not only about releasing a film, but also about designing the experience and accessibility. In an interview with a small independent distributor (ZeC), when asked whether the cinemas were new partners, the interviewee answers: “We have worked with all of them before” (ZeC, n.d.). Read against the high concentration noted above, this suggests that smaller distributors develop agility through recurring relationships and a “trusted network” of partners, shortening coordination cycles. The same interview also points to the growing importance of accessibility: respondents note that cinemas were “very open” to screenings with subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences (ZeC, n.d.). In collective-agility terms, this reflects an expansion of distributor competences toward audience design and collaboration with institutions/cinemas in creating a screening’s “added value.”

The Portuguese case also strengthens the theme of long-horizon audience-building policies. In an interview with a cinema operator representative (NOS), the argument appears that without strategies for participation habits over the years “we won’t have anything in 10 years” (NOS, n.d.). The interviewee points to the value of school programs in cooperation with the Ministry of Education, as well as the economic conditions required for implementation (e.g., minimum group sizes, costs of opening cinemas in the morning). This illustrates how a micro67 level operator perspective translates into a macro-level policy claim: collective agility requires not only firm-level flexibility, but also stable frameworks and cross-sector partnerships.

At this point, it is worth adding that Crescine’s policy recommendations for audience development treat the cinema experience as a “social value” and recommends measures to strengthen the communal dimension of screenings (discussion areas, clubs, group-oriented programming). The principle is stated explicitly: “Thinking of ‘who’ and not ‘what’ in programming.” In small markets, programming understood in this way becomes a practical tool for compensating platform pressure and distribution concentration—yet it also highlights the core trade-off for competitiveness: sustaining culturally oriented circuits and audience development under conditions where scale and visibility remain structurally constrained.

Flanders: Agility through iterative financial and VoD policy adjustment

Flanders stands out due to a relatively strong production position and international circulation capacity. The market portrait notes that the sector is competitive and “adept at finding routes for international distribution” (Kostovska et al., 2024). At the same time, pressure from digital distribution is reshaping the demand structure (often favouring series over films), which forces adaptations in project development and portfolio management across firms and intermediaries (Kostovska et al., 2024).

A key element of collective agility in Flanders is an extensive set of public policy and financing tools. From an orientations-model perspective, fiscal incentives—especially the Belgian tax shelter—should be treated as a major structural driver of the ecosystem’s production-service orientation: by improving financial closure and predictability, it increases the region’s attractiveness for incoming productions, supports continuous capacity utilization, and stabilizes company portfolios, including more commercially oriented projects and service work (Kostovska et al., 2024). In ecosystem-agility terms, these instruments function as resource-recombination mechanisms that translate external demand into retained capabilities, employment continuity, and learning effects within the local production base.

A further component is “regulatory agility” vis-à-vis platforms: the early introduction of investment obligations for VoD providers can be interpreted as an attempt to sustain funding inflows into the ecosystem under platformization (Kostovska et al., 2024). Together, these financial and regulatory instruments strengthen competitiveness by enabling hybrid firm profiles (film/TV/service work), while also responding to the structural shift in demand. In the area of audience development, Flanders provides an example of a meso-level collaboration mechanism on the exhibition side: the Cineville Pass subscription model for arthouse and independent cinemas. Crescine’s Good Practice examples for audience development describe Cineville Pass as an initiative that supports audience building and stabilizes independent cinemas in Belgium/Flanders. In collective-agility terms, Cineville functions as a “demand coordinator”: it increases frequency of attendance, supports habit formation, and reduces title-level risk because revenue becomes partially “portfolio-based” within the subscription framework.

7.5. Comparative discussion: mechanisms of collective agility and their costs

Institutional scaffolding for adaptation (policy scaffolding)

Across all three cases, market agility is not produced solely by firms’ project practices, but by institutional “policy scaffolding”: a configurable set of public instruments, fiscal incentives, regulation, and intermediary infrastructures that stabilise expectations, lower coordination costs, and enable adaptation under uncertainty (UNESCO, 2025.; Culture Action Europe, 2025.). Crucially, this scaffolding is not neutral: it reflects distinct market orientations and therefore different pathways to competitiveness. In Estonia, scaffolding predominantly reinforces a domestic accessibility/learning orientation by supporting circulation, education, and audience infrastructures that sustain language and culture while building long-term demand. In Portugal, strong dependence on public funding aligns with a “cinematic art” orientation, where competitiveness is pursued through cultural value and specialised circuits (festivals, arthouse distribution, education), while adaptation is structurally constrained by distribution concentration and persistent demand limitations. In Flanders, a denser mix of fiscal tools and platform-facing regulation supports a production-service and hybrid portfolio orientation, strengthening international integration by improving financial closure, attracting incoming productions, and sustaining capability-building under shifting demand. Taken together, policy scaffolding functions as an ecosystem-level capability for resource recombination, but it also entails trade-offs—between domestic cultural objectives and internationally oriented competitiveness strategies—whose costs become visible in how resources, visibility, and bargaining power are distributed across actors (Teece, 2007).

Intermediaries (festivals, industry platforms, funds, VoD/educational initiatives, club and subscription programs) act as “transmitters” of knowledge and relationships. In Estonia, this role is played, among others, by the festival and its industry platform; in Portugal, by networks of institutions and distributor–cinema relations; in Flanders, additionally by mechanisms stabilizing demand in independent cinemas (subscription). For research on agility, this matters because it shifts the analytical focus from “teamwork tools” to “collaboration infrastructure” across the ecosystem.

Hybridization is both an adaptive resource and a form of pressure in small film markets. It describes the systemic need to combine roles, competencies, and revenue logics that in bigger markets are separate. In collective-agility terms, hybridization supports competitiveness by enabling actors to “switch” between segments (e.g., art-cinema circuits, co-productions, service work, VoD-facing releases, education-linked screenings), but it also produces costs: role overload, coordination frictions, and persistent tensions between cultural objectives and market visibility.

On the audience-development side, agility requires hybrid competencies that combine programming, accessibility, cooperation with education, and tailored work with specific groups (children, seniors, migrants, people with disabilities). Crescine’s Recommendations for Audience Building highlights the importance of designing “group experiences” and cinema clubs as tools for systematically engaging communities and supporting habit formation. In practice, this expands the operational remit of exhibitors and intermediaries: they move from title-level scheduling toward audience design, partnership work (schools, local institutions), and accessibility-oriented coordination, where the “value” of a screening is co-created through ancillary formats and social infrastructure rather than assumed to follow automatically from content availability.

Hybridization also characterizes firm portfolios and professional roles across production and circulation. Under resource constraints and demand volatility, firms and professionals often operate with hybrid profiles—combining film and series work, domestic and international projects, culturally oriented titles and service production, and alternating between development, production, and audience-facing activities. Such portfolio hybridity can stabilise cash flow and sustain capability-building, but it also intensifies organisational trade-offs: time allocated to service work can crowd out development; short-term continuity may compete with long-horizon cultural strategies; and heterogeneous KPIs (cultural recognition, admissions, platform visibility, regional spend, educational reach) can pull stakeholders toward different priorities, complicating collective coordination.

Because scarcity is structural, effective recombination depends on a shared understanding of constraints across stakeholders (funders, producers, distributors, exhibitors, educators, and audience intermediaries). This mutual recognition helps align expectations and negotiate inevitable trade-offs (e.g., cultural value vs. scale; accessibility vs. costs; domestic development vs. service-work continuity), sustaining trust-based cooperation where formal market mechanisms alone do not deliver efficient coordination. Relational governance and repeated interaction can therefore operate as a competitiveness mechanism in small markets by reducing transaction costs, enabling knowledge-sharing routines, and supporting coordinated adaptation under uncertainty (Dyer & Singh, 1998; Poppo & Zenger, 2002).

Overall, hybridization should be treated as a central mechanism of collective agility in small film markets—and as a source of its “costs.” It enables resilience through recombination and cross-domain competence building, yet it simultaneously raises coordination demands and makes stakeholder alignment more difficult precisely because different actors may seek different outcomes from the same collective processes.

Trade-offs: the costs of collective agility

Collective agility is not “free.” Three types of costs recur:

1. Risk of ‘servicification’ — growth in service work increases financial resilience, but may weaken national production and its cultural legitimacy (Estonia; partly Portugal),

2. Risk of concentration — dominance of large distribution and exhibition players hinders access to audiences and stabilizing returns (Portugal),

3. Risk of demand platformization — shifting attention toward series and platforms changes the logic of development and circulation, affecting firm and institutional strategies (Flanders).

7.6. Implications for policy

The analysis supports the claim that agile culture in the creative sectors—if it is to be diagnosed adequately—must be studied at the ecosystem level. In small markets, institutions, public instruments, and intermediaries create conditions for agility as strongly as production practices do. Crescine’s audience research adds an important element: ecosystem agility also includes the capacity to build audiences through collaboration between cinemas, education, civil society organizations, and audience groups (clubs, school programs, accessibility). Policies supporting agility in small markets should balance: 1) internationalization and service production (resilience, competence transfer), 2) sustaining capacity for national production (cultural objective), 3) stabilizing circulation and building audience habits (school programs, clubs, subscriptions, accessibility).

In practice, this means designing instruments as “packages”: funding plus collaboration infrastructure plus learning and audience mechanisms. Crescine’s Recommendations for Audience Building emphasize the need for building collective experiences and clubs, including through educational activities and partnerships.

7.7 Conclusion

This chapter has shown that collective agility in small film markets is a systemic phenomenon arising from the interplay of public policies, intermediaries, hybrid roles, and learning networks. Estonia emphasizes long-term institutionalization, festival infrastructure, and a VoD/educational platform; Portugal highlights adaptation under strong state dependence and distribution concentration, alongside the growing role of audience strategies and accessibility;

Flanders underscores the effectiveness of financial and regulatory instruments and mechanisms stabilizing demand in independent cinema circulation. The shared denominator is that in small markets agility is collective—and must be analyzed not only at the project scale, but at the scale of the ecosystem that enables (or blocks) resource recombination, learning, and collaboration.

7.8 Method and research material

This chapter takes the form of a qualitative comparative synthesis based on Crescine resources. The material includes: (1) Crescine market portraits of Estonia, Portugal, and Flanders describing institutional mechanisms, sector relations, and key tensions; (2) the synthesis report State of European Film (2024); and (3) Crescine’s audience-oriented materials, including interview transcripts with key ecosystem actors and the Recommendations for Audience Development. The analysis applies a structured comparative reading to identify recurring mechanisms of collective agility (policy scaffolding, intermediaries and collaboration infrastructures, hybridization of roles and portfolios) and maps associated trade-offs (e.g., risk of servicification, distribution concentration, and cinema–platform tensions), linking these to market orientations and competitiveness implications.

The case evidence is used illustratively to trace mechanisms of collective agility within the CresCine resources, not to claim exhaustive coverage of each ecosystem. Where quantitative indicators are unavailable in the market portraits, we rely on convergent qualitative signals across policy, intermediary and audience-development materials.