Adolfo Blanco (62, Aranda de Duero, Burgos), founder and president of A Contracorriente Films, treats his films like publishers treat their books. His experience in publishing led him to cinema, which is what he loves the most. The owner of the Verdi cinemas, which are celebrating their hundredth anniversary in Barcelona today, explains how, in the midst of the rise of artificial intelligence, sheets of film are consumed in his theaters. “People come and take what they saw and everything. They steal,” he explains. In Madrid, the Verdi “maintain the pulse and, without much growth, win over a young audience of which they were historically rare”.
Ask. In Rue Verdi, the world is upside down: the cinema has eaten the supermarket. The Verdi are expanding in Barcelona with two new rooms which will be ready next fall and will occupy the adjacent premises, which were already theirs. How did they achieve this?
Answer. When we bought Verdi, the supermarket represented a small source of income each month. We’ve been like this for years. And what is obvious is that cinema lacks rooms. It’s a cinema with such an activist, film-loving and generous parish, I think a good job has been done.
Q. Did you expect to be able to say this sentence? “The cinema lacks rooms.”
A. When we went into the theater, he was in intensive care, and we thought it was a very good synergy with our production, distribution and content management business, but to think that this could be a business… We didn’t know if the patient was going to be able to run again. I come from Atlético and I am very cholista, match by match.
Q. How many people have they made happy?
A. Several million. It’s a reciprocal gift, it has transformed many people into movie buffs. It’s a space, it’s a neighborhood, which brings together everything beautiful that life can have when you want to enjoy a moment of cultural inspiration. The work of Enric Pérez (founder of Verdi in the modern era) was spectacular, converting some poor reissue theaters. This was Gràcia’s tenth cinema at the time, when the newspaper’s billboards took up several pages. Over the course of a hundred years, the Verdi has been on the verge of closing several times. In 1981, Enric had the idea of making cinema competitive with a programming of festival films, films that no one dared to program because they were radical.
Q. When you see the Comedia cinema in Barcelona becoming the Thyssen Museum, what comes to mind?
A. It’s an absolute disgrace. When I was a kid, within a mile radius, I had 14 movie theaters. Unfortunately, there are currently large cities that do not have a movie theater. One of our favorite projects is the reopening of rooms in all types of spaces at a reasonable cost.
Q. The tone of the programming is a little more commercial. Is this the formula for resistance?
A. Since our birth in 2009, we have been called A Contracorriente. At that time, starting a business was crazy because of the economic situation. But as we didn’t know how to do better, because we are a group of partners who love cinema and basically it was a professional and personal misfortune if we had to devote ourselves to something else, that pushed us to move forward. But part of the differentiation also lay in our belief in auteur cinema, but also in commercial cinema. We understood the folk art house and we were lucky enough to find a film very early, from the second year of life, Untouchablewhich goes beyond the elites and reaches the normal spectator, which leads them to love cinema. The most commercial film, if it has a vision and a style, is an art film. Can we deny that Spielberg or Bayona are authors? However, a film which programs Verdi from the start is accepted as an “author”, such is the prescriptive value of our cinema.
Q. Do the series also feed the bug?
A. Either they are great films or they are well packaged short films. Yesterday I saw Fine arts and each story could be short. And then there are the series which are a very long, well-cut film. In any case it’s cinema and it’s good.
Q. What do you say to those who think that cinema is an expensive product?
A. I don’t think anyone believes that. For nine euros, two and a half hours of fun… you go to a bar and they’re going to charge you that for one gin and tonic and you will brush it in 20 minutes. And you will have to order another one. Although it is true that people have become lazier and cinema has suffered from competition from other forms of leisure. It’s not so much a question of budget as it is a waste of worms. To fall in love with cinema, you have to see more good films. Right now, what’s programmed on linear television is less interesting, honestly, it’s not filling. A lot of people like it, but it’s not good cinema. And then, the algorithms are very dogmatic because they lead you to the most commercial, to what the majority sees. We are slaves to the majority and sometimes the majority doesn’t like the best. The Verdi attracts more moviegoers because statistically you will see good films. The film distributor is the equivalent of the book publisher. We identify the films that we think they will like, we adapt them to our territory, we do perfect dubbing, sometimes we even change the title, we think about the launch… we do conscientious editorial work. I don’t want films where you see grass growing, even if they win the Golden Bear, someone else frees them, I’m not interested in a film where people are bored.
Q. Paramount declares war on Netflix: makes hostile bid for Warner Bros.
A. It’s worrying. It’s not good that Warner is disappearing. Netflix has not been particularly supportive of the cinema model. But I’m not any calmer if this ends up at Paramount because then the competition could be canceled.
Q. What do you think of those who accuse culture of being subsidized?
A. This is happening in Spain. You go to other equally subsidized countries and this question does not arise. Often the people who complain are those who have felt an attack on their way of thinking from the culture. Intolerance works both ways. It’s not good. We don’t joke with museums, it’s with cinema. It’s difficult for someone who goes to Verdi and who loves cinema to say this. Normally, it is very uneducated people who use this kind of arguments, we must subsidize culture, because otherwise it would be a catastrophe, we would only live off the algorithm.
Q. What do you recommend before the end of the year?
A. Flowers for Antonio And Homo Argentum.
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