Premiere
A premiere, also spelled première,[1][2] (from French: première, 1er, transl. first, 1st[3]) is the debut (first public presentation) of a work, i.e. play, film, dance, musical composition, or even a performer in that work.[4][5][2][6]
"Opening night" and "World premiere" redirect here. For other uses, see Opening Night and World Premiere.History[edit]
Raymond F. Betts attributes the introduction of the film premiere to showman Sid Grauman, who founded Grauman's Chinese Theatre.[7] The first ever Hollywood premiere was for the 1922 film Robin Hood, starring Douglas Fairbanks, in front of the Egyptian Theatre.[8] By the late 1920s the red carpet had become synonymous with film premieres.
Festivals[edit]
Significance of a premiere[edit]
The type of premiers that a work receives will impact on how the work is treated by festivals, including the categorization of the work in screening sessions, e.g. Fantastic Fest, and even as the basis of its submission requirements, e.g. Sundance Film Festival eligibility rules require that United States feature films, both narrative and documentary, have retained their world premier status, whilst international feature films, both narrative and documentary, have retained the international premiere status.[18]
Premiering at a film festival has been used to gain publicity for a film, even without a distributor already in place, and can even allow last minuting editing.[19] Director Alex Winter said, of film festival premiers, "It helps me get a sense of what my work is or isn't communicating. We've often made little tweaks and changes after we've premiered it at a few film festivals."[19]
Online premieres[edit]
Concerns existed about online premieres, when in 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, festivals had to become either partially online, e.g. SXSW and Tribeca, or fully online, e.g. CPH:DOX, Visions du Reel.[20] Director Alex Winter even went so far as to pull his documentary Zappa out of both SXSW and CPH:DOX rather than let the film premiere there, saying "Our main concern was sales. Being online with these festivals would be the equivalent of a streaming distribution deal."[19]
On 29 May 2020,[21] upon the cancellation of a number festivals, including the Tribeca Film Festival, an International film festival called We Are One was organised where films were globally streamed, via YouTube,[22] in an event containing 13 world premieres, 31 online premieres, and 5 international online premiers.[23] Director Lina Soualem, who reluctantly kept her film Their Algeria in for an online premier at We Are One said "At first, your automatic feeling is, 'No, I don't want to do that, ... I felt distressed because this would be the first time I would show an audience my film, so I was upset that it (would have to) be online." but said she relented as "I was observing (the Doha Film Institute's Qumra event) online, and it was a good experience. I spoke to many programmers and professionals, and little by little, I understood we are all in the same situation and times are so uncertain that if I decided to say 'no,' I wouldn't know what would happen next with the film."[19]
Fionnuala Halligan of Screen Daily questioned the legitimacy of the festivals without physically screened premiers, saying "Is premiere status demanded by A-list festivals still valid, and if not world, then national or international, or online – how much do they matter in the time of Covid?"[20] On the complications of incorporating online premiers during the new online reformatting of festivals, Halligan said that another burning question was "Would a geo-locked online premiere at a smaller festival jeopardise a filmmaker's chances for showing their "international premiere" at another, perhaps larger, more covetable event (for which the selection hasn't yet been announced)?"[20]
