DEFY THE LIMITS: WE ARE PARABLE

We Are Parable is an award winning film exhibition company that provides opportunities to audiences to experience Black Cinema in culturally relevant, memorable and unique ways.

We spoke to We Are Parable Co-founder Anthony Andrews:

Given one of your core company beliefs is “Experience over everything,” how have you all adapted to keep hold of that value in the times of 2020?

What a great question! In order to survive the year we’ve just had, it was really important that we stayed true to this very simple statement, and we treated this our North Star; so if any proposed activity didn’t get us closer to the value of “Experience Over Everything”, then we wouldn’t do it.

One of the things that we did early on in the pandemic is try and understand how we could translate the experience of coming to our events online; once we created events like a “Queen and Slim” Watch Party, we started to bring in activities like a live DJ set on Instagram, a poetry performance and a Q+A prior to watching the film together. Although this was all on a digital platform, we felt that we were able to offer a different experience to other Watch Parties at the time, which I think helps with our competitive advantage.

It’s also about understanding the audience. We know how much they love films and culturally relevant moments around that, so it makes our job easier when we start to create experiences that hopefully marries these two elements together. Knowing what we stand for, and priding ourselves on knowing what our audience are saying they want has been crucial for us in 2020.

You collected research surrounding willingness to return to cinemas, what’s the most surprising thing you found in the results?

I think the most surprising thing about our research (we looked into the confidence of Black audiences returning to cinemas) was the size of the disconnect between Black audiences and White audiences. For example, over a third of Black audiences said back in June that they were not sure when they would go back to cinemas, as opposed to 15% of White audiences. The research came out of hearing how cinemas were planning to recruit audiences back to cinemas, but with Black people being four times more likely to die from COVID, we wanted to know about the strategy to encourage this vulnerable audience group. We were disappointed with what we heard so, we went and asked the British Film Institute to commission us to carry out this research. This is the other thing that surprised us – the response from particular bodies in the UK film scene about protecting and communicating to Black audiences, especially when you consider that we are the second most frequent visitors to cinema in the country.

What do you think is the key to creating a successful creative and inclusive team? What positive changes have you seen come out of 2020?

Well, at the moment, it’s myself and my wife Teanne who make up the permanent team, but we are scaling to include some full time members very soon! When that happens, we’ll keep the same philosophy of  “Audience first”. It’s really important that we stay true to that, because that’s what we’ve always done and it’s what has got us to this stage. We also think it’s massively important to identify things that we need to develop in and to bring in others who might have a more authentic voice than we do. I don’t pretend to be an expert in Black Queer Cinema, to give you an example, but I know of creatives who have spent huge amounts of time producing work, articles and programmes in this space so I would take my interest in this area and hopefully collaborate with them to make  a project as honest as it could be for the intended audience. We are also really passionate about offering young people opportunities they might have to ordinarily wait a long time to be a part of – knowing how hard it is to break into some spaces. Young people have some of the best ideas, so it feels silly not to include them in a bigger team.

I think a collective ability to slow down and take stock of what’s happening and assess whether something is helping or harming you is a huge positive, not only in business, but in life. By discarding what’s not needed and keeping everything else, we’re able to really focus on what we want to do. Lockdown was helpful because we had no choice but to slow down and really think about what we mean to our audience; prior to then, it was always something I knew I should do, but because of moving at a million miles an hour meant I never gave myself the headspace to sit with those thoughts.

Seeing how cinema has adapted has been interesting to me as well; people may bemoan the big screen experience, but if we flip it, more people are watching films on streaming platforms they may not have watched before; people who couldn’t get to the cinema for whatever reason now have a film that was released this week available to watch on VOD. D/deaf, disabled and neurodiverse audiences can all benefit from improved accessibility on the latest films. These are GOOD things. It’s really not all doom and gloom.

Are there elements of your 2020 work or creative structure that you hope stay beyond this year? 

I think a collective ability to slow down and take stock of what’s happening and assess whether something is helping or harming you is a huge positive, not only in business, but in life. By discarding what’s not needed and keeping everything else, we’re able to really focus on what we want to do. Lockdown was helpful because we had no choice but to slow down and really think about what we mean to our audience; prior to then, it was always something I knew I should do, but because of moving at a million miles an hour meant I never gave myself the headspace to sit with those thoughts.

Seeing how cinema has adapted has been interesting to me as well; people may bemoan the big screen experience, but if we flip it, more people are watching films on streaming platforms they may not have watched before; people who couldn’t get to the cinema for whatever reason now have a film that was released this week available to watch on VOD. D/deaf, disabled and neurodiverse audiences can all benefit from improved accessibility on the latest films. These are GOOD things. It’s really not all doom and gloom.

Another great question. And my answer is that I want to keep asking great questions to, and about our audience so we can learn how to serve them in even a better way, and giving ourselves the space to that. I want to keep combining offline and online activity to create integrated events here and in time, across the world, and we are both really focused on fast tracking opportunities for Black British Filmmakers and creatives in the UK. So, not that ambitious at all, really… :)