The biggest slice of day one at the ICAA conference saw the internet pressed into the service of conventional cinema screenings as several speakers – all CEOs of their respective companies – explained imaginative ways of promoting films and screenings that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago.
David Doepel of the new distribution company Leapfrog presented his 2014 slate of international films from Nigeria, Spain and the US. He used quotes from great writers to explain Leapfrog’s philosophy: one, from the late critic Roger Ebert, caught this writer’s imagination and deserves repeating. “Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts… The great movies enlarge us, they civilize us, they make us more decent people.”
