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"Once you let yourself give the movie your full attention, you can let your imagination get swept away."


For the seventh edition of Big Screen Feature - providing a behind-the-scenes look at the world of cinema exhibition through the eyes of professionals themselves - Suzanna Holmqvist (Chief Marketing Officer, Svenska Bio) discusses the job itself and the value of the Big Screen.

Describe your typical day at work.
I try to always start my day with a few minutes just plotting down my aims for the day. It’s too easy to get swept up by the phone calls and emails so it helps me stay focused once other things occur, which they inevitably do. Then, I normally check-in with my colleagues to see what’s on. As I’m usually at my best in the morning this is the part of day in which I try to book most meetings and get more creative or challenging things done.

My focus is to enhance our customers’ journey and the challenge is to choose from the many opportunities to do so. Which ones should we focus on and when? What will make the largest impression on the audience to make them come back and visit us soon?

The moment you fell in love with the Big Screen?
I’ve fallen in love with the cinema repeatedly. There have been points in my life when the cinema held a very special place for me, such as when I lived in Los Angeles and was overwhelmed by the vast options of cinema profiles, for example.

My family have always been in exhibition, so I grew up loving the cinema. But my strongest childhood experience was Disney’s The Fox and the Hound. I saw it during the school summer break and I remember that when the teacher asked us what we did during summer, the visit to the cinema, watching The Fox and the Hound, was all I wanted to talk about.

The best thing about the cinematic experience? 
The undisturbed environment where there is a minimum of things to steal your focus. Once you let yourself give the movie your full attention, you can let your imagination get swept away. For example, my teenage daughters only watch movies at the cinema. At home on a TV, tablet or smart phone they lose their concentration within fifteen minutes so instead they watch YouTubers or TV-series. However, thankfully they love the cinema and go often with their friends. And whether you go with friends and family or on your own (which I sometimes do) there is the sense of a shared experience. And you may or may not like discussing a movie after the story ends, but you have still shared the experience with others.


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