Abstract

This chapter explores how audience research can enhance our understanding of World Cinema. It focuses in particular on the insights that can be drawn from box-office figures, audience surveys and focus groups. I will use these methods to examine how contemporary European audiences engage with films from around the world, though the methods can of course be applied to other contexts. The research itself comes out of the Mediating Cultural Encounters through European Screens (MeCETES) project, a three-year collaborative research project that examined the funding, production, distribution, reception and policy circumstances that enable European films and television dramas to be made and to circulate within contemporary Europe (www.mecetes.co.uk/).