The head of Bashkiria will consider a request to remove restrictions on COVID in cinema halls

The HEAD of Bashkiria, Radiy Khabirov, will consider a request to ease anti-covid restrictions in cinemas. An appeal about this to the head of the region was sent by the Association of Cinema Owners.

“The appeal of the owners of cinemas has been received and is under consideration,” the press service of the head of the republic said.

New rules for visiting cinema halls were introduced in Bashkiria by a decree signed by Radiy Khabirov on June 17. In accordance with the document, from June 22, only citizens who have a document on vaccination, a certificate of contraindications to it or a negative PCR test are allowed into the auditoriums. A similar requirement applies to other republican cultural institutions: museums, exhibition and concert halls, libraries, theaters, houses and palaces of culture, nightclubs and discos, as well as mass physical culture and sports events indoors.

The Association of Cinema Owners considered that the impact of additional restrictions on the industry would be extremely negative. The appeal sent to the heads of Bashkiria and the Nizhny Novgorod region notes that the previously introduced requirements for customers to maintain social distance, air disinfection, use of personal protective equipment and others "objectively led to a significant outflow of visitors and a drop in revenue compared to the same periods of previous years."

“After analyzing the consequences of new restrictive measures at a meeting with cinemas on the economic sustainability of film screening enterprises in the region, we are convinced that the requirement for visitors to have documents provided for by the adopted Decree will not become an effective incentive to vaccinate the population, but will only lead to a multiple decrease in the audience of cinemas ”, the industry association said in a statement.

The document notes that visiting cinemas is not the first necessity for the population, so the new restrictions will lead to a complete halt in the activities of rental organizations. At the same time, for cinema halls in the regions, rent will not be canceled or reduced, and bank loans will not be restructured, as was the case in 2020.

“Obviously, the introduction of new restrictions will lead to a complete suspension of film distribution activities in the region, the bankruptcy of cinemas and the loss of jobs, since after the suspension of cinemas for several months in 2020, the industry simply cannot withstand a second blow,” industry representatives emphasized.

Entrepreneurs are asking to exclude cinemas from the list of organizations that require a certificate provided for by the decree on high readiness to visit. They stressed that the appeal of the association was supported in Bashkiria and the Nizhny Novgorod region.