German cinemas showed a total of 2,368 films in 2017. These included 653 first screenings. According to the Filmförderungsanstalt (FFA), 122.3 million cinema tickets were sold. As reported by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) in the run-up to the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), each inhabitant went to the cinema on average 1.5 times in 2017. US films were seen most frequently in 2017. Their share of admissions was 64 %, while German cinema films and German foreign co-productions reached a share of 24 %. Films from the European Union accounted for 11 %, other foreign films for 1 %.
The report states: „Attending a film festival usually involves more than just watching a film with family or friends. Film festivals are events where films are offered and consumed for several days. Different target groups are addressed and come together in one place. For filmmakers, too, film festivals are an opportunity to make their works accessible to a wider audience. Differentiated analyses of the German film festival market are only available nationwide in the form of a study, the results of which have so far only been published in excerpts. … A few results of this study will be presented in this divisional report.
Nine film festivals will be examined in detail in the FFA studies. … The initiative to examine film festivals in Germany (Film Festival Studies) is the only source of data on the German film festival landscape. … Further efforts would be needed here to obtain more information on the artistically and economically important field of film festivals.”