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Second Workshop Report – 7 to 9 November, 2012 – Retz (Austria)
Module 1 – The Role of Public Film Funds
This issue was already raised and discussed during the First Workshop. Participants have asked that it be included again in the Second Workshop in order to delve more deeply into it with the following questions in mind:
- What is it that we want to do?
- What is it that we want to achieve?
- What are our ambitions?
- Why do we think we have a role to play?
Nota bene: this chapter can be read in parallel with and/or in addition to the equivalent chapter in the First Workshop Report at www.focal.ch/medici-training/reports/1-module1.html.
1. The Mission of Film Funds
- To determine whether to remain exclusively a cultural fund or, due to the economic crisis, to instead invest more in TV programmes and commercial projects.
- To undertake some risk and opt for new innovative financing strategies like crowd-funding and social-network financing.
- To keep up with unabated expectations of today's audiences to see new stories on screen, and to incite audiences to see more movies.
- To remain democratic and avoid any external pressure on decision-making.
- To improve collaboration with other funds, particularly with those ones based in the same region.
- To be as transparent as possible in demonstrating why a project receives support or not.
- To be open-minded enough to be seduced by something unexpected.
2. Challenges
How to improve communication with audiences, film professionals and politicians?
- By better marketing film funds in terms of partnership rather then than financing.
- Through digitization, helping arthouse theaters to keep films on their screen for longer lengths of time, in order to reach a wider audience and enabling more films to be seen.
- By collaborating with, for instance, social media, airlines or cable companies in order not only to raise additional money for the films, but to also increase the number of opportunities for these to be seen.
- By finding the right balance between ‘marriage of interest’ and ‘marriage of love’ through separate schemes for arthouse and commercial films, so as to satisfy different kinds of audiences.
- By creating a way of communicating decisions and feedbacks to increase producers' awareness and responsibility instead of ‘scaring them off’ (i.e. the role of scriptwriters and script doctors).
- By involving the public in the evaluation process (i.e. Norwegian Film Institute’s program whereby diverse projects are presented to the public on the Norwegian TV).
- By encouraging projects able to convey local stories using a universal language (examples: Iranian films about Islam understandable to people belonging to other religions and cultures, or recent films about the war in Yugoslavia targeting international audiences).
- By creating bridges between television and the film industry in order to improve audience reach.
“The craft of seduction” in film financing. How to seduce/be seduced more easily as a public fund?
- By asking the producer to state clearly WHY he wants to produce his film, enabling the fund to define and communicate to politicians and government just WHY it wants to support the film, even though a considerable financial risk is entailed.
- By introducing new financing schemes for new talents (for example, a scheme for first-time directors working with established producers).
- By networking and improving the international presence of the supported projects so that they can seduce outside the domestic market.
- By careful selection of the topics and styles from one's own country, to lend it appeal in other markets.
Risk-taking and new strategies
Why?
- Pressure by politicians and government for public film funds to be less isolated and more industry-oriented often contradicts their mission to support mainly art-house films regardless of the distribution potential. Therefore, risk-taking and the introduction of innovative strategies are crucial policy options for a number of the public film funds in Europe.
How?
- By thinking more digital in order to reduce the costs of filmmaking.
- By taking into consideration participatory cinema (crowd-financing, social-network financing, and engagement of the on-line community of film enthusiasts) like in the recent case of Finnish Film Foundation.
- By drawing up the financial lines for cross-media support.
- By opting for more inclusive tax-mechanisms that avoid the trap of promoting only the local element (Belgian tax-shelter excels as the best example).
- By increasing the funds for the minority co-production schemes (especially for countries from a same region) in order to attract new names, improve skills and consequently improve the performance of domestic cinema (Croatian Audiovisual Center, for example, allocates 15% of its production budget to the minority co-production scheme).
- By being more global, i.e. opening up to new non-European markets regarding co-productions (for instance, Brazil offers very favorable co-production arrangements at the moment).
- By supporting top-quality projects, regardless of the origin of their directors.
3. Shared conclusions
- A great majority of public film funds, although subject to a number of different problems, have two threats in common: lack of money and lack of communication with politicians, private investors, people who make final-decisions and producers.
- Funds are filled with generous intentions; nevertheless, they are obliged to continue to come up with improvements and innovations in order for them to cope better with the myriad challenges of today and tomorrow.
- Bringing larger audiences to cinemas showing national movies is the crucial and ongoing ambition of many funds.
- Module 1 — The Role of Public Film Funds
- Module 2 — Coproduction, Minority and Agreements
- Module 3 — Financing Tools
- Module 4 — National Funds / Regional funds – Friends or Competitors?
- Module 5 — A diversity of voices… a real challenge
- Open Space Module
- List of Participants (PDF)
- MEDICI Second Workshop Full Report (PDF)
Illustrations by Rudi Klein, photos by Nora Friedel
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