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Fifth Workshop – Tuesday 29 September to Thursday 1 October 2015 in Santpoort, Netherlands
MODULE 6 – What to foresee in the next ten years based on what’s going on now?
In other words:
- Why not spend some time looking at what is happening within the funds?
- Are there new initiatives, issues of funding, future changes that would be useful to share with colleagues?
- How do funds see their role evolving in the next ten years?
In a nutshell, what funds need to think about
- If they do not change, they lose.
- Funds need to get closer to each other.
- They should not impose unnecessary rules on themselves.
- They can always improve. They should learn from mistakes and revise their methodology to avoid repeating them.
- They need to set high goals and find the way to adapt to the strategies that lead to reaching those goals.
- It is more dynamic when there is competition. They should look what their competitors do and co-evolve with new ideas.
- The situation within the system does not really reflect what happens outside it.
- Are the fund those who can drive audience-behaviour or does it come entirely from somewhere else?
Outcome of group discussions
What are the chief change-drivers within the public film funds’ system?
- Expectations from politicians
- Technological change/telecom/digital world
- Viewing patterns among audiences
- Many underrepresented voices
- Economic crisis
- VoD platforms like Netflix
- Transatlantic Trade and Partnership Agreement (TTPA)
- Globalisation of services
- Piracy
- Global market value of audiovisual products (web is absorbing millions of dollars while television is declining)
- Consumer behaviour
- New production formats
- New definition of film
Ways of responding to these change-drivers
- Keeping the traditional approach by resisting any changes, OR
- Moderately changing the traditional approach, OR
- Radically changing to an approach that would reconfigure the entire system.
What will not/should not change in 10-year time
- The political willingness to support screen content in a cultural context.
- The survival of a traditional form of films that will continue to receive the major part of film funds’ support.
- The existence of cinema theatres. As a social activity, they will still dominate despite the new viewing habits caused by Netflix, piracy, new technology and higher internet and cable TV penetration rates.
- Funds will stay primarily cultural. Business criteria will not permeate.
- Funds will keep making socially relevant films.
What funds will/should change in 10 years’ time
- Redefine themselves as not exclusively cultural institutions, and ask for funding from other competent ministries not just the Ministry of Culture. In Finland, film funds are already linked the Ministry of Telecommunications.
- Bring a broader expertise within their team that would loosen-up the rigid, old-school cultural thinking.
- Redefine what “national” means. What is national culture today in the global world when people have 2-3 passports and young people function globally? Should the national identity be preserved in the most traditional way or should this notion be expended?
- Turn more towards the new habits of the audiences in the way the public broadcasters did in the past 10 years.
- Be renamed as an audiovisual fund, whereby they would make more room for experiments, innovation, development of new formats, etc.
- Respond to different parts of society that, due to new technologies, demand new audiovisual output in different formats.
- Accept that there will be more players able to co-finance new formats (all kinds of distributors, telecom operators, etc.).
- Keep cultural value in the films they will support, but not necessarily national value.
- Support media literacy and audience-building. It is crucial to educate the upcoming audience, not to leave them only to the market.
The main impediments to implementing adequate changes within the funds
- People involved in the system of public funding are old-school types (producers, directors, traditional distributors and exhibitors). There are hardly any new people, like telecom operators, coming in.
- The way public funds finance screen content now, in administrative terms, is not adaptable to the financing of new formats.
- The DVD service and the revenues it generated are gone. Although transactional VoD is up and running, it will never compensate for the lost revenues.
- There is a self-evident change in viewing patterns and consumers’ behaviour, but there is sometimes too much of fetishism for change at any price, which could mislead funds in their strategies.
International co-productions, Development, Gender and quotas
- Module 1 – Co-production: Landscape (volume, co-production treaties, cinema vs television, financial, non-official)
- Module 2 – Co-productions: Financing issues: for the producers, for the funds (specific programmes, decision timeline, recoupment, financial co-production)
- Module 3 – Co-productions: Legal and Financial Issues
- Module 4 – Distribution: co-production opens access to other countries, does the audience follow?
- Module 5 – Gender / Quotas Issue – Update on Funds’ Strategies
- Module 6 – What to foresee in the next ten years based on what’s going on now?
- Module 7 – Development – An underestimated stage in the production process?
Illustrations by Gijs van der Lelij
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