MEDICI — The Film Funding Journey

Methodology, Skills and Professional Benefits Participants Participants' Comments MEDICI Head of Training «The 12 Labours of Hercules» Report of the Reports – Workshops 1 to 4

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Ninth Workshop – 25 to 27 September 2019 in Potsdam, Berlin

Module 6: Free Flow: What Do You Think?

Introduction

During Module 6, the MEDICI participants took part in the joint panel discussion to share their impressions of the 9th MEDICI workshop and make proposals for the topics and the structure for future workshops. What follows is an overview of their comments, concerns and suggestions divided into nine themes.

THEME 1: Should the supported content be free when exploited online?

In many countries there is the binding regulation that whoever pays taxes in that country can watch for free the TV series financed by that country’s public film funds. For that reason, it is difficult to sell the funded TV series to Netflix or similar digital platforms. Countries have two approaches:

Some pass the law stipulating that after a TV series is offered for some time for free by a local, public broadcaster, it can be sold to Netflix.
In some countries, the public broadcaster has online platforms where everything is offered for free because people paid for it via different forms of national media tax. In this way they avoid the risk that the tax-payers pay twice for the same TV series (once to finance it through their taxes, and once to watch it)?

THEME 2: How to integrate support for digital formats into traditional film funds?

Film funds are forced by politicians and governments to integrate the new digital formats into the existing film and TV support schemes rather than create entirely new schemes. However, it is a huge challenge for the funds to find a vocabulary that would help them insert the digital world into the pre-historical film funds and their schemes. There must be separate funding schemes for the digital.
Some funds resolved this problem by changing the terminology. For example, the Swiss regional fund Cinéforom replaced the term “film” with the term “a work of art”
The Flemish Audiovisual Fund (VAF), first tried to integrate the digital into the funding schemes for traditional format, but the experts in the classic selection committees were not competent enough to evaluate digital projects. As a result, new formats were discriminated, while the traditional formats were protected. That is why the fund now has a separate scheme for the new formats. It works better even though the fund had to build a wall between the old and the new formats. The number of applications for the new formats scheme is increasing, there is a new vocabulary, people making new formats have a distinct identity and the experts in the selection committee are getting more and more competent and experienced. However, the VAF’s final goal is still to go back again to the global approach when the format will not matter.
At the Danish Film Institute, the game support scheme is run by a games expert, so that the selection can be as professional as possible.

THEME 3: Why do filmmakers seem detached from the serious topics of contemporary society?

Directors seem too alienated from contemporary themes. They mostly either deal with historical topics or, if they deal with the contemporary times, tend to create their own bubble and a constructed reality which does not have anything to do with real issues such as, for example, the alarming polarization of the society.
Is there something wrong with film schools if they do not instruct the new European talent to be more subversive and contemporary?
How can film funds motivate filmmakers to be part of society and tell the stories that are relevant to people?
It is true that there are already many social-realistic dramas, but they only imitate and reproduce society. The stories from those films can be put in an imaginative way, so they incite a stronger engagement and an extraordinary connection to the story.

THEME 4: Issues with the IP rights

Producers still do not think enough about protecting and exploiting their IP rights. They still focus much more on the ideas and the content.
In Germany, there is a specific fund designed only to attract large TV and film productions to Germany that would engage more German producers and production companies. For the FFFA it is important that German producers keep some IP on such productions, so that they can receive some revenues from their exploitation. Keeping some IP also gives producers a power while negotiating about the platform release during the exploitation of films. Otherwise, they simply give away the entire IP for a fee. However, the main problem is that many producers do not mind giving away all the rights for a decent fee.
The funds should keep archives of produced films and go back to the catalogues of films from time to time, in order to check if they still create revenues. Some Eurimages films produced in the 1980s and 1990s indeed still generate revenues when they are, for example, broadcast on Canal+ today.
Some films do not have identified owners. They are called “orphan films” and cannot be exploited economically. However, if their owners appear, they can claim the revenue back.

THEME 5: How to communicate bad news to producers

Many public film funds find it difficult to communicate to producers that they need to phase out a support scheme. How to tell producers, for example, that funds will not finance project development anymore because they need to start financing something else. Producers are dependent on the funds, which makes it very delicate when the funds need to stop supporting them. MEDICI participants proposed several solutions to this communication problem:

Funds can explain to producers that the limited-budget they have necessitates changing priorities from time to time.
Producers must be made aware from the very beginning that the funds depend on external funding and that some schemes will have to be shut down if their budgets are not increased by the governments.
Funds can communicate in the very beginning that a particular funding scheme will last only for a limited period of time and thus prepare producers in due time.
The funds need to develop the tools for measuring the impact of all funding schemes and prioritize the funding schemes based on their impact index.

THEME 6: More visibility for the funded films

Funds should consider moving some money to distribution and promotion from the production funding schemes.
Funds do not necessarily support projects because they are good, but often have different side motives that determine their funding decisions. Sometimes they grant funding to a company only because they know that it would go bankrupt otherwise. This approach is highly problematic.
Funds should also consider granting more support for the promotional costs incurred during the production stage (i.e. making the top-quality stills, electronic press-clip, etc.). The Flemish Film Fund (VAF) grants 30,000 euro for these costs if the producer is ready to invest another 30,000 euro. Productions then hire a promotion manager who takes care that a project receives a proper visibility already during the productions stage.
Producers and distributors are sometimes more traditional then the funds themselves. They do not care about the new formats and innovative business models. They focus only on theatrical release and festivals. The funds need to make sure that they allot the promotional money to the right people who know how to spend the promotion and distribution funding properly and adapt it to the project. The funds need to educate both producers and distributors about what is the market today.
Promotion money should be given only to those who make an obvious extra effort to promote films. Producers and distributors must come with concrete strategies.
Funds can demand that all the films are after certain time available online for the public under the conditions that producers set.

THEME 7: Political challenges

The funds produce digital content and new, innovative formats, when the governments decide to allocate some extra budget for that. However, it is happening only when film-friendly politicians are in power. It is sad that the sustainability of a film industry depends on that. What do funds do when the government changes.
In some countries like Portugal, the funds do not need to worry about the political changes in the country because they are financed by the money that is independent from the government. The entire funding comes from the cable operators, broadcasters and exhibitors. This has been regulated by the amendments to the film law.
Politicians put film funds under a huge pressure to increase the visibility of their films. Funds need to make sure to share this pressure with the producers.

THEME 8: The question of green cinema

The concept of green cinema is based on a special method starting from the green script-writing. It means that content of scripts should increase the environmental awareness of the spectators. For example, old-fashioned technologies should be replaced with the new ones in the scripts wherever possible. The same approach can be applied also to productions and distribution. Furthermore, the funds can also make their workflow more ecological and simultaneously more cost-efficient.

How can funds motivate and incentivize film professionals to adapt this approach?

Does it mean that the producers would be forced to lower the budgets of their films?

In 2015, Cineregio, the network of European regional film funds, published the report about the green filmmaking. The report is available at www.cineregio.org/publications/green_regio_report_2015/
Funds should pay more attention to green cinema. But they should apply it to themselves first before the impose it on others.
The Swiss Federal Office of Culture has imposed the rule that its employees can fly only to the places that cannot be reached by train within six hours.
Five years ago, the Flemish Audiovisual Fund set the rule that for every funded project, the producer must fill in the specific form in which the possibilities for the environmentally friendly production are explored. There are experts who are employed only to help producers with this. They explore if they can save energy on the transport, on the use of light, etc. After the production is finished, producers submit to the fund an excel-sheet that shows how much effort the producer made in this regard. Producers surprisingly accepted this without any opposition even though the fund did not provide any financial incentive in return.
Co-productions involve a lot of travelling of cast and crews. So instead of travelling and exchanging people, co-producers can trade incentives.
There is a company called Ecocinema, based in the Latin America, that shot the entire film in Patagonia using only the solar energy. Maybe such cases should be given more attention to inspire European producers.

THEME 9: Data-management issues

Privatization of data is a big issue. They are not available to the funds, but are exclusively owned by private companies. The funds need more resources, IT-tools, data-experts and more time for handling the available data. Funds should include all these things in their official objectives. F
Funds can demand from the producers to start providing the data on the platform-exploitation of their films.
If the funds put all the data on blockchain, do they know what will happen with them. Can they trust that they will be handled properly?
Some funds, like Eurimages, have a lot of data, but they really do not do much with it due to the lack of resources, people and time. Statistical analysis is also often not among the policy objectives and priorities of the funds.
Digital platforms need to be forced to share data about the success stories with producers. They should at least tell them how many people clicked on the “play” button. They have slowly started sharing such data for the original productions, but they still do not do it when it comes to the licensed content. The funds need to push more towards his direction if they want to receive more audience-relevant data.

The public film funds’ experiences with new players and forms of content, their impact on funding schemes and their responsibility towards the industry in the 21^st century

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