23/07/2015 - The country is due to sign the membership agreement in the autumn, with a view to achieving actual participation in 2016

Ukraine is due to sign an agreement that will grant it membership of the European Commission’s Creative Europe programme this autumn, with a view to attaining actual partial membership in 2016. The information was announced on Thursday 16 July by Martin Dawson, of the EU-Eastern Partnership/Culture and Creativity programme, during a Creative Europe presentation session held as part of the 2015 Odessa International Film Festival.

Ukraine will therefore join the 28 European Union member states as well as Turkey, Georgia and Moldova (members since 2015), and Iceland, Norway, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia, which became members of the programme in 2014. Candidates from Ukraine will thus soon be able to partially benefit from MEDIA support in the sectors of training, festivals, audience development and market access.

This membership (which will be made official with a symbolic sum of one euro) could be good news for Ukraine, whose investment in the audiovisual domain fell substantially in 2014 in the wake of the crisis that has riddled the country. In any case, Ukraine is recovering gradually, as several speakers pointed out at Odessa: negotiations are under way on a new audiovisual law that will allow the nation to attract foreign productions, and a good number of Ukrainian initiatives are in rude health, including the audiovisual group Film UA and the historic Odessa Film Studio.

(Translated from French)