29/03/2007

Despite the good performance of French film production in 2006, details of which were unveiled on Tuesday by the Centre National de la Cinématographie (see news), two worrying and opposing trends are becoming more pronounced.

With only nine big-budget (+€15m) French majority productions in 2006, compared to 12 in 2005, and a fall in the number of productions with budgets under €1m (28 in 2006, compared to 41 in 2005), the gap is clearly widening within the mid-budget film category (€2-€15m). Films with budgets of between €4m and 7m are particularly hit by this trend, with only 19 features produced in 2006, compared to 48 in 2005.

As pointed out by CNC Director General Véronique Cayla, the figures are "affected by the Canal+ Group’s diversity clause, which makes a distinction between films with budgets of under €4m and others (the limit was fixed at €5.34m prior to 2005)."

The problem is that the category immediately below (€2-€4m) saw no increase in productions, while 63 features were produced on budgets of less than €2m. According to Cayla, a significant number of them sometimes have precarious production conditions because of their artistic ambitions."

This analysis echoes the alarm bells rung by director Pascale Ferrand at this year’s Cesar awards ceremony (“Television channels are very methodically trying to get rid of medium-budget auteur films”) and has pushed the CNC to set three objectives.

The first consists of encouraging new sources of public funding (the regions, Sofica) to provide more investment to this part of French production. The second objective is to redistribute CNC funding after consultation with professionals in order to reinforce the principle of solidarity of the support funds. "When the market is performing well, we can provide more support for artistic ambitions, for example through the increased degressivity of automatic support for multi-million budget productions in theatres,” said Cayla.

Lastly, the CNC will study in detail the effects of the Canal + limit set by its diversity clause to curb the lack of mid-range budget productions.

In the high budget category, 67.4% of 164 French majority productions made in 2006 carried a budget of more than €7m, compared to 61.2% in 2005 and 50.5% in 2002. Top of the list were Asterix at the Olympic Games, outdoing its competitors with a €70m budget; Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Sa Majesté Minor with a €30.4m budget; Gérard Krawczyk’s L’auberge rouge (€21.4m); and Alain Corneau’s Second Wind [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (€21.1m).

(Translated from French)