22/01/2026 - At a time of market uncertainty and format fluidity, the heads of Göteborg Industry discuss audience-first thinking, creative risk and the evolving role of industry platforms in Europe

Ahead of the upcoming edition of the Göteborg Film Festival (23 January-1 February), the Nordic Film Market (28-30 January) and TV Drama Vision (27-28 January) run in parallel, reinforcing the festival’s position as one of Europe’s most significant audiovisual meeting points. Head of Industry Josef Kullengård and head of TV Drama Vision Cia Edström reflect on adapting to market shifts, protecting authorship within audience-first thinking, and how uncertainty can fuel ambition, collaboration and artistic risk in the European audiovisual sector.

Cineuropa: The Nordic Film Market and TV Drama Vision run side by side; how do you see their roles evolving, and what does their coexistence reveal about the changing boundaries between film and series?
Josef Kullengård: The Nordic Film Market and TV Drama Vision running side by side is one of Göteborg’s clearest strengths. Together, they make the festival a genuine audiovisual marketplace. In many ways, the core audience overlaps – producers, financiers, buyers, festival programmers and commissioners increasingly move between formats, and the same production companies develop projects for both cinema and series. At the same time, each platform has its own distinct logic and community, which is exactly why the combination is attractive.

Cia Edström: Their coexistence also reflects what we all see in the Nordic and European industries right now: boundaries are becoming blurrier. Formats are fluid, IP travels across windows and platforms, and consumption patterns have changed dramatically. With the drama-series ecosystem still finding a suitable size and moving to pre-pandemic figures, it is becoming even more important for industry platforms such as ours to mirror reality.

Across both programmes, there is a strong emphasis on audience-first thinking. How do you balance this focus with the need to protect creative risk and authorship in an increasingly risk-averse market?
CE: Positioning your project with an intended audience is not about lowering your artistic ambition; that’s a common misunderstanding. It is about understanding your audience, and getting to know them and their behaviours. It means working with a team that truly believes in your story, and thinking about who the work is for and how it will reach its audience.  

JK: In today’s market, I actually think elasticity is a key creative and strategic skill – being able to identify your recipients, understand where they discover stories, and still safeguard a strong auteur vision. That’s the equation everyone must face. And the truth is: audiences are often far more open than the market assumes. Every year, audiences prove they can embrace challenging, complex and even seemingly “difficult” subjects, sometimes more readily than financiers or gatekeepers expect.

Several sessions this year, including Wonderful Things That Work and Dogma 25 [see the news], reflect a desire to rethink established industry practices. What kinds of conversations do you hope these sessions will open?
CE: We programmed these sessions because the industry is in a moment where “business as usual” no longer feels sufficient. Wonderful Things That Work is about hope, and looking into what succeeds creatively, structurally and financially in a tough market. What does it take, and what can we learn from these brilliant minds?

JK: Dogma 25 is a different kind of provocation. It brings the conversation back to urgency, authorship and artistic risk, and it asks what kind of rules, constraints or principles might help filmmakers reclaim momentum in a landscape shaped by algorithms, compressed financing and speed.

Reality, technology and politics are moving faster than traditional development cycles. How are you encouraging projects that are resilient, adaptable and still culturally relevant in this shifting landscape?
CE: We try, in a practical way, to support projects and creators in staying culturally relevant while becoming more adaptable to a faster-moving reality. Apart from spotlighting projects, part of that is curating a programme that dives into topics that are relevant for the industry, very much in the spirit of the Nostradamus Report’s call to engage with reality while continuing to tell stories that matter. Some examples in the 2026 programme are looking into changing audience behaviours, how to rethink IPs and formats, shared sustainability frameworks and how AI is entering the production pipeline, with all the creative and ethical implications that entails. We also work to improve cross-border collaboration, with initiatives such as In Focus: Germany, and sessions on co-production and financing structures. Our ambition is simply to create a space where the industry can get inspiration, test ideas, share strategies, connect, and find new partners and financing.

Looking ahead, if both platforms succeed on their own terms over the next five years, what would be different in terms of how European films and series are developed, financed and circulated compared to today?
JK: Both the industry and society remain volatile, making even the near future impossible to fully foresee. But it’s really about making Europe succeed, and that will mean that films and series will be developed and financed in a way that is more collaborative, with clearer bridges built between formats, windows and partners. I hope we’ll see earlier, smarter international co-development and financing models that better reflect how stories now travel across platforms (cinema, streaming, public service and small windows). I also hope “audience work” will become more normalised as a creative tool, rather than a marketing afterthought: prototyping audiences earlier, building communities around projects, and making distribution and circulation part of development from the outset. The best we can do is commit ourselves to what we engage in, and through that commitment, create faith and hope for what lies ahead.