28/11/2002

FICAM, the French federation of film, audiovisual and multimedia industries, commented the findings of the Couveinhas Report and presented a report of its own about the state of the technical sector of industry. The Couveinhas report was presented to the French minister for culture and communications, Jean-Jacques Aillagon at the beginning of November and highlighted a number of problems affecting the industry’s technical sector.
FICAM’s November report covers issues like the current crisis the industry is going through, the level of debt, and also voices industry anxieties about the growing trend for making films abroad. According to the FICAM Report, the technical sector of the AV industry reported a Euros 11 million loss in 2000 and Euros 30 million in 2001. The reported annual loss in profits now stands at Euros 100 milion and this is given as the main reason why so many films and programmes are being produced abroad.
The FICAM report suggested a number of ways the system could be relaunched: introducing tax breaks to make producing in France more attractive; the creation of a permanent observatory on “delocalisation” and a commission to analyse possible support systems. FICAM also called for guarantees of supplementary credit from IFCIC (institute for the financing of cinema and technical industries) as a way of obviating a key problem for the industry: maintaining loan repayment deadlines.
FICAM also advised productions to limit their artistic costs because any increase automatically results in cuts to the technical budget. FICAM feels this is hugely damaging to the film industry as a whole, not least because the technical sector is responsible for contributing some Euros 40 million annually to independent productions.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

(Translated from French)