24/10/2011

Last Friday, good news and fears fuelled the debate organised by the Dijon Film Meetings on the topic of improving distribution of European films. Positive signals came from the MEDIA Programme, represented by Philippe Brunet, chief of staff to Andrea Vassiliou, European Commissioner for Education, Youth, Culture, Sport and Multilingualism.

Confirming that the budget proposal would take the MEDIA Programme 2014-2020 up to €900m (compared to €778m for the previous period), Brunet also underlined that the Guarantee Fund would amount to €200m and that for the digitisation of theatres (which had a budget of only €8m), the European states could dip into the €300bn from the Regional Development Fund. On this last point, he nonetheless expressed major reserves about the possibility of linking up the transition to digital, when it is financed by public funds, to European film programming commitments, a request made by several participants and the ARP (Civil Society of Writers-Directors-Producers). Indeed, according to him, the introduction of such a condition would see member states preferring to use these funds to build bridges and hospitals rather than put in place digital screens.

Major concerns were voiced especially by the distribution sector with Poland’s Jakub Duszynski (Gutek Films and co-president of Europa Distribution) pointing out that European auteur cinema risks ending up being ghettoised in a few theatres amid fierce competition between distributors and in an environment where the multiplexes in his country refuse for example to programme films like François Ozon’s Potiche [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. In his opinion, the main challenge is finding solutions to bring the TV-glued over-fifties audience back to theatres.

This interesting analysis can be compared with the analysis of the UK market provided by Clare Binns, head of programming at City Screen, the UK’s largest independent cinema network. She emphasised that teenage audience figures were very low in her theatres and she believes that adult audiences have a large appetite for European films, but that the range of films on offer isn’t sufficiently developed. According to her, "audiences who enjoy European films don’t like multiplexes which aren’t interested in debut features and difficult films.”

This point of view isn’t shared by Régine Hatchondo, managing director of Unifrance, whose main aim is to curb 15-25-year-olds’ loss of interest in a certain type of European cinema. She believes that the structural decline in the circulation of European works has reinforced the triumph of US cinema (except in China and India) and only radical and speedy measures will be able to reverse the trend. According to her, the solution for European cinema lies in young audiences, the need to avoid the same failure in the shift to digital as there was in the shift to multiplexes, the strengthening of the Europa Cinemas network and attempts to capture multiplex audiences.

(Translated from French)