Festival Film Sales Support
- Financial incentives to promote European films at a selection of targeted festivals. The experiemental initiative for film promotion in 2004 is called the Film Sales Support
A new scheme to help promote European films screened at selected international film festivals has been launched by European Film Promotion (EFP). It’s called the Film Sales Support (FSS) and the initiative will offer financial incentives to sales agents or producers of European films, to actively promote and sell their films at a series of specially chosen events in 2004.
The FSS is being supported by the EU’s MEDIA Plus programme, the Department for Culture of the City of Hamburg, the German Federal Department for Culture and the Media and the British Council in the UK. The project is being piloted and will initially run for one year, with the aim of boosting the performance of European films and enhance their visibility in certain territories.
There will be a sum of €40,000 set aside for each festival, with the funding being equally shared by the number of applicant countries participating in the festival. The FSS will support 50% of promotional and marketing costs for participating films, such as expenses for various press and public relation activities, travel costs for professionals involved in the film, or the production of a subtitled print, if necessary. The maximum support per film is €5,000.
The target festivals in 2004 have been carefully selected to reflect the results of a recent EFP survey and they cover new important film markets in Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe. All of these festivals screen a good proportion of European films and have extremely dedicated audiences. The events on the list for 2004 are:
the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival (8-19 April),
the Moscow International Film Festival ( 18-27 June),
the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival (September/October) and
the Pusan International Film Festival (October).
For a copy of the FSS guidelines, see the EFP website for details.
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