31/01/2005

Before the Cannes Film Festival, a meeting between France and Italy will take place in Cinecittà. Alessandro Usai, general director of the Cinecittà Holding, broke the news on CinecittàNews, as he was coming back from Paris where he attended a series of meetings organised by Unifrance to encourage film export. Usai explains: " The Italian Direzione Generale Cinema, Unifrance, the French CNC, and us, have raised the idea that a three-day summit should be organised so as to allow French and Italian producers and distributors to meet. The summit, funded by Unifrance and the Italian Direzione Cinema, will also be open to journalists”.

The Italian and the French cinema industries, so far strong and well supported by public policies, are both going through a diffcult phase. There is therefore great will to unite and collaborate against this state of facts: “one of the ideas is to organise lobbying within the European Union to defend the "cultural exception", a principle greatly damaged by the new European directions, so much that the notion of diversity regarding cultural products threatens to disappear”. Both countries also intend to "encourage co-productions, and bring them back to the success they had in the past, for example by using laws which are available but have been applied only on rare occasions”. The manager of the Cinecittà Holding points out how weak the Italian cinema industry is outside Italy: its presence on the market in the other European countries is negligible, if present at all. The tradition of co-production must be revived."In this regard, the new law is quite daring, allowing funds for 50% of the cost of each film, even when it could almost totally rely on foreign producers".

(Translated from Italian)