13/08/2003

After the “Open Doors” event where European film industry operators were given an opportunity to meet with their Cuban counterparts, and the presentation of a line up of new Argentinian filmmakers, Locarno continued its tradition of providing the industry with a meeting place for a free and frank exchange of ideas and a laying down of bases for joint ventures with a conference to present the industry with some of Europe’s foremost film foundations. For the most part, the funds at their disposal are aimed at the film industries of Eastern Europe and the Southern Hemisphere.

The participants included representatives of France’s CNC and its Fonds Sud, the Göteborg Film Festival Film Fund, Holland’s Hubert Bals Fund and the MonteCinema Verità Foundation. In keynote speeches, they explained the principle criteria of film funding and then presented a number of projects they had given their support to that had subsequently been selected for Locarno. Thes kind of joint ventures are steadily gaining in popularity and the speakers pointed out some of the characteristics that each of the projects in question shared with the others.
“It is very much in our interest to work together,” said Ido Albram on behalf of the Hubert Bals Fund. “Although we maintain our total independence as to the choices we make, we meet on a regular basis at the major international festivals or at other gatherings. It is logical for us to decide together the ways and means of giving a given film project the greatest visibility possible.”
Other goals shared by these foundations include support for writers, distribution, post-production and – occasionally, as exemplified by Fonds Sud, also for production. “It is very difficult and costly to support production and the funding that foundations such as ours can supply is vastly inadequate,” explained Abram. “That is why we shut down that particular sector, to enable us to be more effective in the others.”

One of the rules governing monies assigned by “Fonds Sud” an institution that answers to France’s National Film Centre or CNC and the French ministry for culture, is that films be made on French territory “although this rule is being ignored of late” said Jacqueline Ada, head of Fonds Sud’s production department. This does not apply to the other foundations, and as a result, writers, directors and producers are not forced to use costly technology.
Assigning funds also means sifting through the 200-odd projects submitted annually and selecting between 20 to 30 and designating funds according to the requirements of each project. Fonds Sud guarantees a production grant of up to €150,000 per project, and up to €30,000 for distribution within France, rights acquisition, print production, subtitling and the promotion of smaller titles.

Set up by Marco Müller in 1992, the MonteCinemaVerità Foundation gives its support almost exclusively to fictional feature films. This consists in an upper limit of €20,000 for screenplay development and up to €65,000 towards the production or post-production.
The contribution to filmmaking by foundations such as these is not limited to the financial sphere: the films they select are also receiving a positive word-of-mouth from the critic’s point of view. This is what Bosnian director Pjer Zalica, whose Gori Vatra was co-produced by Turkey, Bosnia, the United Kingdom, Austria and Holland, as well as three of the foundations invited to the Locarno conference (Fonds Sud, MonteCinemaVerità and Hubert Bals), had to say about the work of the foundations: “I submitted my screenplay to Fonds Sud twice. Their having turned me down the first time was the push I needed to re-examine what I had written and rewrite it.” So, as we said, it’s not just money but invaluable suggestions that help cinema thrive and survive.