18/11/2003

“Producers who follow their ideas grow poorer”. This was the harsh conclusion from the president of the Association of Polish Producers, Darius Jablonski (Apple Film), who perfectly summarised the relatively dramatic situation facing the film industries in the Eastern European countries. Eight of these countries will join the European Union in 2004 (they are Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia) while Romania and Bulgaria are on the waiting list to join.
It’s a positive integration for constructing a Europe that wants to tackle thorny issues in the fields of cinema and audiovisual production. As was stressed by the president of Eurimages, Jacques Toubon, these countries with a great cinematographic tradition (Wajda, Forman, Tarr, Szabo, Pintilie etc.) see enlargement as “a further lever to use to exploit the policy of cultural diversity, renewing their cinema and increasing exchanges between authors and producers or, on the other hand, to transform the EU into a wider playing field, a Europe where only the strongest can stand out from the crowd”.

In an attempt to resolve this big dilemma, analysis from the past is crucial. As the man responsible for Central and Eastern Europe from Unifrance, Joël Chapron, explained, there are no laws governing the television’s support for cinema in Eastern countries, in spite of the strong development in the sector after the fall of the Wall. A lack of financial help is even more harmful when cinema enjoys well established structures (a legacy from the era when films were used as a means of propaganda), qualified technicians, a wide range of subjects and a pool of quality actors. These talents have already been noted by the French producer, Antoine de Clermont Tonnerre (Mact Productions), a specialist on co-productions with the East, who stressed “the amount of investment made in studios and post production”. Thanks to a cutting-edge and competitive infrastructure and low cost services, the film industries in these countries should flourish, since the public has a real need to see national images. But the current situation is actually very difficult because of a lack of funding. For example, in Poland (the number one producer, with 128 films made since 1997), the ministry of culture supports production with grants to the tune of €4 million a year, and public television invests €4 million (though there is no obligation for it to do this). According to Darius Jablonski “the budgets are getting tighter”. And out of the 120 producers in the Association of Polish Producers, to date only 18 have managed to avoid working in television production.
In addition, there are also some wide discrepancies in the cinematographic productions of the 8 Eastern European countries. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic produce an average of 15 to 25 films a year, Slovenia and Slovakia between 3 and 7 and the three Baltic states between 0 and 3 films a year. There is also a difference in the requests for Eurimages funding from the countries that want to invest in national films (Hungary) and those that are active in minority shares of international co-productions. In total, only 25% of requests to Eurimages from producers working in Eastern Europe involve national directors. This is a crucial and problematic issue, since the co-productions that work best are those made by Western European countries. And according to Darius Jablonski “if the stories are Polish, it’s difficult to organise co-productions. There’s still a lot to do to create a pan-European market open to local and national stories”. This argument was taken up by the Romanian director, Nicolae Caranfil: “to find a high level distributor, films from the East have to have a festival pedigree. Western audiences expect to see images that focus on the sordid, with the obligatory pessimistic tone”. Antoine de Clermont Tonnerre stressed the difficulties of co-producing with Eastern Europe (8 out of 10 films are made thanks to Eurimages), the reduction of French support (with the disparity of the ECO specific fund for Eastern European productions and the block on acquisitions by Canal+) and the frequent lack of skills and realism of producers from the East, when you consider that it’s a relatively newly acquired profession for them.

The situation as far as distribution is concerned isn’t much better, even if the national market share in the Eastern European countries is on the rise (especially in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic) after a virtual total dominance by American films during the ’90s. In 2002, the market share for American films in Poland was at 43%, with similar figures in the Baltic states, very much the same as in Western European countries.
But the biggest problem is in the sphere of circulation of works. In the neighbouring countries in the East, it is virtually inexistent because, as the Czech distributor Ivan Hronec (SPI), explained “cooperation between the different countries in the East reminds them of the Soviet era”. And the problem is just as bad in Western European countries: only 42 films from 8 Eastern countries were distributed in the 15 EU countries in the last 7 years, equivalent to a market share of 0.05%, half of which was registered by just one film: Kolya in 1997.
This dismal performance has led the ARP filmmakers to ask that the new MEDIA programme, post 2006, looks at the needs of these countries, and they have called for the ECO fund in France to be continued, with the possibility of Germany collaborating in its funding and management. The important thing not to forget in all this, is that the new Eastern countries coming into Europe in 2004 will constitute 20% of the enlarged EU’s population, a potential audience and creative pool that should not be undervalued.