24/02/2006

In 2004, French audiences saw 4,638 hours of documentaries on public television, equal to 17.6% of all programming, while Italians had to be content with 1,223 hours, or 4.6%, of RAI programming, of which 84% were documentaries that were bought and not produced in Italy.

This discouraging data was made public Thursday evening during a conference on the Italian documentary market organised by Doc/It (Association of Italian Documentary Filmmakers) with RAI and the General Direction for Cinema of the Ministry of Culture. According to research conducted by the Italian Institute for the Cultural Industry (IsiCult) in 2004, the revenue of the documentary industry amounted to €50m, with 250 companies and approximately 3,000 workers involved in the field. Within this scenario, RAI invested only 0.5% of its budget in documentaries, across all three of its public channels.

The three private Mediaset channels had worse results than RAI, programming only 278 hours of documentaries in 2004, only 10 of which were produced in Italy. In the same year, all French channels (public, private, thematic and satellite) invested €145m in documentaries, €65 of which came from public funds, while total French investment (television and other platforms) in documentary production was €308m, compared to the €625m invested in fiction.

There are signs of hope, however, from CEO of the General Direction for Cinema, Gaetano Blandini, for whom the new "Urbani Law" finally gives citizenship rights to documentaries within the system of state funding. From now on, 5% of the state film budget will be set aside for documentaries.