23/05/2006

“We should have European legislation to force European broadcasters buy EU films”, Adriana Chiesa, CEO of Italian sales outfit Adriana Chiesa Enterprises and Vice-President of the European Film Export Association, told Cineuropa. “This is a serious problem that really needs to be discussed at the European level because theatrical distributors are increasingly careful when buying European films as they are not guaranteed a TV deal”.

The respected sales veteran pointed that out a particularly tough market for Italian films is the UK, whose screens are over-run by US product.

Chiesa’s views echo the debate held last Sunday at the Palais des Festivals during the panel discussion “Who is a producer’s best friend?”, organised by the European Audiovisual Observatory.

One of the panellists, Jan Vandierendonck, Executive Secretary of Eurimages, stressed that the pan-European co-production fund also noticed a disinvestment trend among distributors and broadcasters in terms of money given to European productions.

Aviva Silver, head of the MEDIA Programme, also sees this as “a worrying trend”. “We have noticed that it is getting very, very difficult for smaller countries that need a lot of broadcasters to be involved to get access to our support,” she said. “And because of the difficulty in accessing broadcasters and financing in general, soft money is increasingly important to producers, in particular for small to medium companies”.

With the rapid development of Video on Demand (VoD) services in the EU and 46 operators of film VoD services now in existence (11 in France alone and 6 in Denmark), European producers could very well find lucrative new ways to distribute their products. However, according to the Observatory’s André Lange, although this would be technically possible, the market would remain segmented because of the differing cultures and languages throughout the EU, and the industry would need to operate with more transparency than is currently the case.