Last Friday saw the Wallonia-Brussels Federation Film and Audiovisual Centre hold its 2022 performance review, an opportunity to take stock of the state of the French-language Belgian industry as it emerges from the pandemic, caught between a revival in production activities and the public’s slow return to cinemas.

Belgium’s Minister of Culture Bénédicte Linard stressed that the profession is now at a turning point, with numerous projects having very recently come to fruition or set to complete in the coming months. New drivers should also result in better funding for Belgian cinema. The 20% increase in the Film Commission’s budget is noteworthy, rising from 10 to 12 million euros, which is going towards writing, development and production grants. The contract for managing RTBF - Belgium’s French-language public radio-television broadcaster - was also renewed, and their  investment in independent producers is set to rise from 12 million euros per year to 23 million by 2027. The other major change is the new obligation on foreign broadcasters and editors earning a proportion of their turnover in Belgium, to contribute towards funding national audiovisual creation, whether through co-productions or pre-purchasing agreements. This concerns players such as Netflix, Amazon and Disney+, as well as TF1 and Canal+, foreshadowing an injection of 12 to 16 million euros in Belgian French-language audiovisual production. The result was that the sector was able to rely on a record overall budget of €41.65m in 2022 (versus 35.33 million in 2021).

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The Film Centre’s director Jeanne Brunfaut also welcomed the emergence of a new ecosystem which should help to consolidate gains. She also looked back on the main statistics from 2022, which saw 40 feature films recognised as Belgian, including 18 majority-Belgian movies: 2 animated films, 7 documentaries and 9 fiction films. What’s more, 25 films assisted by the Film Centre were released in Belgian cinemas, creating a slight bottleneck, partly explained by delayed releases on account of Covid. These films attracted 165,205 viewers, which is obviously a spectacular rise on 2020 and 2021, but it’s also the case vis-à-vis 2019 (115,557). The top three movies are composed of Tori and Lokita [+lee también:
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entrevista: Joely Mbundu
entrevista: Luc y Jean-Pierre Dardenne
ficha de la película] by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, with 40,000 admissions), followed by Nobody Has to Know [+lee también:
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entrevista: Bouli Lanners
ficha de la película] by Bouli Lanners (28,000 admissions) and Yuku and the Himalayan Flower [+lee también:
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entrevista: Rémi Durin y Arnaud Demuynck
ficha de la película] (14,000 admissions). These figures are wholly in sync with the performances of other films by European authors, such as The Night of the 12th [+lee también:
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entrevista: Dominik Moll
ficha de la película], for example, which earned itself 25,000 admissions.

There were also a number of series broadcast in 2022, produced by way of the Series Fund, a joint initiative between the Film Centre and RTBF which, in 2022, was endowed with 3,830,000 euros: a sum allocated to 6 writing subsidies, 6 development grants and 1 production subsidy. It also helped to support projects along the lines of Des gens bien (currently being broadcast on Arte in France, where the series is a huge success) and will be re-designed in the coming months so as to open it out to other operators and to enhance production capacity, in terms of both number and quality.