Coppola, Binoche, Sandra Hüller Urge EU to Protect Film Funding
(L to R): Francis Ford Coppola, Juliette Binoche, Sandra Hüller, Joachim Trier
Marilla Sicilia/Archivio Marilla Sicilia/Mondadori Portfolio, Stephane Cardinale – Corbis/Corbis, Dominik Bindl/FilmMagic, John Shearer/WireImage
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Francis Ford Coppola, Juliette Binoche, Sandra Hüller, Stellan Skarsgård, Joachim Trier, and Vicky Krieps are among the more than 4,700 film professionals who have signed an open letter calling for the European Union to protect film funding on the continent.
The letter, titled “Europe needs cinema, Cinema needs Europe,” calls on the EU to “future-proof” support or cinema under Europe’s MEDIA program, which has provided funding for thousands of films in the 35 years of its existence.
The MEDIA program has backed virtually every acclaimed European film of the past decades, including recent Oscar winners Sentimental Value, Mr Nobody against Putin, Flow, Anatomy of a Fall and The Favourite.
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“Thanks to MEDIA, Europe wins an Oscar almost every year,” the letter highlights.
The open letter comes as EU Member states are discussing plans to combine funding for culture, media and civil society into a single pot. The so-called AgoraEU plan would see the MEDIA program merged with a new Media+ division, which would include EU funding for video games, news media and journalism. The European Commission has proposed a budget of €8.6 billion ($10 billion) for AgoraEU over its initial 2028-2034 funding period. The European Parliament has called to bump that up to €10.7 billion ($12.6 billion). With so much money at stake, the film, TV and media industries in Europe are fighting over how the budget gets divided up.
European film professionals want guarantees that funding for cinema is locked into the AgoraEU budget, and not diverted to other projects or industries.
“For over 35 years, [MEDIA] has been supporting the creation of European stories from script development to production by independent production companies, the releases in theatres and online, festivals, professionals’ training and upskilling,” the letter reads. “We, European cinema professionals and citizens – all cinema lovers – call upon the European Commission, European Parliament and Member States to future-proof the success and integrity of the vital and precious MEDIA program and reinforce its resources. There are no shared values, no democracy, and no European soft power, without artistic creation.”
EU Member states are due to adopt their initial position on the AgoraEU proposal next Tuesday, May 12, coincidentally the opening day of the 79th Cannes Film Festival. Several of the directors in the Cannes competition this year signed their names to the open letter, including Pawel Pawlikowski (Fatherland), Lukas Dhont (Coward), Arthur Harari (The Unknown), and Rodrigo Sorogoyen (The Beloved). Signatories include such festival regulars as Ruben Östlund, Yorgos Lanthimos, Oliver Laxe, Michel Hazanavicius, Agnieszka Holland, Nadav Lapid, Ariane Labed, and Clémence Poésy, among many others.
Among European film professionals, and independent producers that rely on EU funding, the debate around MEDIA and AgoraEU is set to dominate discussions up and down the Croisette this year.
Read the full letter below:
Cinema needs Europe, Europe needs cinema
“No art form, like cinema, traverses our diurnal consciousness so directly as to touch our feelings, deep within the twilight chamber of our soul.”
For more than 130 years, this twilight chamber, as Ingmar Bergman called it, was brought to life by the lives of others, by their thoughts, their struggles, their words and their gazes.
Cinema begins with the desire to create. It becomes a film through a succession of encounters: screenwriters, directors and producers develop it, cinematographers, actors, and technical crews contribute, film funds support it, sales agents and distributors bring it to cinemas and festivals – and later broadcasters and streamers, critics debate, and audiences embrace it.
Filmmaking is a collaborative art. It becomes an industry through job creation and technological innovation. Yet every film remains a prototype, impossible to mass-produce on an assembly line. There are no economies of scale in storytelling. This dual nature calls for deliberate political choices engaging public and private operators. Europe itself, as a collective end