Photo: Niklas Gyberg Ivarsson/Elina Nomade
Nordisk Panorama responded 18 May to the Nordic Council of Ministers for Culture (MR-K) decision not to fund the festival/market from 2022. Nordisk Panorama is a core annual event for the funding, launch and promotion of Nordic docs and shorts. The Nordic Council contribution of 1.5 million Danish kroner (€215,000) amounts to 60% of the event’s operating budget, Nordisk Panorama confirmed to Business Doc Europe.
Underlining the “grave impact for documentary and short filmmakers,” Anita Reher, Nordisk Panorama Executive Director, commented: “We provide the stepping stone that lets Nordic filmmakers reach beyond their borders to the world. Filmmakers needed our support in the best of times. Now, as they face endless challenges, the Council’s [MR-K’s] decision will have a dramatic impact on the industry’s most important gathering in our region.”
The Nordic Council of Ministers for Culture (MR-K) decision followed the commission and publication of two reports on the effects of the pandemic on culture and the media sector across the Nordic region. In a press release dated May 5 MR-K stressed its need to “reprioritise resources in pursuit of the vision of making the Nordic Region the most sustainable and integrated region in the world by 2030 will mean a cut of 20% in the total budget for cultural co-operation in the period 2020–2024.”
In a separate short statement (translated from Danish, and also released May 5), MR-K wrote of its Nordisk Panorama decision: “It has certainly not been an easy process for the Ministers of Culture to reach this decision, but the sharply reduced budget has meant that even good and important efforts such as Nordisk Panorama have not been included in the budget in 2022.” Nordic Panorama says that no further explanation was offered as to why the funding was cut by 100% from 2022.
In their May 18 statement, Nordisk Panorama (NP) wrote how, “demand is running higher than ever for participation in what the Nordisk Film & TV Fund’s recently released distribution report determined is a “key industry event” in the Nordic Region – the Nordisk Panorama Pitching Forum – which presents new Nordic film projects to financiers. That demand will only grow as the audiovisual industry struggles to get back on its feet again. Most of the companies Nordisk Panorama supports are independent enterprises that rely heavily on Nordic co-financing to realize their films.”
The statement continued: “Nordisk Panorama’s primary objective is to encourage collaboration and the production of high-quality short and documentary films in the Nordic countries. It was also created to let new voices and new generations of filmmakers enter the film industry. NP’s framework enables independent filmmakers to promote their films and receive funding from public sources in the Nordic region and from the industry at large. NP gathers the resources – creative talent, industry networks, and international financiers from broadcasting, film institutes, streaming platforms, and private foundations – that let Nordic filmmakers succeed on the world stage.”
Producer Signe Byrge Sørensen of prolific and multi award-winning Copenhagen-based Final Cut for Real (The Act of Killing, Flee, Songs of Repression) commented to BDE: “Nordisk Panorama, and especially Nordisk Forum, is an extremely important platform for the documentary industry in the whole Nordic region. This is where we find the home backing for our projects. And because each country is fairly small, what we can expect to get from our public service television stations, or even our film institutes, is never the full cost of a documentary, especially not an international documentary. It’s maybe on a good day, that 20, 30, 40% of the finance we can find at home. That means that we always, when it’s an international project, have to co-produce. So, it’s a very natural fit often to co-produce within the Nordic region, but it’s also the test ground of the international potential of any documentary film that we make. So for us, it’s like a stepping stone into the wider world.”
She added: “I believe that the money it [Nordisk Panorama] costs to actually run is very well spent given how much money this creates for filmmaking in general afterwards. So I think it’s absolutely not smart to cut this kind of funding because it will be so much harder for each individual producer to generate the same amount for those films.”
“I will definitely be campaigning for the reinstatement of that funding,” she continued. “We will work together with the Danish Producers Association, but also of course, with the producers associations in all the other Nordic countries and also with the directors associations.”
Swedish director Fredrik Gertten (Bananas, Becoming Zlatan, Jozi Gold) underlined how “the Nordic Panorama structure has been really important to create the kind of Nordic quality brand of documentaries.” He added that aside from the annual festival and Forum, Nordic Panorama also serves Nordic filmmakers at international film festivals and events. “They have always been at Sunny Side of the Doc, they have always been at IDFA, they have always been at Berlin, they always been at Cannes, at MIPCOM and so on. They are there every year and it means that they also have a broader network…I still get doors opened through their network, which is very helpful.”
This applies just as much to emerging filmmakers, he underlines, “The doc world loves new talent and the Nordics have seen a lot of new talents coming every year. It [Nordisk Panorama] is a way of making that possible.”
