Despite an increase in the Creative Europe budget for 2021-27 (from €1.46bn to €2.2bn) signatories to an open letter published and signed May 19 by 41 European documentary bodies points to three major areas of concern for the doc industry “which must be changed urgently.”
“While the MEDIA budget is increasing, in its Europe Creative 2021 work programme, the European Commission is quietly digging the grave of the creative documentary,” the letter states. “Three technical modifications meant to simplify and standardise the programme rules will have major consequences for creative documentaries in Europe.”
The first of these, the letter argues, is that development funds in future will only be awarded to projects that begin filming at the earliest ten months after the application deadline for support (as opposed to eight months from the date of submission previously). “This new deadline is incompatible with the production schedules of single creative documentaries, which are inherently shorter than those of fiction and animation, due to the need to react fast to the rapidly changing reality of world events,” the letter states.
The second area of concern is the transformation of the “single project” to a new “co-development” tool, whereby all production companies must now co-apply with a production company from another country. The lead company should have distributed a project to at least 3 countries (previously one country, the letter points out), other than its own, since 2014. “This change unfairly affects the ability for ‘low capacity countries’ companies to lead a project,” the letter underlines, and will lead to “dramatic consequences in the low-capacity countries, the small European countries (as far as film production is concerned), and in the countries whose language is not spoken in any other European country or do not belong to a geographical area in which collaborations are historically customary.”
The letter adds that “the scheduled changes will cause a serious damage to the basic principles of Creative Europe itself: Creativity, Parity and Pluralism.”
The third concern is in the reduction of audiovisual production funding to docs from the MEDIA fund. Whereas fiction and animation could previously claim a co-financing rate capped at 12.5%, documentaries could claim up to 20%. Now a flat rate of 15% is applicable across the board, which the doc signatories claim will severely affect their sector. “Already underfunded, creative documentaries are thus seeing their potential support from MEDIA further reduced,” the letter stresses.
The letter ends: “We, the European authors, producers and distributors, signatories of this statement, wish to express our deep concern at the European Commission seemingly lack of consideration for the documentary industry in Europe. Were the specificities of the genre continued to be ignored, a whole sector of independent European creation would become de facto ineligible for European support, leading to further precarious overall funding.”
Brigid O’Shea, co-founder/co-director of Documentary Association of Europe (DAE) told Business Doc Europe: “The three regulation changes this letter asks for shows that the new policy does not take the contemporary reality of documentary filmmaking into account, asking producers to not be entirely honest to meet eligibility criteria, and puts small AV output countries at a disadvantage.”
“The 40+ signatories of this letter hope to enter a proper and honest dialogue with our colleagues in Brussels to make changes that support European filmmaking in its plurality. We see this as the beginning of a new age of information sharing and collaboration,” she added.
Jérôme Dechesne, president of CEPI (European Coordination of Independent Producers) told BDE that it is probably too late to change minds in Brussels for 2021 as the call for CE support is imminent (around June 1, he suggests) but that there is time to persuade CE personnel ahead of 2022.
“First of all, the process of the European Commission…they have to listen to the sectors and the associations and the professionals, and secondly they definitely have to change [the new guidelines],” he commented.
“It’s not too complicated to change, it’s only a few words to change,” he underlined, “but maybe they won’t have time to validate the change with the member states before the launch of the calls, because this is the main problem we are facing. For 2022, I hope so, we will see.”
“We are very, very happy that all the European documentary sector is in this call [the appeal to the EC] and I think it’s a good, good sign of solidarity,” he stressed of the unified response from doc bodies across the continent.
