The KEA Blog

Funding for European Cinema

On 20 April Philippe Kern gave a speech to the European Parliament on behalf of EFCA (European Film Companies Alliance).

He began the speech by outlining how European cinema is being increasingly marginalized by the prohibitive costs associated with marketing and distributing films. The difficulties experienced by European films in this respect have discouraged banks from investing in them.

Mr Kern went on to explain how, even though the European Investment bank has been providing loans to the film industry, it too is unable to provide loans to films that it sees as a risky investment.  In the second half of his speech he made a series of recommendations to the EU concerning their funding of the film industry.

The full text of the speech can be found here.

European integration and football

Mark Keller and Arsène Wenger are both from Alsace, a region at the heart of the European project and a leading- edge workshop of the European integration process. As highlighted by Philippe Kern, they are “telling examples of this Alsatian dual nature, products of that mixture of German affectivity and French sensitivity”. This duality is a vehicle for the European ideal. The plan to hold a debate on the role of football as a source of national and regional identity originated from these considerations. The discussions were chaired by MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit, an enthusiast of both football and European integration.

To read more ...

Everybody for cultural diversity?

The U.S. market, which is the largest in the world, is also the most difficult for non-American audiovisual products and services to access. European, African, Asian and Latin American films account for only 5% of the market in the United States. As for music, U.S. artists lord over the market with a 92% share. In recent years, British artists have seen their market share melt away like snow in April: it is currently down to 6%, compared with 30% just under 15 years ago, in spite of the fact that three of the five record giants – namely Universal, Bertelsmann and EMI – are European. In contrast with the situation in the United States, the European market is an example of openness to cultural influences from abroad. Nevertheless, Europeans are being accused of protectionism.

To read more... http://www.kernnet.com/kea/news/news06_en.pdf