By Petar Mitric
It does not take a lot of investigation to realize that quotas permeate almost every film and TV policy framework (regardless of time or place) when it comes to production or distribution. They have existed in multiple forms in China, South Korea, Canada, Australia, or even the US.
The initial reasons for introducing quotas in Europe were chiefly cultural. Quotas were aimed at preserving cultural Europeanness and resisting Hollywoodization. The EU’s Audiovisual Media Service Directive (formerly “Television Without Frontier” Directive) thus envisages that EU member states “shall ensure by all means that broadcasters reserve for European works a majority proportion of their transmission time” and that at least 10% of the transmission time and programming budgets of broadcasters should be allotted to “European works created by producers who are independent from broadcasters”[1]. Similar policies have also been indirectly implemented through grants that the MEDIA Programme of the EU and Eurimages have allocated to distributors to include European arthouse films in their catalogues. Together with the “cultural exception clause” and European co-production policies, the said measures indeed built a defensive wall against the “barbarian from the US”, as the head of the Danish Film Institute called the US majors at the opening of the MeCETES conference in Copenhagen in September 2015.
Nevertheless, quotas have also caused several setbacks that can be of political or economic nature. Namely, fighting against the Hollywood domination led to some kind of “internal cultural domination”[2] within Europe itself. The rich countries fill in their programming with domestic productions or productions originating from neighboring and culturally connected countries with which they sign favorable co-production treaties and agreements. However, at the same time, in 2003 for example, only 0.9% of the newly released films in the old 15 EU member states originated from the eight Central and East European countries, which made up only 0.05% of the market share[3].
Although indirectly, quotas have also been introduced across Europe through strictly financial reciprocity-based policies when it comes to co-producing among European film producers. Financial reciprocity schemes disrupt the idea of quality-based decision-making as well as the principle of solidarity inasmuch as they leave poor or austerity-struck countries out of the co-production landscape. In other words, you co-produce if your national film fund is rich enough to pay a grant back.
At the same time, distributors who receive grants from pan-European funds to release non-domestic European films usually screen such films for only a week or so in cinema theaters, without any promotion, and then replace them with more lucrative content. On the other hand, the US majors are tacitly bypassing quotas and other restrictions by means of ambiguous revisions of the European Convention for Cinematographic Co-production or introduction of the digital single market.
The most recent quotas in European cinema spotlight gender equality. The equality directive within the Swedish National Film Agreement 2013-2015 thus stipulates that the funding provided by the Swedish Film Institute must be equally divided between men and women. Three years following the set of drastic and dramatic equality-boosting measures that the newly appointed CEO of the SFI, Anna Serner, introduced in 2012, the Swedish statistics show that in the period between 2005 and 2015, the number of the female directors supported by the SFI jumped from 19% to 50%, female screenwriters from 26% to 56% and female producers from 28% to 66%.[4] The Swedish model has inspired similar initiatives by the Norwegian, Finish and Austrian Film Institutes, and since 2013 by the European film fund Eurimages. [5]
Quotas can be fruitful indeed. I was impressed when I learnt, while interviewing the director of the Yugoslav Cinematheque in 2013, about the Cold War–era import quotas that insisted that Yugoslav film distributors import proportional number of films from the East, West and the Non-Aligned third-world countries. As a result, the films from 137 countries could be seen in cinemas. However, there are still open questions on how to fight positive discrimination, internal hegemony or threats to quality of films that quotas may cause. And last but not least, are gender quotas enough if the majority of European film professionals, regardless of their gender, still come from the same upper-middle class?
[1] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32010L0013&from=EN
[2] Sarikakis, K. (2005) “Legitimating Domination: Notes on the Changing Faces of Cultural Imperialism“ in In Hamm B and Smandych, R, (eds) Cultural Imperialism: Essays in the Political Economy of Cultural Domination. Peterborough, Ontario, Broadview Press, pp. 80-92.
[3] European Audiovisual Observatory, “Distribution on the European Union Market: films from Central and Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean Basin, Latin America and Asia”, on the occasion of the Thessaloniki Conference, May 25-27, 2003.
[4] Data received during the interview with CEO of the Swedish Film Institute in September 2015
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