Media Industries 2020 conference: Global Currents & Contradictions

***This event is currently postponed***

In April Caitriona will present the findings of the project in a paper entitled ‘Screen Agencies and Film Funds: Findings from a Comparative Study of Small EU nations’.

This is the second international Media Industries conference, hosted by King’s College London. According to the organisers, ‘Media Industries 2020 (MI2020) maintains an open intellectual agenda, inviting papers, panels or workshops exploring the full breadth of media industries, in contemporary and historical contexts, and from all traditions of media industries scholarship. MI2020 will therefore provide a meeting ground for all forms of media industries research’.

More information about the conference is available here.

 

Abstract for ‘Screen Agencies and Film Funds: Findings from a Comparative Study of Small EU nations’.

This paper reports the findings from an international comparative study of screen agencies and film funds across a number of small EU nations.  Using interviews with senior staff in these bodies and analysis of policy materials, this research offers insight to the evolving rationales, roles and models for publicly funded interventions in the film and television sector.  The research also advances the field of cultural production by examining the professional identities and challenges for those working within these agencies.

Screen agencies and film funds play a key role in the assembly and allocation of disparate financial, logistical and talent resources, often in temporary ways in response to industry demands. In doing this, many agencies have shifted from being exclusively funding bodies to being more rounded development agencies. This can be viewed within the wider shift from cultural to economic objectives in European film policy (Mingant and Tirtaine 2018; Hammett-Jamart et al 2018) and the growing power of mobile transnational content producers and distributors like HBO, Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Many agencies (though not all) are now designed to promote the screen sector as part of an economic agenda in which to increase international competitiveness and build the sustainability of indigenous production. Therefore, they are at once local and global in their orientation.  They are increasingly ‘market facing’ and growth driven, rather than ‘citizen facing’ and culturally framed, as more and more of their role involves investment decisions, labour market interventions, branding and capital investment.

While they frame their role through a market-based agenda, they also (paradoxically) argue that film and TV makers will not deliver a straight-forward financial return on investment. Therefore, while being framed as an economic agency might grant them more power, status and institutional security, it is often at odds with key performance indicators of the government department or public bodies to which they are accountable (e.g. culture departments, arts councils).  This, coupled with concerns for the commercial competitiveness of their funding recipients, also makes their effectiveness more difficult to define.

Furthermore, the research points to a number of emerging agendas for screen agencies including expansion of expertise and funding to support new forms of screen technology (e.g. apps, VR, gaming), attempts to establish more diversive production cultures and efforts to reconfigure a new map of screen production through the regional distribution of funding and resources.

Emerging from this research is a critical understanding of the making of creative content and the ways in which cultural policy is shaped and enacted in response to regional, national and global markets.

Keywords

Film, television, screen agencies, policy, small nations

References

Hammett-Jamart, Julia; Mitric, Petar and Novrup Redvall, Eva (2018) European Film and Television Co-Production: Policy and Practice.  Cham: Palgrave Macmillan

Leiser, Stephanie (2017) The Diffusions of State Film Incentives: A mix method case study. Economic Development Quarterly 31(3): 255-267

Mingant, Nolwenn and Tirtaine, Cecilia (eds) (2018) Reconceptualising Film Policies. Routledge: New York.

Ramsey, Phil; Baker, Stephen and Porter, Robert (2019) Screen production on the ‘biggest set in the world’: Northern Ireland Screen and the case of Game of Thrones.  Media, Culture and Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443719831597

Schlesinger, Philip; Selfe, Melanie and Munro, Ealasaid (2015) Curators of Cultural Enterprise. Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot.