Organisations from across the Europe's film and audiovisual sector send a joint statement to EU Culture Ministers ahead of the Education, Youth, Culture and Sport Council on 12-13 May, calling for sector-specific effective EU funding programmes, to safeguard the long-term resilience, competitiveness and the vitality of Europe’s cultural and creative ecosystem.

Next MFF - EU funding for cross-border education, training and solidarity, youth, media, culture, and creative sectors, values, and civil society

We are approaching the end of the year, but the beginning of a new mandate for the European Commission. European audiovisual stakeholders therefore jointly call on European Ministers of Culture to reaffirm their commitment to policies that promote Europe’s unique cultural diversity while supporting local audiovisual ecosystems in a rapidly changing world.

The SAA welcomes the Commission’s proposal for a European Media Freedom Act and its objective to protect media freedom, independence and pluralism, as well as journalists. Indeed, it is crucial to make sure that the public and private media are able to freely express opinions without interference from governments. However, it is important to make sure that the EMFA regulation doesn’t create any legal uncertainties, especially those that may have adverse effects on European cultural diversity.

We, European authors, producers and distributors, welcome the adoption of the legal basis of the Europe Creative programme by the European Parliament, and the support provided to European creation. We are looking forward to the start of the calls for the Media Programme as soon as possible. However, the Work Programme for 2021 prepared by the European Commission includes concerns for the documentary sector which must be changed urgently.

In recent years, there has been an important increase on the use of AI in the audiovisual and media sectors. This raises key questions on authorship and creativity.

At this week’s Lumière Film Festival in Lyon, Commissioner Gabriel will present the prototype of the Directory of European Films developed by the European Audiovisual Observatory to increase the visibility of European films on the video-on-demand (VOD) market.

As organisations working across the European audiovisual sector, and in the context of the discussions surrounding the next Multi-annual Financial Framework, we would like to reiterate our support for the Creative Europe MEDIA Programme,

Dear President Juncker, We are writing to share our thoughts on the place of culture in the EU budget ahead of the presentation by the European Commission of its draft Regulation for the post-2020 MFF in May 2018.

The wide-reaching copyright package presented today by the European Commission is met with a mixed reaction by SAA. Beyond these first steps to support authors, SAA calls for greater ambition at EU level for screenwriters and directors.

Last week (31st August), the European Commission published a Eurobarometer survey on “Cross-border access to online content”.

The Digital Single Market Strategy adopted by the Commission on 6 May was very much discussed during the first week-end of the Cannes Film Festival, one of the biggest gatherings of cinema professionals in the world.