France

[FR] Cinema digitisation grants

IRIS 2009-10:1/39

Marie-Anne Buron

Institute of European Media Law (EMR), Saarbrücken/Brussels

Owing to the considerable costs incurred by cinema operators, the cinema digitisation process in France is in its infancy. As early as 2007, the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée (National Centre for the Cinema and the Moving Image - CNC) held talks with Germany’s Filmförderungsanstalt (Federal Film Board - FFA) to find ways of subsidising the digitisation of cinemas. In 2009, the CNC came up with the idea of setting up a mutual fund (fonds de mutualisation), and more than half the cinema operators had pre-registered for this fund by 30 November 2009.

The aim of the fund, which is to be open to all film distributors and cinema operators, is to collect the levies paid by the film distributors and share them among the cinema operators. The plan is for distributors to pay during the first week of the screening of a film a fixed levy for the cinema operators that are registered with the fund and show the film. The fund will pass on these levies to the cinema operators in the form of fixed and regular payments for the financing of the necessary digital equipment. Grants are to cover up to 75 % of the digitisation costs incurred. The fund is scheduled to be established in the first quarter of 2010, subject to the approval of the competition authorities.

Another support measure is planned in addition to the fund, namely a guarantee provided by the Institut pour le Financement du Cinéma et des Industries Culturelles (Institute for Funding Cinema and Cultural Industries - IFCIC). The IFCIC is a funding body set up to promote the development of the culture industry in France and is to be given more resources in order to make credits raised by cinema operators more secure.

Apart from these special measures planned to support digitisation, cinema operators can also draw on normal cinema support schemes, such as grants from the relevant local and regional authorities and so-called “automatic assistance”. This assistance is a funding measure of the film and cinema industry and involves every cinema operator being given a support account counter-funded by the cinema tax levied on each admission ticket sold. In this way, the cinema operators can have the costs of renovation or other investments reimbursed to them.