France’s National Film Board (CNC) has unveiled a new strategy to boost the profile of French movies and talent navigating the Oscar race.
The country has not won the international feature prize since Régis Wargnier’s “Indochine” took the honor in 1993, despite frequent nominations in that category.
The exec, who recently founded the Paris-based consultancy Cinema Collectors, comes into the role fresh off the Oscar-winning campaign forn Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh’s “Two People Exchanging Saliva.” His other awards work includes serving as a consultant and international publicist on Mubi’s campaign for Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance,” as well as a longstanding collaboration with Florian Zeller that included “The Father,” which won two Oscars.
Speaking at Monday’s conference, Cauchon said France has been relatively slow to embrace the kind of specialized awards strategy.
The CNC’s new approach will aim at pooling resources earlier in the process and work alongside U.S. distributors.
That tension between France’s cultural standing and the increasingly competitive global marketplace ran through Monday’s conference, where French film and TV figures warned that the country’s international position can no longer be taken for granted.
“We’ve spent years — rightly — celebrating the fact that we fill the top 100 fiction rankings on television, without seeing that we were losing the streaming battle,” Bruel said. He noted the contrasting performances of countries such as Spain and South Korea, where local programming commands a much larger share of streaming consumption.
Speaking of Korea and Spain, he said there were “smaller markets that were forced to think internationally from the outset because their domestic industries could not sustain production on their own.”
France, on the other hand, has relied on its own market fir a long time thanks to its “unusually robust internal system of financing, production and distribution.”
“The tech giants, which are now publishers — more or less, depending on the company — are taking power,” Pélisson said. “And all of this is happening in the context of the evolution of AI, which is impacting absolutely every sector.”
Pélisson, who works alongside Unifrance’s well respected managing director Daniel Elstner, called for France to revamp export support schemes, including funds for film, television and shorts, as well as assistance for foreign distributors who release French works.
For Pélisson, one of the industry’s most pressing battles is over data. Streamers’ reluctance to share detailed viewing data, he argued, is directly tied to the economic value of the works they carry.
“Data today is the underlying key to the value of works. And that’s why, strangely enough, the platforms have so much difficulty sharing data. Of course they do — it’s exactly what determines the value of our works and the value of your works.”
Yet, Mazars, who also co-presides over the French exporters association ADEF, warned that those companies need to be incentivized take risks on French movies.
“The reality, and we have to say it, is that for exporters it is often more attractive within the ecosystem to sell a foreign film than a French film. The system isn’t sufficiently incentivizing for us to sell French films,” Mazars.
French sellers, he said, are increasingly being asked to put up sizable minimum guarantees while international competitors, such as in the U.K., are introducing schemes aimed at reducing those risks.
Mazars also called on France to explore ways of attracting private equity into film financing, citing MK2’s partnership with IPR.VC, a Helsinki and London-based fund manager, as one possible model.
“I think there is work to be done between exporters, the CNC and perhaps Bpifrance to bring private equity funds into French cinema. We all know the difficulties producers have financing their films,“ he said.
Clara Flageollet Schmit, sales manager at SND and ADEF’s co-president, said the role of international sales agents themselves has changed dramatically as they take on more financial exposure at ever earlier stages of production.
“We’re no longer simply intermediaries. Today we’re real financiers of cinema, and particularly French cinema. We’re getting involved earlier and earlier in projects, sometimes from the development stage,” she said. “We also participate in casting, and we’re putting up increasingly substantial minimum guarantees, often on first and second films.”
