For an Oscar or a Raspberry?
A storm in a teacup or a serious shift in the Greek cinema industry’s institutional landscape? Draft laws, as a rule, tend to attract the interest only of those who are directly affected, a few specific circles. Their anxiety about what will come is not always justified, as their main source of concern is, usually, that some new measure will come along to rock their boat.
The Culture Ministry recently submitted a draft law to Parliament that seeks to introduce new regulations to the film and audiovisual industry. Titled “Creative Greece,” the draft law begs the question of just how much creativity it took to come up with the idea of merging the Greek Film Center (GCF) and the National Center for Audiovisual Media and Communication (EKOME) into one agency with purview for both cinema and television.
The GFC has been around for 50 years, serving the Greek cinema industry, sometimes doing a great job of promoting new creative forces, other times being held hostage to vested interests. It’s had many ups and downs over the course of the decades, though everyone agrees that the management had succeeded in striking a successful balance in the past few years. So, the reason why it is being merged with EKOME is obviously financial.
The question that it in turn raises is to what extent the national film center’s role can be safeguarded through selective funding programs where the local and universal collide. The draft law presents the cash rebate scheme as the only way forward. The scheme, however, does not care about the quality of the work that will be receiving backing, only how much money will be spent in the country. The film “Expendables 4,” for example, was partly filmed in Thessaloniki and went on to break every record for the Golden Raspberry Awards, an American institution celebrating the worst films of the year.
What kind of chances for funding will a screenplay like, say, Yorgos Lanthimos’ weird “Dogtooth” have under the new framework? On the same day as the draft law was headed to Parliament, we learned that the award-winning and Oscar-nominated Greek director’s new film has been added to the official program of the highly respected Cannes international film festival.
The draft law contains the term “exploitation”; not an auspicious word when it comes to art and any form of creative expression. It’s a bit like “gentrification,” where cities are transformed not for their own sake but because of a desire to turn them into tourist playgrounds. It signals the moment when artists like Lanthimos start being treated as expendable, while we’re asked to applaud it as an economic miracle.
