“For months now, our industries have been weathering a storm. As all European small and medium enterprises, those from the technical sector are undergoing a severe economic crisis that adds itself to the cost of technological changes.
Despite their important role in the national production ecosystem, our industries no longer directly benefit from the French model, since in 2005 the European Commission excluded them from the cultural perimeter. Thus, direct assistance to technical industries only represents 0,8% of the CNC’s support fund. Under such a system – and we will not question the €100m system to their advantage – over 20 years would have been necessary to support cinema digitisation, although in reality this considerable shift only took 18 months…
The result? When shooting and post-production equipment suddenly became obsolete, technical industries were suddenly forced to massively update their technical equipment. The necessary investment multiplied by two or three could not be found from credit establishments, whose cautiousness has hit all small to medium entreprises.
In this context of great fragility, technical leaders in the cinema and audiovisual sector still today receive minimum support from the CNC, and are left to their own devices to find solutions to an undeniable blow to the durability of the French cinematographic industry”.
Cineuropa.org, Apr 3 2012.
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