Mediante dos ejemplos tomados de la selección oficial del Festival de Venecia 2002, ambos coproducciones realizadas con el apoyo del fondo Eurimages, se valoran los beneficios y riesgos que los modelos de coproducción tienen sobre las películas que se realizan. Las dos películas estudiadas son Bear's Kiss de Sergei Bodrov y Nha Fala de Flora Gomes.
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Parallel to the issuing of the Convention and the Agreement, the Council of Europe and the CACI have established international co-production funds, Eurimages and Ibermedia respectively, operating within the framework established by both conferences.
The ‘Fondo Iberoamericano de ayuda IBERMEDIA’ was created in 1997 on the basis of resolutions regarding the implementation of a programme of stimuli to co-production of film and TV movies in Iberian-America, first cut of cinematographic projects, distribution and promotion of films in the regional market, and training of human resources for the audiovisual industry. Its current signatory members are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Chile, Spain, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Its main activity is the financing of feature fiction films (longer than 70 minutes) and documentaries (longer than 45 minutes), co-produced by at least three member countries. This financial assistance consists of re-payable loans of up to US$200.000, or 50% of the total budget, assigned to each individual co-producer in function of its financial participation in the project.
The European Support Fund for the co-production of cinematographic works, Eurimages, was established in 1988 as a Partial Agreement of the Council of Europe concluded between twelve countries. It is currently composed by 30 member States. In the same spirit of the Co-production Agreement, Eurimages has two main objectives, a cultural one1 and an economic one. 2 Currently, Eurimages develops three funding programmes: Assistance for co-productions, Assistance for distribution, and Assistance to cinemas. In line with the Agreement, for the evaluation of co-production projects, their European character is assessed on the basis of the 19 points system and
Artistic and/or technical cooperation [are] assessed on the basis of nationality (or residence) of the heads of departments (director, scriptwriter, composer, director of photography, sound engineer, editor, art director) and of the main roles (first, second and third role), as well as on the studio and/or shooting location and post-production location.
The Fund’s financial assistance is a conditionally repayable loan (advance on receipts) that doesn’t exceed 15% of the total production costs of the film up to 700.000€.
Two Eurimages-funded films premiered in the official selection of the 59th Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica (Venice Film Festival, 2002) exemplify two extremes of what and how can be and is being made under such co-production frameworks as the European Agreement.
Nha Fala (My Voice) is Guinea-Bissau-born director Flora Gomes’ fourth feature film. Described as a musical comedy, it tells the story of Vita (Fatou N’Diaye), a young woman from Cape Verde who, fearing a supposed curse that any woman in her family who sings will die, before leaving for Paris to study, promises her mother that she will never sing. Once in Europe she meets a man, a young musician, with whom she falls in love and, full of joy, she lets herself go and sings. Despite her horror for what she has done, her boyfriend convinces Vita to make a record, which becomes an immediate success. Fearing her mother might find out she broke her promise, Vita goes back home where, with the help of the young man, she stages her own death and resurrection in an extraordinary music and dance climax.
The film was produced by, ‘in order of importance,’ Fado Filmes from Portugal, Les Films de Mai from France, and Samsa Film from Luxemburg, and received 230.000€ from Eurimages. Nha Fala was shot in Cape Verde and France, with dialogues in French and Creole and its music was composed by Manu Dibango, from Cameroon.
Nha Fala seems to have been made on the basis of the exceptions of the European Convention: only partly shot in Europe, neither its director/co-scriptwriter, nor its composer, nor the first role (i.e. all the 7 points of the creative group plus 3 points of the performing group) are a priori European, and the film wouldn’t qualify as an European production. The reason for its being made under the co-production agreement with support from the Fund is, besides the obvious European ‘cultural interest’ of the subject of multiculturalism and African immigration; that Gomes is Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France, and that, citizens of former Portuguese colonies, both N’Diaye and Dibango have the Portuguese nationality.
Critically regarded as a good film and an important film, to ask for Nha Fala’s nationality is almost superfluous and, beyond the legal definition, Portuguese, 3 impossible to determine objectively: to what extent, because of the music, is it Cameroonian; or is it any more from Cape Verde than from Guinea-Bissau than Luxemburg. The fact is that it probably would have not been made otherwise, certainly not with (only) Cape Verde or Guinea-Bissau capital, and it ultimately represents a way in which the co-production is (and can be) used to serve the creative process of the filmmakers.
Venice 2002 also premiered in its official selection Bear’s Kiss, the last film of Russian director Sergei Bodrov (nominated to an Academy Award for Best Film in a Foreign Language in 1996 for Prisoner of the Caucasus). A modern fairytale, it tells the story of young Russian trapeze artist Lola (Rebecka Liljeberg, from Lukas Moodysson’s Fucking Åmal) travelling around Europe with a third class circus after her mother left her. One night, a young man (played by the director’s son, Sergei Bodrov Jr.), wakes her, telling her he is Misha, the brown bear of the circus, her only friend, who takes the human form every night. They soon become lovers, and a Spanish Gypsy tells them Misha will become a human being, on the condition that he must not kill anybody. In defence of Lola, he ends up killing the circus’ owner, thus sealing their destiny. The film ends with the trip back to Russia, where the bear is set free.
It is, ‘in order of importance,’ a German (Pandora Film-produktions)- French (Orsans Productions)- Spanish (Tornasol Films)- Italian (Alia Films)- Swedish (Memfis Film and Film I Väst)- Russian (CTB Film Company) co-production, and was partly shot in all the co-production countries (except Italy and France, and the sequences set in Russia were actually shot in Sweden) in English and the countries' respective languages, with actors from all of them in significant roles. The artistic and technical participation is distributed across all the co-producers and includes German editing and costume design, Swedish sound, an Italian composer, French production design, and Spanish cinematography, as well as a script written by the director, Carolyn Cavallero from Spain, and Terrence Malick, uncredited.
It was granted 700.000€ from Eurimages and has very high production values. Its overall quality and achievement, however, are seriously undermined by issues and compromises that obviously originate from its co-production character. The bet placed in the combination of an Oscar nominated director and the actress of a Swedish film that became a huge overnight success across Europe seems very attractive, especially in regard to finding partners to fund the film, and with the aid of a strong, however formulaic, script. In the final result, the accommodation of locations, actors and crew from all the co-producing parties, as well as the market-oriented inclusion of the English language in addition to the other six, only have a negative cumulative effect that dramatically reduces not only the quality of the film, but also its market potential, both in the countries involved in its production and everywhere else.
At the end, the problem with the nationality of Bear’s Kiss is not so much that it is lost between the countries Lola visits in her peregrinations, but that, irregardless of the sources of funding, it should have been, a Russian film, set in Russia with Russian actors speaking the Russian language, as it was originally conceived by its Russian director, since everything else only damages its integrity.
The International Standards Organization (ISO) is currently designing an international system for the identification of cinematographic and audiovisual works, which includes criteria to determine the nationality of films. This concept of nationality is important not only for identification purposes, but much more so for financial reasons, as it allows films to be eligible for all sorts of financial support, and for cultural and political reasons, as ‘the origins that inspire [their] making’ may be of a different origin than the capital that allows their creation.
The growth in the number of multi-national co-productions during the last decade, aided by instruments like the European Convention and the Latin American Agreement on Cinematographic Co-Production, and funds like Eurimages and Ibermedia, further complicates the issue of the nationality of films, which increasingly encompass financial, artistic, technical, linguistic, and thematic participation from several different countries.
Film co-productions, thus, end up outside legal considerations being either non-national multicultural products, like Nha Fala, or nationless, necessarily weak trips, like Bear’s Kiss, and only rarely representations of stories, characters, and subject matters truly relevant to all the parties involved in their making.
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1 Exceptions “In that it endeavours to support works which reflect the multiple facets of a European society whose common roots are evidence of a single culture.”
2 “In that the Fund invests in an industry which, while concerned with commercial success, is interested in demonstrating that cinema is one of the arts and should be treated as such.”
3 Or Luxembourg-Franco-Portuguese.
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