Coproducing Europe: An Ethnography of Film Markets, Creativity and Identity 9781800739864

Citation preview

Coproducing Europe

Coproducing Europe An Ethnography of Film Markets, Creativity and Identity

Eleni Sideri

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Eleni Sideri All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sideri, Eleni, author. Title: Coproducing Europe : an ethnography of film markets, creativity and identity / Eleni Sideri. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022054574 (print) | LCCN 2022054575 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800739857 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800739864 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: European Union--Influence. | CYAC: Motion picture industry--Political aspects--Balkan Peninsula--History. | Motion picture industry--Social aspects--Balkan Peninsula--History. | Motion picture industry--Political aspects--Greece--History. | Motion picture industry--Social aspects--Greece--History. | Motion picture industry--Political aspects--Georgia (Republic)--History. | Motion picture industry--Social aspects--Georgia (Republic)--History. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.B35 C67 2023 (print) | LCC PN1993.5.B35 (ebook) | DDC 791.4309496--dc23/eng/20230207 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054574 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054575 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-­1-80073-­985-­7 hardback ISBN 978-­1-80073-­986-­4 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800739857

Contents

List of Figures, Maps and Tablesvi Acknowledgementsvii Introduction. Methodology1 Chapter 1. Between Art and Industry

12

Chapter 2. Coproduction History in Post-­War Prehistory

31

Chapter 3. EU Media Policies

52

Chapter 4. Film Festivals in EU South-­Eastern Peripheries

73

Chapter 5. From National Cinemas to European Coproductions

96

Chapter 6. Matchmaking117 Chapter 7. Coproducing Emotions

137

Conclusion157 Appendix163 References166 Index184

Figures, Maps and Tables

Figures Figure 5.1. ­Timeline – ­Greece. Figure 5.2. Timeline – Bosnia–Herzegovina. Figure 5.3. P ­ articipation in Crossroads – Thessaloniki Film Festival. Figure 5.4. Participations in ­CineLink – ­Sarajevo. Figure 5.5. ­Timeline – ­Georgia.

99 101 104 104 106

Maps Map 5.1. Coproduction ­networks – ­Greece. Map 5.2. Coproduction n ­ etworks – ­Bosnia–Herzegovina. Map 5.3. Coproduction ­networks – ­Georgia.

112 113 114

Tables Table 3.1. Selection criteria. Table A.1. Funding for Greece. Table A.2. Funding for Bosnia–Herzegovina. Table A.3. Funding for Georgia. Table A.4. Cash rebates in the Balkans.

62 163 164 164 165

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Fotini Tsibiridou, for the opportunity to start this research as a postdoc at the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia. I am grateful and indebted to my colleague and friend Dr Elina Kapetanaki, independent researcher in social anthropology, who read an earlier draft and gave insightful comments, as well as to the emeritus professor of the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies Eftihia Voutira. My gratitude goes to Katherine Baker, Periklis Choursoglou and Dimtris Kerkinos, the latter of whom shared his thoughts and contacts at the beginning of this research. I would like to express my gratitude to the people of the Agora at Thessaloniki Film Festival, especially to Ageliki Vergou and Yanna Sarri, to the Greek Film Centre, and especially to Anna Kassimati. I would like to thank Aida Kalender, Danijela Majstorovic and Nebojša Jovanović in Sarajevo, and Salome Jashi, Artchil Khetagouri and Alexander Baev in Tbilisi. I am indebted to the Creative Europe and Eurimages offices and delegations in all three countries, as well as to all the people working at the film festivals in Sarajevo, Thessaloniki and Tbilisi. My eternal gratitude goes to mum, dad and my mentor, the late professor of anthropological linguistics Lukas Tsitsipis.

Introduction Methodology

h Tbilisi, 3 July 2003 During my first period of fieldwork in Georgia in 2003, Nick Nolte visited Tbilisi. The news circulated fast, causing great excitement. The star’s visit was interpreted as part of the changes in Tbilisi. A masterclass was hosted at the Amirani Cine Club. My friend Lia1 invited me to the event. One of the leading actors in the film being shown, The Good Thief (dir. Neil Jordan, 2003), was the ethnic Georgian Nutsa Kukhianidze. The entire artistic scene of the city attended the event. Town Hall officials and people from the US embassy came as well. Nick Nolte seemed genuinely surprised by the crowd. Many of the questions concerned Nutsa and her success in the US. Her journey, literal and symbolic, was envied by many young Georgians back then.   When we returned to Lia’s home, with the old, handmade wooden furniture and the black and white photographs on the antique sideboard, her grandmother wanted to hear all the details. She used to make costumes for the National Ballet Theatre of Soviet Georgia. ‘This is nothing’, Natela said, ‘I remember when Nargis and Raj Kapoor visited Tbilisi [in 1954]! What a reception! What a beauty!’ She directed an austere look at my friend, who was bored with her granny’s stories. ‘Elene, you should know that Tbilisi was always a mezhdunarodnyĭ [‘international’ in Russian] kalaki [‘city’ in Georgian].’

The visit of the two megastars from India to Tbilisi demonstrated the Soviet Union’s involvement in international coproductions. Natela’s narration highlighted the circuits of films and film stars, but she also stressed the connection of these circuits to cities and their internationalization. Natela’s memory

2 • Coproducing Europe

underlined the cultural policies and diplomacy of the Cold War period. These aspects of internationalization, mobilities and circuits, the cultural and political histories of post-­war Europe, and their traces in the present cinematic landscape of the continent are part of the history of film coproductions, and as this work will argue, they are important for an understanding of coproduction networks today.

Europeanization and Margins According to Wolfram Kaiser, Stefan Krankenhagen and Kerstin Poehls (2014), who have studied Europeanization in the context of museum collections and exhibitions, this process was not only a political project of institution-­building and the formation of policies and integration mechanisms. Instead, they argued that Europeanization can be studied in full only by referring to cultural and historical processes of political transformation. They also underlined that Europeanization comprised both the ‘idea of Europe’, as an idealization of ‘what Europe is’, and the ‘cultural-­political’ (ibid.: 3) project that the authors called Project Europe, a political design of policies resulting in the idea of Europe. The idea of Europe, as John Borneman and Nick Fowler (1997) postulated in their account of different policies for Europeanization, involved a long and turbulent historical process. It started with the formation of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, which contrasted Europe with the archetypical Others (the Jews and the Muslims). It continued with the gradual formation of the modern nation states. During that phase, as Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller (2002: 302–8) persuasively argued, cultural policies, including film policies, were utilized in the production of a homogenous cultural (national) memory, overshadowing histories of national violence (social inequalities, colonial legacies and ethnic conflicts). This legacy seems to have inspired the EU policies of the 1990s. As Lila Leontidou (2004: 605) has argued, the idea of Europe, often identified with a democratic legacy and cultural superiority, was filtered ‘in the context of deborderings and relevant declarations, the collapse of the “Iron Curtain”, the partition of former Yugoslavia, questions of European federalism, and the expansions of the EU’, through a ‘bureaucratic institutional narrative’. My research examines film industries and the role of coproductions in their development by looking at EU film policies, regional histories and politics as they interact with the process of Europeanization, the shaping of Project Europe, and the way that Europe is perceived at different scales. My comparative angle takes into account three different regional film industries, those of Greece, Bosnia–Herzegovina and Georgia. These three countries are on the geographic and political margins of the EU. This perspective gives a

Introduction • 3

clearer insight into the, often invisible, power inequalities that construct the regional. As Sarah Green (2005: 1) has noted, marginality ‘evokes a sense of unequal location as well as unequal relations’. The EU project contributed to the formation of south-­east Europe as a region by delineating not only borders, but also peoples and cultures through economic, political and cultural policies from the 1990s. EU enlargement towards the eastern and south-­eastern peripheries was a highly hegemonic and hierarchical political project whereby the people of south-­east Europe felt ‘one boundary shift from . . . E ­ ­ uropean citizenship’ (Leontidou 2004: 609), This boundary, however, often seemed insurmountable. In recent years, a new approach combining both postsocialism and postcolonialism has argued that the very position of the Balkans as peripheral preserved colonial Eurocentrism during Europeanization (Bjelić 2018). The shaping of the region itself opened a discussion of what Europe was and where its borders could or should be drawn from the 1990s. In this way, the margins became part of the centre’s political project, reminding us of the shifting geographies of power that produce the sense of belonging often connected to a privileged narrative (see Massey 2005). The margins of Europe during Europeanization turned into peripheries and Western and Northern Europe turned into the centre within the same grand narrative of becoming European. Nevertheless, these changes resulted in ambivalent comparisons, critique and discontent among the people living in these shifting geographies that were often considered marginal, like the Balkans. These political and emotional ambiguities seemed to be part of film policies in which film coproductions played a significant role.

Methodology and Methods Marginality and peripherality have emerged in my work in various ways. I started my anthropological studies in the 1990s, in a period that Fotini Tsibiridou (2003: 185–202) has characterized as transformative for the reading of the social in Greece. During those years, social anthropology in Greece challenged ‘Helleno-­centric’ (ibid.: 188) perceptions and became more outward-­looking. This happened in connection with the emergence of the neighbouring Balkan countries and the former Soviet Union, where Greek-­speaking diasporas lived. Both these regions emerged as prominent fields of interest for anthropologists from Greece. This was also true for me. I undertook my first fieldwork in the Caucasus. Approaching the anthropology of Greece from the margins challenged ethnocentric perceptions and shed light on the hegemonic visions that Greece had started to have with regard to its former socialist neighbours. The discussion regarding the Western-­centric

4 • Coproducing Europe

stereotypes of the transition from socialism to postsocialism, which followed the first years of ethnographic research in the former socialist bloc, made me aware of the value of comparative study and historical contextualization (see Angelidou 2011). Comparing Greece’s film industry to two other film industries from behind the Iron Curtain enabled me to challenge dominant perceptions regarding before and after, but also suggested differences within what was often understood as the homogenous socialist bloc. Turning my attention to the cinema as a field of interest was not an obvious choice. Although social anthropology introduced photography and film as part of its ethnographic methods very early (see Sideri 2016, 2021), this engagement did not really involve fictional films and the film industry. Anthropological visual representations of Greece did not escape exoticization and Orientalism, following the colonial gaze of Mediterranean anthropology (see Herzfeld 1987; Kalantzis 2019; Venaki and Nikolaidou 2019). This gaze fashioned ‘images of Greece’ or the ‘Greeks’ for global consumption, whether this consumption concerned wider cinemagoers or academic audiences. Studying Greek coproductions in comparison to other film industries in wider south-­east Europe will first help me interconnect and historically contextualize the formation of the local, regional and global within Cold War historical legacies and hierarchies of power, and then during the enlargement of the 1990s. This comparison will also contribute to studying the formation of the peripheral through film festivals and film markets, not as a result, but as a constitutive part of Project Europe. Film coproductions in this sense emerge as a space of economic, political and cultural collaboration, but also of knowledge and emotional entanglements that dis/connect creators from south-­east Europe and the ‘heart’ of the European creative economy. Salazar, Elliot and Norum (2017: 4) reminded us of Malinowski’s fieldwork, which, although it became synonymous with a territorially bounded study of culture, was really depicting a world of motion, trade and exchange. Mobility was always part of ethnography, even if it was unnoticeable in terms of epistemological and methodological recognition (Clifford 1997). This negligence was recognized in the 1990s. George Marcus (2009: 90) proposed multisited ethnographies to explore ‘chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions’ between various things such as objects, persons, stories, biographies and metaphors. In this work, I follow people (creators, EU officials, festival practitioners), their narratives and their emotions, which circulate in con- and disjunction with EU power hierarchies and the global economic agenda. My research (from 2016 to 2018) took place during the period of the financial crisis in Greece. Lack of funding was a crucial factor in any travel plans, and in the duration of fieldwork in the three cities I studied, Thessaloniki,

Introduction • 5

Tbilisi and Sarajevo. The crisis also played a significant role in the participation of various creators in festival markets and workshops. As a result, both online and offline fieldwork were undertaken during this research period. But these setbacks made me more aware of how these professionals work and the hardships they face behind stardom and the red carpet, which often overwhelm our imagination of the film industry. Writing these lines during the COVID-­19 pandemic and within a regime of strict confinement turned my setbacks into norms. I already had connections with the people working at the festivals in Thessaloniki, as I have lived in the city since the early 1990s, and in Tbilisi, since my first fieldwork there in 2004. My connection to the Film School at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, first as a student and then as a teaching assistant, also gave me access to Thessaloniki Film Festival. I also had contacts with film directors in Tbilisi, as in 2015 I organized, at the university where I worked, the first documentary film festival dedicated to the Georgian documentary. I built my connections to the Festival of Sarajevo through colleagues doing research in Bosnia–Herzegovina after the Yugoslav wars. I attended three film markets in total, in both Thessaloniki and Sarajevo. In Tbilisi, there is no organized film market. I also participated in an online session of Creative ­Europe – ­Slovenia and Ukraine, which aimed to connect young creators during the pandemic, in November 2020. I discuss in more detail my participation in the markets in Chapter 6. My role as a researcher was known to the other participants, and some creators joked about this role by saying that I was there to ‘examine them’. Most of the time, they were very supportive and helpful, discussing problems in funding their films and all the ingenious but demanding strategies they employed to find producers. Moreover, they discussed ideas, plots and twists, trying to understand if they would work on audiences like me. Often, they asked for information regarding film markets and festivals I visited. For the interviews, I contacted professionals working at the MEDIA (Measures to Encourage the Development of the Audiovisual Industries) desks and the National Film Centres of the three countries, at festivals, and in particular, at film markets. Through the snowball technique they introduced me to a network of creators and producers in all three industries. I tried to interview, either in person or online, officials in similar positions in all three festival markets. My main targets were EU officials working in the Creative Europe and Eurimages programmes, professionals in film markets, film festivals and national film centres, and creators who had experience of participating in film markets. I used similar tactics (the snowball technique) to get in contact with creators. At the beginning of each interview, I explained to them the goals of my research project and asked for their consent. For extra protection, I use pseudonyms for all the people I interviewed.

6 • Coproducing Europe

Discussing ethnographic methods during the pandemic, Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma and Chika Watanabe (2020) argued that the ‘recombination of “home” and “field” have now become necessities’, arguing for a new ‘patchwork ethnography’ that expands in time, values long-­term relations, and identifies new ways to do fieldwork despite mobility constraints. Undertaking research under the conditions of a long financial crisis, with no funding, and writing up during an epidemiological crisis forced me to expand my research temporally and to be more resourceful in terms of methods, for example by digging into film databases. In this sense, the pandemic generalized what was for many social anthropologists a reality even before COVID-­19, drawing attention to the research problems often faced by anthropologists living on the margins (those at peripheral academic institutions and from economically challenging contexts). More specifically, my research started with readings on mobility and global economy and ­culture – s­ uch as the seminal work of Arjun Appadurai (1990, 1996) on global dis/junctures, which described the economic and cultural landscape that turned film coproductions into a significant part of the film ­industry – ­as well as Cold War cultural histories (Scott-­ Smith, Segal and Romijin 2012), which can be highly monitored, could produce a different understanding of how films circulate globally. At the same time, the cultural history of the Cold War can reveal the relationships that were shaped despite the political rhetoric of polarization. This prompted me to use the idea of prehistory (Shami 2000) as a way to explore the history of coproductions before the 1990s, when the EU film policies were introduced. I found anthropological works on imagination, cultural improvisation and creativity very helpful, especially the works generated by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK’s conference in 2005 (Hallam and Ingold 2007), in capturing the construction of Project Europe, as well as how film coproductions were embedded in it, how this vision generated emotions as part of political and public discourses, and also how these emotions circulate in different contexts and among different people. I am also indebted to the work of Annelise Riles (2000) regarding the notion of networks as something envisioned and constructed in policy reports, discourses, charts and maps, which seem to have their own lives in the ways and contexts in which they travel through different actors and scales. One example is the way in which policies circulate from EU reports to festival executives and film market volunteers and creators. Finally, I was inspired by the work of Marilyn Strathern (2020) on the different articulations and meanings of the concept of relationships as a way to generate kin connections, but also forms of knowledge. How do creators understand coproductions and their connections to coproducers and festivals? What do

Introduction • 7

they expect from their participation in film markets, and why do they apply for participation in specific film markets? In addition to my bibliographical research, I undertook short field trips and held interviews with creators in the three counties, as well as carrying out extensive document analysis (policy papers, EU treaties, reports, etc.). The interviews were planned to involve persons involved in the same capacity in the three fields, such as officials from the head teams of film coproduction markets or creators. In practice, I held interviews with the officials of the coproduction markets in Thessaloniki, and I also had the opportunity to talk to officials from the industry in Sarajevo and Tbilisi. I also interviewed officials from the Greek Film Centre in Greece and the MEDIA desk in the Ministry of Culture in Georgia, as well as the heads of Creative Europe: Culture and the Association of Directors of Bosnia–Herzegovina in Sarajevo. I also contacted the head of the MEDIA desk in Banja Luca via email. Apart from short field trips to markets to interview creators and market officials, I also participated in three film markets in three different capacities. The first was in Thessaloniki, organized by the European Documentary Network Doc Market in 2014, at which I first pursued the then-­rough idea I had for research into film markets. I participated as an observer. The second was in Sarajevo, at a CineLink Drama workshop in 2017 in which I participated as part of a creative team for a TV series. Finally, I participated in an online matchmaking workshop for Creative Media organized by MEDIA in Slovenia and Ukraine, where I was trying to find partners for a project. I opened the discussion at the beginning of this chapter with an excerpt from my diary. Diary notes were generated on my field trips during this research but are also drawn from diaries of the past. For example, in Tbilisi, where I have undertaken fieldwork since 2002, I used my past diaries and memories to draw comparisons. I also used my diaries written as a child and student in Thessaloniki during the formative years of the Thessaloniki Film Festival. A diary, ‘the first book’ according to Geertz (1973: 347), is an important tool that allows raw first impressions to be processed and reflected on at a distance (in time or space), and in comparison to other ideas. I used my diary excerpts as flashbacks, to use the terminology of films, not in an explanatory, linear and causative way, but as a context with the potential to deepen my understanding. As George Marcus (2013) stated, montage is more than an innovative syntax of film or experimental writing in ethnography; it can play another significant role in revealing the ideas that shaped fieldwork and the means used to undertake it. As he put it, montage ‘captures this labor conceptually and as process’ (ibid.: 315). I used my diaries in this sense of connecting my thoughts to the process of ‘doing fieldwork’ and exploring how these two labours interacted with each other.

8 • Coproducing Europe

It was the economic and family problems that I encountered, and their proliferation, that made me investigate film databases. In a previous research programme, I worked on producing material for a database through the collection of oral stories, but here I found myself on the opposite side.2 I had to deal with the information and protocols with which others worked in order to produce a corpus of knowledge codified in a certain way. Lev Manovich (2000) argued that databases are more than technology. They are cultural modalities, as they organize human and cultural experience in specific historical contexts. He argued that databases have become the dominant cultural expression of the digital age, as novels and the cinema had been during the rise of modernity. In his reading of these different modalities, he stressed that there is a clear opposition. Novels and cinema employ narrative and were thus forms of reasoning in which relationships based on causality were predominant. Conversely, a database privileges a ‘list of items, and it refuses to order this list’ (ibid.). The databases I used were all launched in the 1990s, when the EU identity was being formed. Examining this period as the starting point for film coproductions stresses the economic and cultural shifts that emerged as part of globalization (global markets, media conglomerations, global audiences), but databases tell a story like other archives in specific historical contexts. In this, I follow Katherine Hayles (2007) in her approach to narrative and databases as complementary and coexistent forms of cultural histories. In this sense, I critically examined the story that the databases I studied suggested, and the way in which it corroborated dominant cultural histories. I also tried to identify the histories of film coproductions before the 1990s. I undertook research with different databases, and the period I was interested in was the first twenty-­five years of the EU’s film policies (from 1991 to 2016): • Lumiere is a database of films released in Europe that was launched in 1996 as part of the European Audiovisual Observatory. It combines various specialized national sources with the MEDIA programme of the European Union. Each film is introduced with its original title, a translation of the title, the country of origin, the year of production, the director and the producing countries. The names of producers are listed in different national databases in order of importance (from those with the biggest participation in the production of the film to those with the smallest). There is thus a first classification in their representation. There are some issues with ISO (International Organization for Standardization) consistency, for example, with different abbreviations used in different fields for the same country, or the names of different coproducers in different databases. Title translations may also vary, especially for less-­known languages such as Georgian or Greek.

Introduction • 9

• Eurimages Archives (online). In this database, I examined the published data on coproduction funding grants since 1989. These archives include only the winners of the coproduction grants from each country. Some of the problems I encountered concerned differences in titles. A film submitted for a Eurimages grant might have a working title that is changed when the film is screened. • I also explored the MEDIA Films Database, focusing on development and coproduction funding. This database compiles all the films that have received MEDIA support since 2001. It registers the title of the film in English, its year of production, producing countries, genre, director, cast, scriptwriter and storyline. It includes the MEDIA call number, the sector concerned (development, distribution, etc.), the amount granted, the production company that received the grant, and the year. It also provides information about the film’s inclusion in major festivals. Apart from the above databases, I cross-­checked the results with national published sources on coproduction funding wherever they existed, such as reports and data from the Greek Film Centre, the Association of Directors of Bosnia–Herzegovina, the Georgian Film Centre and the Georgian festivals (Tbilisi Festival and Documentary Festival). I also delved into the published reports of coproduction markets from the festivals of the three cities. I collected information from these reports about the origins of the film partners, language of the films, and major and minor coproducers. When investigating coproductions before the 1990s, I used the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), in particular for Yugoslav, Soviet and Greek films produced from the 1950s until the late 1980s. IMDb provided important additional information about the content of the films, the actors and the production companies. I also used national databases and archives whenever possible, such as the database of the National Film Centre of the three film industries examined here, the Cinematheque in Sarajevo and the National Archives in Georgia, although I did not undertake archival research due to a lack of time. I investigated publications from regional festivals (in Thessaloniki, Sarajevo and Tbilisi) regarding the coproduction markets, creators and projects. Databases thus opened the horizons of my research in ways not often visible to traditional ethnography due to the size of the networks generated by coproductions today (see Marshall and Staeheli 2015). I also tried to go against the presentism often found in the study of networks mapping the Cold War histories of coproductions.3 I used the open-­source programme Gephi to visualize these networks. This visualization helped me to trace patterns, connections, and the density of relationships, to illustrate the shifting relations and geographies of coproductions in the three film industries, and to make clear the size and extension

10 • Coproducing Europe

of these networks. The histories and personal ­choices – ­in other words, the invisible orchestration of motives, desires, needs, opportunities or mere ­chance – ­involved in these networks were critical points missing from this visualization, however, and were only traced through the more traditional methods of ethnography. The complementarity of traditional and new ethnographic methods and representation can offer answers to the exigencies of our interconnected world and the proliferation of data, as well as to emerging crises. Outline of the Chapters As the following chapters will show, there has been strife since the inception of the EU in the areas of economy and culture, especially in relation to film industries, connected to post-­war European history, and especially in French– German relations, as although these nations pushed for the formation of a common European market, they were not ready to release part of their national sovereignty. Chapter 1 will discuss how film gradually became part of the national cultural legacy. The process was slow, and it involved social and economic changes (a shift to a post-­Fordist economy and an entrepreneurial culture) in which culture played a significant role. Chapter 1 will illustrate how this relationship played an important role in shaping film industries in Europe today by focusing on south-­eastern Europe (Bosnia–Herzegovina, Georgia and Greece). The chapter will argue that the process of enlargement was shaped within the introduction of policies regarding a more coherent European identity at all levels of economic, political and cultural life. Chapter 2 examines the history of coproductions, from post-­war Europe until the 1980s. It will allow us to compare the role given to coproductions on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It will discuss the politics and the mechanisms built to support film productions and international coproductions in the framework of the cultural diplomacy of the Cold War. The chapter argues that it is important to challenge the ‘newness’ of coproduction as a policy and dig into the prehistory of coproduction as cultural history, memory and legacy in Europe. Chapter 3 studies the EU framework of coproductions, starting with the foundational treaties and how they ­refer – ­if or when they do ­so – ­to culture. I then turn to the study of MEDIA and Eurimages as the main mechanisms supporting coproductions today in Europe. I discuss the tautology that seems to emerge in the official discourses of these programmes, where ‘European’ is one of the criteria according to which each submitted project is funded, but is also something that results from the projects funded. Chapter 4 turns to festivals and their importance in the regeneration of European cities, especially in the cities of the wider south-­eastern Europe,

Introduction • 11

such as Thessaloniki, Sarajevo and Tbilisi. I discuss how the development of film festivals was embedded in a new vision of these cities as part of a global economy in which tourism and cultural branding were important for their economy and cultural life. Chapter 5 analyses the results regarding the way that coproduction as a cinematic culture for funding was introduced and embedded in national regulations in the three film industries examined here: Greece, Bosnia– Herzegovina and Georgia. I will also assess the effect of this culture on the film production of these three industries, noting the patterns of collaboration and the coproduction networks produced by these collaborations, and the way that they shape cinematic neighbourhoods. Chapter 6 discusses the micro-­context of film coproduction markets. How do people working in them see their roles, and what are their main tasks? What do they think of their mission and the relationships they develop with creators? The focus of the chapter is the main activity in the coproduction market: the matchmaking between creators and producers. I try to trace the power geometries generated in this ‘rite de passage’ of the film markets and the way that this space is situated between economic and political agendas, festival programming and designs, and creative agencies. Finally, Chapter 7 turns to the creators, their feelings and emotions regarding participation in film markets and the know-­how they develop regarding choosing the ‘right coproducer’. How does this know-­how differ from the ways that EU officials try to produce knowledge through their cultural and film policies?

Notes 1. All names are pseudonyms, following anthropological research ethics for the protection of informants. 2. Although the research programme DEMUCIV (Design the Museum of the City of Volos) constructed a tailor-­made metadata-­management system that tried to meet the expectations of the historical and anthropological research, combining rich archival data, sound data and life stories, there was always a feeling of simplification and reductionism. 3. Broadly speaking, there are two overall trends in the use of network theory in social anthropology. On the one hand, we study already-­shaped networks. On the other hand, there are those who criticize the application of a modern, Western-­centric concept such as networks in societies and practices with different semantic systems of meaning.

Chapter 1

Between Art and Industry

h Thessaloniki, 18 July 2016 Perhaps the most fundamental and striking characteristic of the motion picture as an institution is that the making of movies is both a big business and a popular art. Certainly its financing; relationships with banks, boards of directors and stockholders; distribution and advertising; problems with markets, domestic and foreign; and its labour relations are all the well-­recognized parts of any big business, but its product is not like those of other businesses. The product of the film industry is a story, told primarily in visual imagery and movement, and, since the introduction of the sound track, with dialogue. The film shares the function of all storytelling, of all literature, of all theatre: that of a comment on some phase of existence. A ­ rtists – ­including directors, writers, actors, photographers, musicians, and ­cutters – ­are necessary to fulfil this function. (Powdermaker 1951: 25) I look at the photograph of Hortense Powdermaker included in the publication for which she wrote the above lines: a young woman in a plain dark dress with a pearl necklace and earrings. Working backstage in a masculine industry, where female secretaries used to correct film scripts but nobody knew their names (see The Story of Cinema; An Odyssey, Episode 2), must have been a challenge for her. She engaged her ethnographic tools to understand how the big studios worked. Hortense had returned from Melanesia in the South Pacific after her degree at LSE, where she had fallen under the spell of Malinowski, when she wrote the above paragraph in order to highlight the complex nature of Hollywood. Her return to the States found her indecisive about what to do next, but after rejecting a collaboration with Edward Sapir among the

Between Art and Industry  •  13

Native Americans, she left for the Deep South to study the Afro-­American community in Mississippi. She was one of the first anthropologists to study home. There, she realized the influence of films on the life of the community, as many of her ‘white informants’ enjoyed them as an escape from their routine (1968: 209). Her book the Hollywood, the Dream Factory had a controversial reception. Variety wrote (1951: 3) that ‘Hollywood as “Dream Factory” [was] just a Nightmare to Femme Anthropologist’, stressing that a correspondent did not need to spend a year in Hollywood and could make the assumptions that Hortense had made in just two weeks.

Powdermaker produced a classic functionalist ethnography in which the main research question was how magic persisted in a secular, modern world. How did film-­making interpolate with the economic agenda of the studios’ big bosses? How did the over-­concentration of power in the hands of a few (even fewer today) shape people’s imagination? Placing these questions in a broader context, how has the economy today become interwoven with creativity? In what ways are creativity and its constituent elements, individuality and imagination, transformed into the creative economy? Magic was the most obvious starting point for an anthropologist of her generation. Since the era of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), various expressions of magic in social anthropology had been used as a vehicle to understand and interpret the world of the primitive. The analogical thinking applied in those societies was intended to reveal the correlation between the natural and social worlds, providing explanations regarding natural phenomena, misfortunes, diseases and anything else that affected human life. Magical thinking needs a creative mind in order to imagine (for instance) the devil in the form of a black cat, but magic is not creation. As Edward Sapir stated in his examination of the relationship between individual and group culture, ‘Culture, Genuine and Spurious’ (1924: 418), ‘[c]rea-­tion is a bending of form to one’s will, not a manufacture of form ex nihilo’. Sapir postulated the way that creation interrelates with individuality, but also society and culture. He stressed that the expression of human creativity could be that rare moment in which human beings overcome social structure and regulations. Empirical and positivist anthropology recognized that artistic creativity and creators could be found in primitive and traditional societies, but only embedded in specific social roles (for example, doctors, shamans, storytellers, singer-­enchanters, etc.), institutions and processes such as rituals. Social embeddedness was often thought of as a strategy against any sign of individualism that was considered threatening to social coherence. This does not mean that the ‘primitive mind’ is not inquisitive or inventive. Claude Lévi-­Strauss’s (1962) idea of the bricoleur explored how the primitive mind worked and produced social life and art. The bricoleur makes use of the resources and tools found in their immediate environment by inventing

14 • Coproducing Europe

new uses (ibid.: 10–13), respecting, nevertheless, the analogies and connections that their world has inherited from the previous generations. The bricoleur is not a creator. Bricolage seeks to reproduce an experience through observation and connection to context. In contrast, the modern creative mind1 tries to invent a new world, and the scientific mind produces structures and abstractions to be used in different contexts, with new results. In this binary comparison between the modern and the traditional, the scientific and the mythical, however, Lévi-­Strauss saved a special position for art. He underlined (ibid.: 16) that ‘[i]t is common knowledge that the artist is both something of a scientist and of a “bricoleur”. By his [sic] craftsmanship2 he constructs a material object which is also an object of knowledge.’ Becoming an artist entails a process of learning community rules, culture and history. Central to this process is the notion of skill. Disassociating skills from specific cultural memories and communities signalled the passage to modernity in Europe and beyond. Today, more than ever, knowledge has become part of the creative economy to reinvent skill in the framework of deterritorialized capitalism. For Lévi-­Strauss, artistic (at least representational3) creativity was found midway between bricolage and scientific knowledge. On the one hand, it reduced reality to a two-­dimensional representation; however, this reduction did not reach the abstractedness of a typology. Art kept alive the analogies of the object of reference in order to reproduce the emotive experience. Emotions were central to what art did, and to its social (and economic) mission. This special position of the artist was not irrelevant to the liminal status with which they were bestowed in both ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ societies, something that I will explore further in its relationship to coproduction markets. The issue of liminality and the question of creativity are tied to the work of Victor Turner. Turner is known as one of the pioneers of symbolic anthropology in Great Britain. Drawing from the Manchester School and the examination of situated conflicts as appearances of a deeper structure, Turner considered society to be processual and dynamic. He focused on rites and symbolic performances to study the different moments in this process. Creativity for Turner was often connected to specific rites that allowed or even encouraged the expression of creative liberties or excess (see Shostak in Rosaldo, Lavie and Narayan 2018: 4). Even more importantly for my study of creativity, Turner included film in the secular rites that emerged in the twentieth century (Turner 1979: 468) to overcome the dominant binaries between traditional and modern societies. Approaching film as part of social drama evoked the idea of enchantment that Powdermaker considered persistent in modern societies, but also, Turner pointed out, the ways that creativity emanated from liminal persons who stand in between temporalities

Between Art and Industry  •  15

and spaces: not quite in the present and not quite in the future. Artists and creators are often identified as having the particular disposition of sensing social changes before they are realized. As Renato Rosaldo, Smadar Lavie and Kirin Narayan (2018: 2) suggested, ‘creativity flows from the margins to the centres more often than the reverse’. What seems to have changed today is the fact that creativity has begun to constitute aspects of the ‘centre’ and the neoliberal economic agenda. How has the liminal position of creators become embedded within the creative economy? Kirsten Hastrup argued (2021: 200) that ‘[c]reativity is not cut loose from the world (in which case it would register as madness)’. As neoliberalism has penetrated all spheres of social life, engulfing the arts as part of the modern economy, it forces us to re-­examine the relationships between liminality and the centre, creativity and economy. Raymond Williams (1985: 82–84) noted that in Western thinking, the creative was tied to the notion of the sacred, and the idea of God as creator. God was the only real creator, as they made the world out of chaos, whereas human beings could not demonstrate such an ability.4 Only in the Renaissance were artists named as creators. James Leach (2007: 99–119), tracing conceptual colonialism in the understanding of creativity beyond the West, noted that these Western understandings were generated and gendered by Biblical readings, wherein all expressions of creativity echoed the original Creation and were tied to the image of the Father, but also to ownership and property rights. This connection, although innate to the Western perception of creativity, became more apparent in seventeenth-­century Britain and France. Eric Hirsch and Sharon Macdonald (2021: 185–93), who explored the connections between creativity and temporality, suggested that the specific period was not irrelevant to the emergence of a new society and subjectivity in Western Europe. The seventeenth century saw the rise of the ‘enterprise society’ (Hirsch and Macdonald 2021: 186), which fostered a new idea of the self. Often these ideas were traced to John Locke’s empiricism and his statement that ‘[m]en living according to reason, without a common superior on earth, to judge between them, is properly the state of nature’5 (Locke n.d.: 113). In this context, ‘creative’ was connected to shaping the self though the exploration of an individual’s potential to live within Reason.6 Removed from the realm of religion, the formation of an individual self was an undertaking, an enterprise involving money, trade and morality, linked to the gradual separation of people from rural societies. The accumulation of wealth and that of knowledge and skills began to be interlinked. The self became a personal project shaped by seeking opportunities and fulfilling duties and responsibilities. As Hirsch and Macdonald noted (2021: 186), ‘­realizing . . . ­immanent potential’ was a possibility for any individual.

16 • Coproducing Europe

Mary Douglas stated that ‘[a]n enterprise culture is sometimes justified by the claim that it frees persons from constraints under which they should not be’ (Heap and Ross 1992: 212). Freedom for people, but also for markets to set their own rules in social life, was the beginning of a new understanding of the creative in connection with the economic, as a project of self-­ improvement. Targeting the future through self-­development and change foresaw the coming of modernity. At the same time, this self-­fashioning provoked a counter-­reaction. Since the late seventeenth century, political power has tried to develop technologies to monitor and control this independent selfhood (Foucault 1966). In his seminal Les Mots et les Choses (ibid.), Foucault considered this shift in the meaning of value as a more quantified measurement, exceeding community boundaries. This change for the French philosopher was one of the systems of thought that accelerated the transition from analogical to modern thinking and encouraged a more mediated and representational way of understanding the world. In the nineteenth century, Romanticism stressed the strong bond between imagination, creativity and the arts (Williams 1985: 83). As Hirsch and Macdonald (2021: 180) stated, imagination is considered a ‘mental faculty capable of acts of creation testifying to individual distinctiveness and personal identity’. Creativity externalized imagination, something that was significant in the formative period of nation states in Europe. As a result, the arts were connected to state ideology through the emergence of centralized policies that produced national memory and heritage. Cultural policies, of which film policies were part, became an important mechanism of national and social (and class) fashioning. Creativity is deeply embedded in the formation of the modern economy and discussions of identity. Both these elements are central to the way that film policies in creative Europe today connect to both the EU economy and to visions of a European identity.

Film as a Commodity In 1868, Karl Marx wrote to his friend, Ludwig Kugelmann, a doctor and political ally, from his home in London asking for two portrait photographs for his fans in London who, as Marx underlined, ‘were plaguing him for that’. Marx was a man of his times. Photography had already become, according to Siegfried Kracauer (1995: 74), a ‘secretion of the capitalist mode of production’. In this sense, photography, and later cinema, became part of the same dominant ideology that Marx criticized as blurring reality, like the camera obscura. In Das Capital, Marx (2005) depicted how throughout history, specific technologies for commodity production became dominant for economic production and profit, such as stamping in antiquity or engraving in

Between Art and Industry  •  17

the medieval world. At no time before the nineteenth century, however, had the reproduction of a technology reached such a scale. The larger scale of mechanical reproduction questioned ownership and threatened authenticity and originality. Walter Benjamin (2006: 29) noted that sound film ‘has become the height of artifice’, increasing the distance between the point of production (and thus the reality that produced the specific work of art) and the experience of its exhibition and consumption. Lamenting the loss of aura highlighted the increased embeddedness of creative artistic production in the economy. The recent digital revolution has further increased this artificiality by dematerializing film (celluloid). The shift gave a new push to the circulation of films around the word (creating global blockbusters), but also diversified film audiences (creating global audiences). It also created even greater detachment between the point of production and that of consumption, increasing the de- and recontextualization of a work of art. Scale and mobility, to use two of the buzzwords of our era, were virtually embedded in film’s inception as art, as well as an industry (see Dudley 2009). The advent of printing contributed to a series of transformations regarding the relationships of social subjects with the state. These transformations created the public sphere as a space where ideas circulate beyond the influence of the courtyard, in allegiance with the emerging capital-­motivated bourgeois class (Habermas 1989). Following Bourdieu (1984: 15), the autonomy of the public sphere from the old centres of power coincided with the emergence of the bourgeoisie and universalized its taste, making it synonymous with national official high culture, something significant for the formation of cultural policies in the twentieth century. In this context, the diffusion of film technology in urban centres at first coincided with the formation of an urban bourgeois culture. Both city and cinemas became not only spaces where a new and modern lifestyle was developed (public, secular sites of entertainment), but also symbols of modernity7 (see Barber 2002). The growing innovations in transportation and communication helped the distribution and exhibition of silent films. The formation of a bourgeois lifestyle connected the practice of going to the cinema to urban life, turning it into a sign of modern times. Soon, the audiences grew bigger and more inclusive of the working classes8 (see Kenez 2001). The first film-­makers became exemplary figures in the enterprise culture discussed above. Inspired photographers, such as the Lumière brothers, the Manaki brothers in the Balkans, and even Leon Gaumont, the engineer who founded the first global film industry, were adventuring individuals,9 half artists, half entrepreneurs, who imagined the use of the new technology in a creative way. The position and role of the artist changed in the nineteenth century. As

18 • Coproducing Europe

I noted above, artists became the vanguard of the emerging new world. On the one hand, artists stopped being apprentices. In his comparative research regarding apprenticeship as a mode of education, Trevor Marchand (2008) noted that apprenticeship is learning within a cultural specific production of knowledge. Apprenticeship springs from a wider social, cultural and moral learning, not only through an exchange of words but in an embodied and sensory way. In contrast, the development of a centralized, national educational system (which was central for the indoctrination of national values; see Gellner 1983), such as academies of arts and design schools, cut the links with the tradition in which an artist was still an artisan. During Romanticism the needs of the bourgeoisie and the industrial capitalists conceptualized artists as envisioning the new, like the first pioneers in the field of cinema. Artists became what Turner (1979: 94–108) described as ‘the liminal people’ who belonged ‘between and betwixt’. Turner stressed, however, that this position was assigned by social convention; in other words, somebody cannot be liminal in a self-­appointed way. Modernity needed the liminality of the artists to evangelize a better future, progress and change. This connection of the liminal artist to novelty and change can be found even in emerging socialist ideas. In their few and scattered references to art, Marx and Engels (1975: 130–31) claimed that artists should reveal the mechanisms of exploitation by bourgeois art and the conflicts involved in artistic production, as the latter, like any other mode of production, was embedded in economic and social structures. During that period (the late nineteenth century to the twentieth century), as noted by Raymond Williams (1985), the concept of culture started to lose its sacredness as an intellectual ability and became a specific attribute defining different fields of human activity, such as religious, cultural and political events and practices. These changes gradually shaped modern governing through bureaucracy, administration mechanisms and the development of centralized national policies, such as cultural policies. Early cinema was incorporated into these cultural policies in a more systematic way after the Second World War, as I will discuss. Nevertheless, film, as a new technology that was still marginalized as art, continued the system of apprenticeship. As Susana Narotzky (1997: 18) stressed, technology combines a repertoire of resources, a workforce, tools, and knowledge of how things work. The knowledge and tools (e.g. cameras) in the context of cinema were often objects of fierce competition,10 but the products of this technology, films, were highly circulated. Cinematographers were often significant players in the transmission of film technology in the Balkan periphery, and young, ‘wannabe’ film-­makers from the area travelled to Central or Western Europe to learn. The transmission of this knowledge was thus done in situ, among the crew members. Older masters, film

Between Art and Industry  •  19

photographers, directors and so on, taught the younger generation in practice during shooting. As Narotzky (1997: 24) noted, the notion of skills and the way they were practised in the wider context of apprenticeship strengthened the ties of solidarity among workers and artists, or film-­makers in my case, who could negotiate wages with industrialists through skill ownership. The intensified industrial capitalism of the twentieth century, however, made it the holy grail of the capitalist to break these ties. Skill, today, has yet again become significant for the economy of knowledge, of which the creative economy and today’s cinema have become part. The growing popularity of cinema, as well as its power to represent reality, made film significant for the politics of mass deception, as the title of the third chapter of the seminal essay by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1998) claimed. Screening reality was a powerful tool with which to diffuse and popularize ideals, lifestyles, ideologies and national languages, as well as film stars, genres and narratives. Adorno and Horkheimer in their work compared media monopoly under capitalism in the USA with the European fascist regimes. Using the notion of Marxist alienation in the field of culture, they argued that regimes in both the East and West supported the indoctrination of a programmed and controlled way of life and forms of desire and pleasure. Nevertheless, continuing the distinction between the high and low forms of ­art – ­the latter being identified with mass culture such as fi ­ lms – t­hey marginalized and stigmatized low aesthetics, such as the cinema, in the life of modern subjects. As Pierre Bourdieu (1996) showed, however, the above dichotomy was in no way so clear and rigid. High culture was supported as hegemonic culture by a combination of cultural mechanisms, education and state funding, which was especially strong in post-­war European culture, which ‘explicitly rejected market success yet gained high prestige (cultural capital)’ (O’Connor 2010: 17). Popular culture, such as films, provided access to a wider base of the population, which, especially before the First World War, was excluded from various forms of cultural leisure. The rise of literacy, involving mass popularized culture through national policies, was at the heart of cultural policies in post-­war Europe. Films were recognized as part of cultural legacy and national culture, with France setting the example. France inaugurated the French National Film Centre (Le Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée) in 1946.

Creativity and the Neoliberal Turn What is important here for my argument is the connection of flow, not only to creativity but to productivity as well. As Rose (1992: 141–64) noted,

20 • Coproducing Europe

neoliberalism is not only an economic world view but also a political and social project wherein ‘centralized bureaucracies were substituted by “enterprising activities” and choices of autonomous ­entities – ­business, organizations, persons’. In the twentieth century, the enterprise self and culture both expanded, not only in scale but in terms of their social and political embeddedness at the heart of the state. The idea of the enterprising self was not limited to individuals but penetrated the way that the post-­war welfare state was about to change in the 1970s (see Moulaert and Ailenei 2005). This change started to take on an international dimension in the 1980s, changing the nature of the post-­war interstate system (Sassen 2005). The shaping of a global economic and political system was linked to the notion of flow. Turner (1979) borrowed the term ‘flow’ from the Hungarian American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who studied artists in the 1970s in order to understand aspects of creativity. There, he stumbled on what he called the idea of flow (Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi 1988; Csikszentmihalyi 2004). Csikszentmihalyi observed that artists developed intense mind concentration during their artistic activity (almost a conscious trance), which resulted in increasing their levels of happiness and satisfaction. Flow was, for Csikszentmihalyi, self-­rewarded. The actor in flow was in harmony with their understanding of their mission, and thus felt self-­fulfilled and happy. Turner found flow important for the transition from religious to secular rituals. In secular rituals, the sense of fulfilment was more individualist and less socially experienced.11 In a sense, the enterprising self began to emerge as a transitional self fixed to the future but using resources and skills from the present in order to shape the new and better self. This project would soon be connected to Europeanization, as I will discuss in the next chapters, which had involved forming a common European identity since the 1980s. Turner also proposed another notion in relation to understanding this transitional self: the notion of ‘subjunctivity’ (Turner 1979: 469). According to Turner, subjunctivity fosters desire, potential and possibility. It is the force behind any kind of creation and change. Often, subjunctivity cannot be explained in words. In many interviews, when I asked creators to explain their feelings and thoughts during their struggles to find the right coproducers to invest in their films, there was a pause while they tried to assess this time- and emotionally consuming period of pre-­production of their films, when the film was just an idea, a desire in their mind. I learned to look at their hands and eyes during these moments. Their hands became tense, often clutching and opening again and again, but their eyes had a spark, not yet a flame or a fire. I think this spark is Turner’s subjunctivity, which pushes creators to travel to different European film markets to describe their film projects again and again to unknown people in the hope of investment, imagining their film shot and screened in cinema halls. How could this moment of

Between Art and Industry  •  21

self-­fulfilment become part of a collective vision such as Europeanization? This is part of what I am trying to address here. Hastrup (2021: 207) argued that imagination could be a link between history and action. This is an important point, as it connects this individual spark to the ideas of a common European home and a common European future. The EU’s cultural policies of the 1980s tried to transfigure some of these visions into applied policies to shape a European audience and identity. These policies were inspired within this wider framework of neoliberalism, in which culture became increasingly linked to visions of economic development. As Hirsch and Macdonald (2021: 188) argued, drawing from Penny Harvey and Marilyn Strathern’s discussion of human agency and creativity, from the 1970s in Europe creativity had specific connotations tied to novelty, productivity and the promise of a better future. This shift had an effect on the cultural industries connecting the flow, as understood above, to the emerging quantification of creativity, entrepreneurship and managerial skills.

From Cultural to Creative Industries The term ‘cultural industry’, and in particular the pluralization of the term ‘industry’ (‘cultural industries’), as Hesmondhalgh (2008: 552) noted, not only introduced ‘a label for a sector of production’ but initiated ‘an approach to cultural production’ based on critical political economy.12 This approach treated cultural industries as a high-­risk venture where ­production – ­at least during the period before the digital ­revolution – ­had a high cost, whereas reproduction involved a low cost. Those ­investing – ­either individuals or ­states – ­in cultural goods therefore tried to raise profits from investing in a repertoire of different products or services, rather than one exclusively. For example, investors preferred to put their money not in one film but in an array of films (slate funding), hoping in that way that the losses from one venture would be compensated by the success of the others. The widening of investments also signified the multiplication of target audiences in a sensitive period for social politics (from the 1960s to the 1970s), when multiculturalism and its recognition was becoming an issue for Europe. In this framework, urban economies in particular faced unprecedented decay during the post-­ war period due to deindustrialization. Cultural industries were considered a way to infuse life and capital into decaying city centres, turning cities into economic, social and cultural hubs.13 From the 1970s, especially in the framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), there was a gradual intensification of pressure to remove the strict control over cultural protectionism in Europe, a nation state legacy of the nineteenth century. In 1982, UNESCO (Mattelar and Piemme

22 • Coproducing Europe

1982) published a volume on cultural industries, stressing that culture had become a significant element of economic growth and development. This was important for understanding how cultural policies, which are shaped in an international and supranational landscape, became part of national cultures, a field still very much incorporated into the political sovereignty of the nation state. UNESCO, moving away from the view of culture as something spontaneous and unconditioned, sought to give due recognition to the importance of analysis and critique of the nature, dimension and impact of mass culture, all issues which largely coincide with those raised by cultural industries. (Ibid.: 12)

UNESCO accepted the significance of popular culture as part of global economic development. The shift from national to international cultural policies, and the emphasis on the strong ties between economy and culture, became clear. UNESCO also postulated the need for a more regulated approach to culture, which set the tone for the emerging cultural policies, not as simple support for the arts and artists, but as a new form of international governance. In a historical account of cultural policies, Myrsini Zorba (2009) explained that cultural policies became central to public policies in the 1970s and 1980s. Eleftheria Deltsou (2014: 303), examining political technologies of the EU regarding the programme EUROMED Heritage, underlined that EU cultural policies had as an objective the resignification of local, regional and national cultures within the framework of European culture. The funded projects, for Deltsou, seemed to work as ritual practices to familiarize people with the national Other and to shape a wider understanding of a European culture. This is why regional differences are combined with the promotion of common European values such as democracy, tolerance and solidarity (ibid.: 304). The funding follows strict, complicated bureaucratic procedures, which have an entrepreneurial and managerial logic, as reflected in the relations produced (ibid.: 314–15). These relations often do not go further and do not deepen the ties between partners, but they generate a space of collaboration that is visible and defined as European. Combined with the economic crisis of the 1970s, this had quite an impact, especially in Europe, and this was expressed in various ways. In the UK, the state monopoly on cultural ownership started to change under the pressure of opening up to artistic communities, which had a certain relevance to the discussion of multiculturalism (Hesmondhalgh 2008). Nicholas Garnham (1990) argued that the focus on subsidizing the creators in that period mainly shifted to state support from production to distribution and exhibition, in other words to the circulation of cultural products; this was very important for films and the growth of their audiences, but made things difficult for film

Between Art and Industry  •  23

production. Transnational cooperation, such as film coproductions, became an important issue. It is not irrelevant that European media policies became a reality during that period. The idea of flow, which had started as an experimental idea regarding individual reward from creation, became connected with this new type of economy, internalizing and essentializing flexible relationships of labour and employment mobility, and connecting creativity to market. There was also a gradual transition in the jargon used in the 1990s from cultural to creative industries. According to the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and the Promotion of Cultural Expressions (2015), cultural industries were defined (in Articles 4.4 and 4.5) as ‘industries producing and distributing cultural goods or services’. The European Commission’s Green Paper (2015), in accordance with the UNESCO Convention, defined cultural industries as: those industries producing and distributing goods or services which at the time they are developed are considered to have a specific attribute, use or purpose which embodies or conveys cultural expressions, irrespective of the commercial value they may have. Besides the traditional arts sectors (performing arts, visual arts, cultural h ­ eritage – i­ncluding the public sector), they include film, DVD and video, television and radio, video games, new MEDIA, music, books and press.

The definition of culture is not debated, but there is a division between ‘traditional’ arts (cultural industries) with strong copyright protection and significance for national heritage, and more market-­oriented artistic expressions such as design, which are called ‘creative industries’. In a text named The Economy of Culture in Europe commissioned by the European Commission Directorate-­General for Education in 2006, there was an effort to show the effect of culture on the process of European integration. There, creative industries were defined as a sector in which culture became ‘creative’ input to the production of non-­cultural goods. In this sense, creative industries were expanded to include economic sectors such as design (e.g. fashion design, interior design, and product design), architecture and advertising. This resulted in the culturalization of different and more diverse economic activities related to the economy of signs, such as marketing, branding or design.14 The landmark for a major push towards creative economy in the EU was the Treaty of Lisbon (2007), which set the following objectives, encouraging state members to catch up with the new digital technology and its effect on society: • To create an open and competitive single market for information society and media services within the EU and to support technological convergence with ‘policy convergence’;

24 • Coproducing Europe

• To increase EU investment in research into information and communication technologies (ICT) by 80 per cent; • To promote an inclusive European information society. The different member states started to develop their own strategies at different scales and speeds; however, as the European Commission (Directorate-­ General for Education and Culture) noted in the above-­mentioned report issued in 2006, one of the main reasons that the EU decided to take action to face the new reality was the transnational economic context. It seemed that digital technology had created a new reality for economic processes in the EU, as in the rest of the world. The formation of an information society (i.e. a technologically literate society and economy) would allegedly lead to more social inclusivity, but also to policy convergence between member states, something that challenged previous nationally dependent cultural policies. It also stressed the need for transnational cooperation, which made common supranational action necessary in the European context, even in the field of culture, which was traditionally a national privilege. This new perspective boosted the role of coproductions in films, not only in the making of films (in the need for funding) but as a way for films to cross borders, travel to new markets and meet a new (European) audience, as I will discuss in subsequent chapters. As O’Connor (2010: 52) stated, ‘[c]reative entrepreneurialism provided for an economic and social agenda delivered through cultural policy’. I started this chapter by underlining the way that cinema as an invention was connected to cities in the formation of an urban life. Today, as part of the cultural and creative economy, cinema has contributed to the regeneration of city economies, and also to their transformation into global destinations for tourism and investment. This change is what caused my friend Irina, described in the introduction to this book, to hope that her native city, Tbilisi, had changed for the better. This research focuses on Sarajevo, Tbilisi and Thessaloniki. These three cities are significant regional centres in terms of the film industry. Much of the symbolic capital they have developed in recent decades was related to culture (in the development of festivals, museums and galleries), and especially film culture. The changes these cities have faced since the 1990s are connected to cinema and film festivals, as I will discuss in the following chapters, and their shift towards the tourist industry is one of their most significant sources of development. In what ways did these transformations relate to the re/bordering of the European south-­eastern periphery? How did these cities refashion themselves to attract investment during the process of EU enlargement?

Between Art and Industry  •  25

Creativity – Emotions and the (European) Periphery As Katerina Kolozova (2019), a political scientist from North Macedonia, argued: After its dissolution [the socialist bloc], we all naively thought we would enter the EU immediately, because, after all, we were European, we were from Europe and we thought we had always belonged to it. This expectation was spontaneous, and it felt, indeed, ‘natural’. So, it felt like a slap in the face when in the 1990s the EU asked us to undergo ‘Europeanization’ before we could become ‘European’ on paper.

Katerina’s reference to feelings and political identities, positions and decisions underlines what my work and this chapter stresses: the strong link between emotions and the politics of national and supranational states. Her statement also alludes to the conflicting modernities that emerged, as I will discuss in the next chapter, from Cold War divisions. As Kolozova noted, there was a clash of expectations resulting in frustration after the introduction of the policies of Europeanization in the former socialist countries (see Božić-­ Vrbančić 2009). This point is significant for my research, as the creative economy and cultural industries exemplified the way that these emotions became part of the EU’s economic politics after the 1990s. EU enlargement was yet another phase in the history of Europeanization, and the definition of borders was interwoven with the re/shaping and hierarchizing of identities, as Kolozova noted above. This process was not limited to the eastern peripheries. As Vassiliki Yiakoumaki (2011: 31) underlined when describing the reshaping of the borders and the meaning of the Mediterranean as a region in the 1990s, regionalism relaunched the agenda of ‘cultural essentialism’, drawn from Europe’s colonial legacies, as an urgent ‘political act’ that could guarantee the EU’s stability and security. Enlargement rediscovered cultures known to Europe from the past and tried through the application of a neoliberal agenda of economic and political transformation to turn them into a vision for a better future, neglecting different political imperatives. Anthropology’s engagement with emotions15 started in the 1960s and 1970s. As Lutz and White (1986) argued, there were certain dominant binaries that had to be challenged so that emotions could become an ethnographic field. Approaches that emphasized the opposition between mind and body and sketched emotions as results of physiological, neurological or psychological processes emerged. In a similar way, empirical and interpretivist methodologies to decipher emotional behaviours and manifestations, along with other studies, explored the division between the social, collective, universal or individual focuses of research. All these approaches alluded to the complexity and variety of the epistemologies, ideologies and methodologies

26 • Coproducing Europe

used to investigate the emotions–society–individual triptych. Furthermore, as Lutz and White (ibid.: 429) noted, these dominant oppositions between mind and body made clear how the theoretical presuppositions and binaries narrowed our understanding of the role of emotions in people’s lives, leaving more ‘phenomenological and communicative aspects’ unexplored. As Lutz and White (ibid.) concluded, ‘[i]ncorporating emotion into ethnography will entail presenting a fuller view of what is at stake for people in everyday life’. Gradually, a more hybrid and less dichotomized approach emerged. The global economic, political and cultural transformations since the 1990s have provoked, especially in the so-­called postsocialist space, deep social and cultural changes, challenging old power relations and hierarchies. As Maruska Svašek (2012: 7) wrote, ‘one of the major challenges for the study of ­emotion . . . ­is to provide an understanding of emotions as forces that bridge “the individual” and “the social”’. Even after 1989, there was a lack of interest in ‘emotional processes’ (ibid.: 6) due to the Western disassociation of emotions from politics, which marginalized feelings and emotions. However, Europeanization’s emphasis on the future is an e­ motional – ­almost ­eschatological – ­project in which belief and faith in the future are not only praised, but also cultivated by EU policies. In the Weberian tradition of the state, emotions were separated from the formation of a distant, logic-­driven bureaucracy in order to fight against the premodern tradition of clientelism and patronage, in which relations, even intimate kin relations, played an important part. Michael Herzfeld (1991) argued that state bureaucracies were not watertight hierarchies, but spaces where symbolic meanings that distinguished insiders and outsiders could be found. Secondly, he postulated close links between bureaucracy and nationalism, revealing how this dispassionate state machine encouraged and fostered stereotypes of discrimination. In the context of my research, creators had to deal with their desires to shoot their films, and the allegedly transparent, objective EU policies and the formation of an EU identity are of value here. On the other hand, I will also examine how these policies are not impermeable or empty of emotional prejudices. As Lutz and Abu-­Lughod (1990: 15) argued, ‘emotions are implicated in the interplay of power and the operation of historically changing system[s] of social hierarchy’. The next chapters will examine how the EU’s gradual enlargement in south-­eastern Europe was also a project rooted in emotions. Perceptions of the region, as Kolozova explained, were full of emotional reactions to and expectations regarding the European project, but also Europeanization through enlargement. Discussing the formation of the south-­east region in the UK in the 1980s as a neoliberal project, Allen, Massey and Cochrane et al. (1998) argued that the construction of a region is embedded in different interwoven and multilayered stories of economic development, political change, gender and class. This is also true

Between Art and Industry  •  27

in the case of the Balkans. Films are part of the storytelling that constructs a region, and the stories about their coproduction form part of these narratives. Luisa Passerini’s work Women and Men in Love (formerly: Love and the Idea of Europe): European Identities in the Twentieth Century (2012) argued that a special kind of love that emerged in the interwar period in Europe enabled the idea of a common and united Europe. Tracing the cultural geographies from which this love stemmed, Passerini examined troubadour poetry, the religious and political writings that exemplified specific gender, racial and intercultural relations, and feminist and internationalist movements that captured a more open idea of belonging in Europe, beyond the national narrative. As Passerini stressed, this gradual belonging did not envision a strictly territorialized and culturally bounded Europe, but alluded more to a process of Europeanization. It imagined Europe as an open-­ended project. From this examination of the relationships between emotions and culture, Passerini noted that a new form of cultural identification with Europe had emerged. This identification was less binary and polarized. Nevertheless, it did not eradicate the dualities between North and South, West and East, White and Black, and Protestant and Catholic, but turned them into the internal fragments of a mosaic, ‘a sum of parts’ (Passerini 2012: 181–82). This is a critical point in the emergence of Southern Europe as region,16 and its configuration within film coproduction networks and markets seems to address the ambiguities of this cultural identification with Project Europe. The Europe of regions, as well as the Europe of diversity, was, as I will discuss, a project that envisioned all the different aspects of the European past and present as part of a wider and better sum. This betterment was a project that drew from older geometries of power, however, such as the binaries described by ­Passerini – N ­ orth versus South, West versus ­East – ­but also presented economic and cultural agendas. The vision of European economic and cultural inclusion was closely connected to this mission of the betterment of the more problematic regions, such as the Balkans, and had an emotional effect, as in the case described by Kolozova. As Deltsou (2014) and Yiakoumaki (2011) underlined, the EU programmes bounded and essentialized cultural traditions in the Mediterranean region, generating a distinctive substance. This substance would become compatible with the EU values within these programmes. The creative economy is an economy of emotions. Sara Ahmed (2004) examined various white groups and the hate speech they perpetrated in the UK, and reminded us that emotions circulate and move in a dual sense: as movement, but also as connections and attachments with the Other, and that ‘attachment takes place through movement, through being moved by the proximity of others’ (ibid.: 13). This is significant for the following chapters, as my encounters with local officials and creators became possible through

28 • Coproducing Europe

circulation (theirs and mine, but also the circulation of films and policy agendas). EU creative polices, as I will argue, produce a space of circulation for creators and film practitioners, wherein Project Europe is experienced through this very transnational circulation, but also through its anticipation, through the production of a European cinema. Love for Europe is allegedly produced through the transnational circulation of human bodies, or at least this is the goal of EU creative policies, their openness and inclusion: to create belonging. In Ahmed’s (2001: 11) words, ‘emotions do things [her emphasis], and they align individuals with ­communities – ­or bodily space with social ­space – ­through the very intensity of their attachments’. The circulation of creators and films (co)produces alignments, but the question is whether this alignment produces what the EU is hoping for: Europe as the home of different but equal parts. However, what should not be forgotten here is that this circulation can also be produced by exclusion.17 Participation is guaranteed only if member states (or other candidate or associate EU allies) adhere to EU values. This is why the acceptance of countries like Bosnia–Herzegovina or Georgia into Eurimages or Creative Europe/MEDIA has a significant political meaning. It is a sign of compliance to these values, a reward of becoming fit to relate to the EU. As many film-­makers know, however, the acceptance of film support mechanisms is only the beginning of a long road when seeking funding. This idea that the future is ‘potentially new’ is a Western-­centric approach which results to the fact that, ‘people seek to enter that future as capably as they can’ (Hirsch and Macdonald 2021: 190). EU film policies seem to offer this promise to creators, to develop their skills and become capable of participating in this common EU future. Hastrup (2021), in her exploration of how social worlds are performed, noted that imagination connects history to action, and the collective to the individual, and that this connection takes place through the interrelationship of anticipation with creativity. Hastrup defines anticipation as a feeling of social action; in other words, it stems from an ‘illusion of wholeness’, from envisioning an entire future and not separate actions. Anticipation alludes to a conviction about the outcome, but not necessarily the means to get there. In order to attain the goal of a common future, the EU implemented a repertoire of policies from the 1990s that would lead member states and their citizens towards this common future, but there are no certainties. The illusion of a ‘whole’ motivates collective social action, such as adopting policies, and ‘its efficiency is constantly reaffirmed in practice’ (ibid.: 199). This practical reaffirmation engages creativity. Hastrup stated that ‘anticipation and creativity work upon different temporalities: the first relates to perceived continuities; the second hinges on discontinuity’ (ibid.: 204). Anticipation evokes a common future for the EU and explores aspects of history that

Between Art and Industry  •  29

can unite, whereas creativity challenges this alleged commonness. Specific agencies of creators intervene in this agenda of a ‘common European project’ according to their personal imaginations and desires. These desires and emotions are crucial for grasping the way that social actors feel, live, understand and imagine Europe in a more grounded way.

Notes   1. Lévi-­Strauss’s comparison referred to the engineer or physicist.   2. ‘Craftsman’ (from German) referred to manual occupations, while ‘artisan’ (from Italian) referred to a person skilled in the use of the mechanical arts.   3. Lévi-­Strauss made a brief comment on non-­representational art (see 1962: 20).   4. In Platonic philosophy, the Demiurge (creator) and creation resulted from the theory of Ideas. As a result, the Greek term demiurghia, the ability to create something for demos, the public, identifies creation as more akin to craftsmanship.   5. Natural law is not a divine law but is connected to reason and the fulfilment of social duties and obligations.   6. For example, in Adam Smith’s (1977) The Wealth of Nations, we find the idea that acting reasonably was a duty for both human beings and nations, in order to establish the social order.  7. Many of the first cinematographers turned cities into their favourite subject matter: for example, Dziga Vertov in The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) and Jean Vigo in A propos de Nice (1930).   8. It is not irrelevant that Bolshevik revolutionaries were the first to realize the potential of film as a propaganda medium.   9. The idea of the autonomous artist is not irrelevant to the invention of aesthetics, often attributed to Kantian philosophy, which suggested that arts have a distinct role in comparison to the sensory perception of empirical knowledge. 10. The documentary by Emmanuelle Nobécourt and Gaëlle Royer Charles Pathé et Leon Gaumont, Deux Pretendants un Empire (France, 2016) provides testimonies on this competition. 11. Turner did not have the time to gather rich empirical material to develop this idea. 12. Critical political economy was developed in the late 1960s among sociologists and political scientists. Its top priority was the crucial reflection on the status quo and dominant economic paradigms and ideology. 13. In Europe, creative industries were launched in the UK, when the first Blair administration set up its Creative Industries Task Force in the late 1990s (O’Connor 2010: 46–48). There were predecessors to this emphasis on creative economy. One could point to Guy Debord in his Société du spectacle, which stressed the growing effect of spectacle. There was also Gerhard Schulze, who used Debord’s insights to introduce the ‘experience society’ (a term used in Scandinavia) based on staging experiences. These transformations took place much later in south-­east Europe, in the 1990s. 14. The cultural sector was defined in the same report as producing non-­reproducible goods and services aimed at being consumed on the spot (for instance concerts; art fairs; exhibitions; visual arts including painting and sculpture; crafts like photography; antique markets; performing arts including opera, orchestras, theatre, dance and circuses; and heritage including museums, heritage sites, archaeological sites, libraries and archives).

30 • Coproducing Europe

15. In recent decades, the affective turn in social anthropology has drawn attention again to the non-­discursive and the unsaid. Nevertheless, understanding affect in the ethnographic field engages intentional and subjective processes from both sides (ethnographer and interviewee), especially in the context of interviews in which people reflect back in order to respond to questions and verbally express feelings experienced in the past. Therefore, I prefer the notion of emotions, which, as Sara Ahmed (2004: 117) suggested, ‘define the contours of the multiple worlds that are inhabited by different subjects’, helping me interrelate the transnational circulation of emotions among creators, local film markets and policymakers. 16. The first reference to south-­east Europe was at Thessaloniki’s Meeting (2003), the first EU meeting at which the member states mainly discussed issues of security. After the enlargement with ten new members in 2004, the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was launched. The ENP gave the countries of the region the opportunity to access various funding resources through several European programmes (INTERREG, TACIS, MEDA). The emphasis on security was increased after 9/11. Georgia is still a member of the ENP today. 17. Ahmed (2004: 122–44) critically follows Freud’s take on love as an emotion that generates strong bonds and is crucial for the formation of subjectivity through identification (I love and am loved and so I belong, I am a member of a family, a community, a nation). When this identification fails, however, then problems arise.

Chapter 2

Coproduction History in Post-War Prehistory

h Sarajevo, 11 July 2017 Alma is one of the three women who keep the Cinematheque in Sarajevo alive. The Cinematheque is found on Alpasina Road, an uphill road starting from the central and touristic Marshal Tito Avenue. The day was quite humid when I walked up the road, but Alpasina was covered with trees. The building was old. At first, the front door gave me the impression that nobody was there. I gave Alma a call. Seconds later Alma was at the front. There was a warm welcome from both Alma and her colleagues. The two offices upstairs were also very small. Alma said that they had moved there because they couldn’t afford security for the rest of the building, or to pay for maintenance expenses.   After once more explaining the goal of my visit in English and Russian, Alma asked her colleague to look in a file, where she found some issues of old journals about films. Alma seemed to have memorized everything, and her suggestions to investigate specific issues were always to the point. We then went downstairs into another tiny room, stuffed with all the old issues of film journals. Alma took the periodicals in her hands with genuine affection and started turning the pages. She asked me again about the topic of my research. I had the impression that something was bothering her. I asked her. Alma thought for a moment and replied. It was the term coproducja (‘coproduction’) and the fact that I was trying to find Bosnian coproduced films that puzzled her: ‘They were all Yugoslav to us. Great films during Tito’s time. Tito was a big man. After he died.’ She shrugged her shoulders.

32 • Coproducing Europe

Coproductions in the West In the last chapter, I tried to explore the ways that film and creative industries emerged as part of the economic vision of post-­industrial Europe since the 1990s. I discussed how this economic shift coincided with the political agenda of enlargement towards the eastern peripheries and how this agenda was also an emotional project involving anticipation and imagination of a better future. In this chapter, I will examine the history of film coproduction as a part of Cold War culture and up to today. I will argue that historicizing coproduction in both parts of the divided world of that period can help us overcome the binaries faced by the hegemonic idea of transition in the 1990s and trace the ways that cultural memories, like that of Alma above, are shaped. According to Norbert Morawetz (2008), one of the most popular definitions sees coproductions as contracts between two or more film producers who agree to share goods, rights or services that are otherwise scarce for at least one of them. This is a rather agent-­centric approach that does not consider national or transnational film and media or cultural politics.1 Another definition, by the European Audiovisual Observatory, suggests that coproduction means every production that is financed by more than one country. This is also a capital-­driven definition. Coproduction strategies benefit from the transnational policies developed within the EU framework, which will be discussed in the next chapter, but they also stem from film cultures, as well as cultural memories, as the above excerpt suggests. These memories are connected to Cold War histories and the way that these shaped the film industry in Europe. Hann, Humphrey and Verdery (2002) compared postsocialism and postcolonialism in an attempt to enrich the field of postsocialist anthropology and argued that in terms of knowledge-­production and representation, the study of postsocialism stressed ‘political control’ (totalitarian regimes) whereas postcolonial studies tried to reveal ‘practices of domination’ (ibid.: 17). I believe that examining Cold War coproductions through different cases that allegedly involve three different relationships (Greece and the West, Georgia and the USSR, Bosnia–Herzegovina and Yugoslavia) could allow us to challenge the narrow approach pinpointed above in order to reveal practices of hierarchizing alleged political equality, drawing from ideas of ‘ideological kinship’ (‘socialist brotherhood’ for the socialist bloc, the ‘Free World’ for capitalist work and ‘Love for Europe’ in the EU). This logic of brotherhood in the socialist bloc and the existence of a ‘Big Brother’ (the USSR) produced affiliated and satellite states (‘brothers’) and proxy markets (Yugoslavia is a prime example); at the same time, however, the role of the US as a beacon of democracy and the leader of the Free World

Coproduction History in Post-War Prehistory  •  33

affected the organization of our knowledge. Often this analysis reproduces the division between capitalist and socialist coproductions (ideology-­driven coproductions vs capital-­driven ones). My examination of Cold War coproductions draws from Seteney Shami’s (2000) notion of prehistory and tries to nuance this dichotomy. According to Shami, globalization forced us to revisit and reassess these binary categories of socialism and postsocialism. Shami (2000: 177), re-­ examining Circassian history through diasporas and mobilities, argued that like modernity, ‘globalization fosters an orientation towards the future, a world on the brink of newness’. Following this comparison between modernity and globalization, Shami noted that modernity invented different notions of the past (history, tradition, evolution, antiquity, etc.) in order to disseminate rupture from the past and the idea of progress for the future. Similarly, globalization continued this project of cultivating a sense of newness. Challenging this, Shami utilized prehistory not as an evolutionist typology of the past but as a metaphor. She drew from Benjamin understanding of prehistory as a metaphor that challenged the bourgeois fascination with modernity and adherence to the laws of capitalism (progress, circulation, transformation) and appealed for a new imagination, unchained from capitalist logic. Shami (2000: 189–90) adopted the notion of prehistory to uncover the more mobile and relational histories that were often suppressed by modernity and Cold War hegemonic history. Applying the notion of prehistory to the examination of Cold War film coproductions will help me emphasize not only the dualities (West versus East) and territoriality attached to them, but also cultural diplomacy within an ideologically intense historical period and the collaboration beyond national borders before the invention of the term ‘transnationalism’. Through the concept of prehistory, I trace economic, ideological and political connections before the institutionalized framework of European collaboration, and the circulation of films and creators. Which conditions nourished these economic, artistic and ideological partnerships? Did these coproductions connect to political alliances? Which partner countries were involved? This historical review may contribute to an understanding of the background that today supports or impedes transnational coproduction strategies.

Cold War Politics and Culture In 1947, the USSR launched the Molotov Plan as aid for Eastern Europe. It was a strategic plan to extend influence over this part of Europe. The USA introduced the Marshall Plan a year later. In 1949, President Truman announced his Point Four Programme, which confirmed the commitment of

34 • Coproducing Europe

the US to the UN’s principles and its determination to financially support the Free World, to extend US solidarity to the North Atlantic Alliance, and to export scientific and industrial progress to the underdeveloped world. In 1958, there was an agreement between the USA and the USSR for collaboration and exchange of films, books, students, artists, musicians, conferences and tourism (Price 2016: 1–137). All these initiatives demonstrated that soft power (although this term was introduced much later2) were very significant in Cold War politics. According to George Kennan, the mission of cultural diplomacy, otherwise known as people-­to-­people contact, was to decrease the ‘negative impressions’ cultivated by economic and military coercion (Bu 1999: 393). Cultural diplomacy should be studied against the emergence of soft politics as the antidote to the explicit military violence of former colonial powers. Following Kennan’s remark above about negativity, soft politics seemed to promote an alternative path to international politics in the post-­ war period, one that addressed the brotherhood of nations (first), and then gradually that of people (in a shift to human rights), dialogue and partnership. This transition gradually drew the attention of nations and nation states to the idea of humanity, paving the way for global politics and economics. The emphasis on the positive feelings drawn from kinship, and the emotional alliances it evokes, was key to the emotions at the centre of international politics. Eleni Papagaroufali (2013: 11–55), in her ethnographic research on different cases of soft diplomacy, such as pacification practices and twinning, argued that international relationships and politics demonstrated that the emergence of soft politics and soft diplomacy paved the way for Europeanization. Papagaroufali suggested that in this period, a vision promoting inclusivity and participation beyond national borders prepared the ground for the emergence of an idea of the global. She stressed, however, that these ideas were not irrelevant to the new ideas that gave rise to the neoliberal economic agenda. When the frenzy for nuclear competition and the atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion combined, cultural diplomacy seemed to become a prominent sphere of communication, as it was considered less intrusive but just as influential in a new era in which consumption and lifestyle had become the new forms of capital. In this context, culture became a source of political and economic power. What was the role of cinema in these shifts? As Tony Judt (2005: 351) noted, there were almost five thousand cinemas in the UK just after the Second World War,3 and one in three people visited cinemas once a week. Similarly, in the second half of 1950, almost a thousand cinema halls were inaugurated in France and Germany, and almost three thousand halls in Italy. However, the steep increase in cinema halls and audiences in (Western) Europe was combined with an increase in the

Coproduction History in Post-War Prehistory  •  35

popularity of American films, and especially of war films. The latter reinforced the feeling of victory after the war and allowed Cold War propaganda to strengthen alliances on both sides of the Iron Curtain (ibid.: 352). The ‘intrusion’ of American cinema was not new in Europe, but the fall of ticket sales in the US and a rise in the costs of production increased economic pressure from the US studios. This pressure did not go unanswered. European governments tried to defend their cultural industries, especially in countries like the UK and France. Both started to pass protectionist laws introducing higher quotas for the screening of national films. As Sophie De Vinck (2011: 84–104) noted, Hollywood was the main competition in post-­war Europe. When European governments started to impose taxes on cinema profits to subsidize local film production, American studios found a way to profit from this policy. They started to invest in production abroad, in other words to produce their films in European countries (Jäckel 2019). In a sense, European governments thus ended up supporting instead of limiting the influence of American productions (Siefert 2016). These European policies also formed a common European defence mechanism against the American ‘invasion’. Films were recognized as national products with special value, and they benefited from tax rebates and other affirmative policies due to their importance to national culture. Coproductions in Europe started in the late 1950s, first with the ‘big’ film industries like those of France and Italy (Siefert 2012). The first bilateral agreements were signed between Italy and France (1946). The war had left its traces on the film industry in both countries. The use of realistic outdoor settings, amateur actors and post-­war cities as film locations gave rise to Italian neorealism after the collapse of the big studios that had supported the pre-­war Fascist propaganda (see Shiel 2006). In France, Sadoul (1950: 235) explains, production resumed after 1945 only because of the heavy subsidies for domestic production (31 per cent) and de Gaulle’s insistence on including film as part of national culture. As Anne Jäckel (2019: 87) noted regarding the early post-­war coproductions in Europe, especially between Italy and France, ‘the system worked well because coproducers came from countries with cultural affinities, a similar industrial and institutional framework, [and] comparable schemes of incentives and markets. Coproductions reached their peak in the 1960s, a time of economic boom, but their artistic quality was challenged. In order to attract European audiences, American studios used international stars like Sophia Loren and filmed at well-­known (but also lesser-­known) locations in Italy, Spain and Yugoslavia in the 1960s and early 1970s. In the 1970s, many coproductions were spy thrillers, horror films or sex comedies (Rivi 2007). According to Betz (2001) in his study of the European coproductions, most

36 • Coproducing Europe

film theorists and critics raised concerns about coproductions and how they affected the quality of national productions. In his autobiography, Ingmar Bergman (2010) referred to an offer made to him by Italian producers (De Laurentis Productions). They visited him with a proposal for a film based on the life of Christ. He was interested and developed a first draft of the script. He never received a reply from the Italian producers. Later, when he watched the film, Jesus of Nazareth (1977), directed by Franco Zeffirelli, he realized that he could never have convinced the Italian producers of his vision. The story revealed two things. First, cultural affinity is important for the circulation of coproduced films, as according to Bergman’s interpretation there were aesthetic barriers and traditions that impeded coproductions. Bergman believed that his Protestant religious cosmos could never fit the Italian tradition of more theatrical representation of the Bible. Secondly, this story indicated that coproductions were an established practice in the cinema of auteurs, something that I will refer to in the next chapter. According to Betz (2001: 9), art films were ‘free to carry on as signifiers of stable national cinemas and identities. The idea of high art cinema thus stood above national borders, having a supranational human quality, as it could communicate the best values of all nations beyond cultural boundaries. Art cinema addressed the international needs of a privileged and cosmopolitan class in terms of cultural capital (the highly educated middle and upper classes). Mainstream coproductions, as Croft (1998) claimed, instead imagined an international audience without distinct characteristics. Conversely, an art film ‘is intended for an international audience with shared class and cultural backgrounds or pretensions’ (ibid.: 288–392). In the 1980s, coproductions were further supported in the framework of the EU. The example of Greece is indicative. According to the Greek Cinematheque, in 1956 Crisaudo Franco and Aris Marnezis codirected the romantic drama Return My Love (Ksanagyrise Agapi mou, Knossos Films). In the same year, there was a Greek–Yugoslav coproduction, For Two Grapes (Gia dyo roges stafylia in Greek, Dva zrna grozdja in Serbian) by the Yugoslav director Djorgjevic Mladomir Purisa, a romantic drama in Western style that resonated with many classes. The 1960s were the peak of Greek commercial film production, with Finos Film a leading production company. Greece became the location for the making of some highly popular films: Boy on a Dolphin (1957, dir. Jean Negulesco), The Guns of Navarone (1961, dir. J.  Lee Thompson) and Zorba the Greek (1964, dir. Michael Cacoyannis). Jules Dassin was one of the first directors to put Greece on the map of international productions. Exiled from the US due to Hollywood’s blacklisting of allegedly communist creators, he sought and found investors for his productions elsewhere (for example, Never on Sunday, 1960, Greece–USA;

Coproduction History in Post-War Prehistory  •  37

Phaedra, 1962, Greece, USA and France). Dassin’s connections with the US and France made this possible. In 1969, the Greek director Kostas Gavras, a political exile due to the military junta, made the film Z as a coproduction between France and Algeria. In 1968, Epiheirisis Apollon (Apollo Goes on Holiday, dir. Giorgos Skalenakis) was a coproduction with Sweden (Damaskinos-­Michaelidis and Inge Invarsson Productions, ABTVS). In the 1970s, Cacoyannis released Euripides’ tragedy The Trojan Women (1971) as an international coproduction with a mixed cast, starring Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Irene Papas and Genevieve Bujold.4 It seems that capital investment, like all infrastructure in the film industry in Greece (for instance, the development of studios) was privately funded, and also connected to ideology. For example, attempts at cross-­border collaboration with neighbours such as the former Yugoslavia, which could be cost-­ effective, were impeded due to Cold War politics. Coproduction in Greece in the post-­war period turned to individual undertakings connected to the symbolic capital of the creator. Only in the 1980s, when Greece joined the EU, was coproduction funding made available to Greek creators, in the tradition of auteurs, as I will discuss in the next chapters. As Michael Herzfeld (1987: 78) noted in his analysis of the European diversity project, ‘[a]t the level of state and above, cultural differences were “European” therefore good’. From the 1980s, the shaping of the ‘European’ gradually embraced these national film cultures, and further fixed them as distinctive, under the branding of ‘European quality films’. The European film industry invested in ‘European art-­house’ as another brand for its films to circulate in global cinema markets. In summary, the political, ideological and economic framework that encouraged coproductions included fierce competition between national cinemas and Hollywood, and the shrinking of the cinema market and audiences in comparison to the pre-­war years. At the same time, this framework fostered cultural affinities that could produce a common ground for artists to work with beyond national borders, and for audiences to receive the film, as I will discuss in the next chapter.

Coproduction on the Other Side of the Wall It should be stressed that Cold War history involved not only a competition between the two superpowers but also their relationships with other countries in the East and the West. Cultural and geographic affiliations were also developed among countries beyond the USA and the USSR. For example, examining Greece (in the Western Bloc) and its shared borders and relationships with the socialist countries of the Balkans could shed a different light on the black and white ideological division of the Cold War. Nor should

38 • Coproducing Europe

these divisions make us forget the influence of the East on European arts, for example, that of the Russian avant-­garde (cinema included). Innovative editing, narration and mise en scène became parts of world cinema history. Auteurs like Tarkovsky, Mikhalkov and Iosseliani formed part of the (Western) artistic canon. The Second World War forged memories of resistance on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and this memory became pivotal for post-­war Europe, although history started to be represented through specific ideologies on both sides. State protectionist policies for national cinema were applied on both sides of the Iron Gate. From the 1920s,5 the USSR produced a system that centralized the distribution, imports and exports of films, and it made production state-­funded. The Bolsheviks6 were among the first to understand and apply the power of propaganda and ideological indoctrination. They were largely concerned with the production and spreading of newsreels. In 1918, the regime formed the All-­Russian Film Commission under the Department of the Commissariat of Education (Narkompros) and monopolized foreign trade, but not film studios, although it put them under workers’ control. Under Bolshevik control and in extreme difficulty, 150 films were produced (not all of them revolutionary). The freedom of this studio was gradually restricted, and studios and creative personnel moved to Odessa, the Crimea, and the Caucasus, where Bolshevik rule was weak until the early 1920s. Many people decided to follow the White Army (the supporters of the old regime) into exile. The film industry was resumed after the Civil War. Revolutionary films, Bolshevik propaganda films, but also some popular foreign films such as Zorro and Robin Hood were great hits in the 1920s in the USSR (Kenez 2001: 26–30).7 The major ­ studios – K ­ hanzhonkov, Kharitonov and ­ Ermolev – ­ left Moscow for the south. Actors, directors and technical personnel first moved to the Crimea, Odessa and the Caucasus,8 and lived for a while under White rule. Perhaps more significantly, the Bolsheviks lost not only talented and experienced people, but also irreplaceable raw material. The Bolsheviks needed to develop film centres from scratch, and they did so in all national capitals as a symbol of the line drawn between the colonial Tsarist past and the new beginning that stressed respect for all national cultures. The Georgians were one of the first national groups to establish a film industry (Kenez 2001: 43–67). This rooting of national cultures (korenizatsia) continued in the post-­war years. The Great Patriotic War became a source of inspiration for shaping a common memory and ideology. It also generated a better knowledge of the people of the Soviet Union through typification and circulation of stereotypes. Eric Scott (2016) argued that the circulation of films from the different republics allowed for a ‘domestic internationalism’, in which films dubbed in

Coproduction History in Post-War Prehistory  •  39

Russian moved freely, as long as they respected the premises of socialism. Typification and stereotypes, often of racial inspiration, were formed and circulated with the films. For example, the Georgians were more ‘black’, and were heavy drinkers, good singers and so on. A national renaissance occurred in the decades after Stalin. As Radunović (2014) argued, Georgian intellectuals paved the way for this renaissance in the 1960s by ‘providing a case for those nationalists seeking to stress the superiority and antiquity of Georgian culture’ (Andria Apakidze cited in ibid.: 66). Every year, a plan was submitted to the State Committee for Cinematography. Each creator’s proposal was examined by local organizations and if it was selected, the creator, usually the director, was paid according to the film’s genre and classification. For example, war films had bigger budgets than social dramas. GOSKINO (USSR State Committee for Cinematography) was responsible for the exporting and importing of films. Similarly, other sections of cinema were institutionalized, such as festivals and cinema journals. Only 20 per cent of imported films each year were from the West (four to five from Western Europe and five to six from the US). The Soviet studio system was monopolized by socialist realist productions during Stalinism (Siefert 2012b: 82–95).9 Coproductions were not unknown in the USSR, but their objectives were connected to the leadership of the Eastern Bloc and the gradual expansion of socialist ideas. As Siefert (2016: 74) argued, The idea of film coproduction recapitulates other types of treaty negotiations and co-­operation in Cold War diplomacy between the Soviet Union and other nations. The equality of each partner was crucial to Soviet aims, as exemplified by several collaborative projects in science, including the famous joint space flight in 1975.

In this way, coproduction in the USSR seems to have become a space where Soviet ideology and leadership could be applied. In that sense, ‘the Soviet Ministry of the Film Industry’s initial intentions for coproductions were expansive, rather than protective’ (Skopal 2015b: 90). There was nothing significant in terms of coproductions in the period after the war, as the country was devastated. In 1945, the Council of People’s Commissars let the Soviet Ministry of the Film Industry send cameramen to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Austria and Germany. Assessing this initiative in 1947, the Minister of the Film Industry, Ivan G. Bolshakov, confirmed that the undertaking had been successful, supporting the expansion of Soviet propaganda and its global representation through networks and newsreels. In 1948 Mikhail Kalatozov, the Deputy Minister of the Film Industry, argued that coproduction could be a ‘tool for ideological expansion and improvement

40 • Coproducing Europe

of film industry productivity’ (Skopal 2015: 90). The first coproductions were modest, as they included shooting in film studios of recognized quality such as those in Prague and Vienna. Later, they also shot in Budapest and Berlin. An opportunity then arose to open a special department working on foreign productions. The Soviet Ministry of the Film Industry would accept a 55 per cent share and the ‘right to control the ideological-­political orientation of the movies’ (ibid.: 91).10 This proposal was rejected by the Council of Ministers in June 1948, however, on the grounds that it privileged quantity over quality. In 1955, Heroes of Shipka (dir. Sergei Vasilyev) related a Second World War story through the cooperation of Leninfilm and Bulga Film (Bulgaria), and this initiated a period of coproductions that lasted until the late 1980s. Many of these coproductions belonged to the genre of war films inspired by the Second World War, as had happened in former Yugoslavia. Examining the Soviet filmography reveals coproductions including Soviet (Mosfilm)– East German (IDFA) films such as Five Days, Five Nights (a war film, 1960, dir. Lev Armshtatam, Heiz Thiel and Anatoly Golovanov); The Lanfier Colony (1969, dir. Jan Schmidt), a romantic drama and a Czech–Soviet coproduction; Dreams of Love – Liszt (1970, dir. Márton Keleti), a Soviet–Hungarian coproduction; and The Battle of Moscow (1985, dir. Yuri Ozerov), a Soviet– East German–Czechoslovak–Vietnamese coproduction. In the same period (specifically in 1957), a partnership began with another national cinema, which did not belong to the COMECON:11 India: The Journey Beyond the Three Seas, directed by Kwaja Ahmad-­Abbas and Vassili Pronin, was inspired by the diary of fifteenth-­ century Russian traveller Afanassy Nikitin. India was trying to maintain a neutral position between the two superpowers in the 1950s. The film was nominated for a Cannes Palme d’Or award in 1958 and remains one of the most positively reviewed films of this period (Salazkina 2010: 72). According to Salazkina (ibid:. 49), ‘filmmakers and officials, including director Vsevolod Pudovkin and actor Nikolai Cherkasov, were sent on an official cultural visit. The trip resulted in the first Indian-­Soviet exchange of films.’ These cinematic ventures continued throughout the Soviet period, and they were strengthened after the death of Stalin with the organization of Indian film festivals in the USSR, and the more pro-­Soviet stance of Nehru in the 1960s. In the period from 1954 to 1964, thirty-­seven mostly Hindi-­language films were produced (Rajagopalan 2006). This cinematic cooperation between the Soviet Union and India also involved Georgia. In 1954, the National Georgian Reels (KinoZournali no. 33, 1954, in Bollywood Art Georgia n.d.), showed the reception of the legendary Bollywood couple Nargis and Raj Kapoor and the director Dev Avand in Tbilisi. The three artists were received with honours and were taken on a visit to the Georgian studios, national theatres and opera.12 This

Coproduction History in Post-War Prehistory  •  41

production involved the participation of ethnic Georgian artists in Soviet– Indian coproductions. For example, Sofiko Chiaureli, the muse of Georgian auteur Tengiz Abuladze and Sergei Paradzanov, played a leading role in the famous film Alibaba (1980, dir. Latif Faiziyev and Umesh Mehra). The film was also located in Uzbekistan (Bukhara) and the Soviet production team involved Uzbefilm. As Rossen Djagalov’s (2020: 3–32) work on the connections between the USSR and the so-­called Third Word showed, both Central Asia and the Caucasus were used as contact zones that showcased the racial diversity of the USSR and politics of inclusion applied by the socialist agenda. This was important political capital in the context of the Cold War competition between the two superpowers to expand their influence, especially over the emerging postcolonial nations. The strengthening of the culture of coproduction was further supported through a meeting point for creators from the socialist bloc in a conference organized every two years (it took place in Prague in 1957, in Sinaia, Romania in 1958, and in Sofia in 1960). The conferences attempted to establish an institutionalized network for the dissemination of cultural values, ideological rules and aesthetic practices among the film industries in the socialist world. The conferences were also a tool for constructing a stage upon which rebellious satellite countries could be condemned by the other members of the socialist bloc (Siefert 2016). For example, this was what h ­ appened in the case of ‘rebellious’ Yugoslavia at the first conference in Prague. Beyond ideological orthodoxy, the conference discussed ­thematic plans of production, the publication of a multilingual film journal, exchanges of personnel and experience among the national associations of film clubs and cinema workers, and the cultivation of the practice of coproductions. The Soviet film industry was shaping a space of Soviet influence and aspired to leadership of the Eastern Bloc. Gradually, this influence was expanded to India, Cuba and other countries emerging from colonial regimes. Some examples of early coproductions,13 apart from those titles mentioned above, included: A Lesson in History, USSR–Bulgaria (1957, dir. Arnshtam and Riskov), Journey Beyond the Three Seas, USSR–India (1957, dir. Abbas and Pronin), Sampo, USSR–Finland (1959, dir. Tushko and Orko), Five Days and Five Nights, USSR–GDR (1960, dir. Arnshtam and Herz) and Attack-Retreat, USSR–Italy (1964, dir. Santi and Vasilyev). In this first period (1950–60), there seemed to be an emphasis on collaboration among members of the Eastern Bloc, with scripts drawn from experiences of the Second World War, but also from legends and historical events, like in the coproductions with India and Finland. New coproducers appeared in the next decade. The first coproduction with Italy led to two more coproductions in the 1970s (Sunflower, 1970,

42 • Coproducing Europe

dir. De Sica; Waterloo, 1970, dir. Bondarchuk) and with Japan14 (Moscow My Love, 1974, dir. Mitt and Yoshida; Dersu Usala, 1975, dir. Kurosawa). The first attempt at a USSR–USA coproduction was in 1975. The film was based on the work of the poet Maurice Maeterlinck. The chosen director was George Cukor and big Hollywood stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda were involved. There were also more coproductions with India (Adventures of Ali Baba, 1979). Just before the break-­up of the Soviet Union, coproductions were opened to other Western countries such as Sweden and Norway (Faraway, 1991) and the UK (The Assassination of the Tsar, 1991). As I stressed, however, the socialist experience should not be approached in a homogenizing way. For example, the comparison with the Yugoslav experience could offer interesting context for a comparison of socialist policies.15 Goulding (2002: xi), in his periodization of the history of the Yugoslav cinema, argued that the period between 1945 and 1950 was oriented towards the creation and organization of a film industry under the control of the state. In 1944, the Party founded a film section within the Department of Propaganda. In 1945 the section became the Film Enterprise of the People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. The department had the task of controlling the production, imports and exports, and distribution of films across the federation. It also had the duty of nationalizing all the existing cinema infrastructure. In 1946 the General Committee launched a five-­year plan to organize the production, distribution and exhibition of films (ibid.: 1–31). The authorities formed regional committees for cinematography and founded the following studios: Avala (Belgrade), Jadran (Zagreb), Triglav (Ljubljana), Vardar (Skopje), and Lovcen in Budva (Montenegro). At a federal level, they founded Zvezda Film (Belgrade), which specialized in reels, and Zora Films (Zagreb), which specialized in educational films. Imports and exports were entrusted to Yugoslavia Film (which already existed as a small imports company) (Bumbak 2014: 24). Collaboration with the Soviet Union in the field of cinema emerged in several coproductions between the two countries. One was V Goraki Yugosalvii, or Mountains of Yugoslavia (1946) by Abran Room, a war film that showed the Yugoslav partisan resistance as guided by the Soviet leadership. The film, apart from its political propaganda, was a space for exchanging knowledge and know-­how. Many Yugoslav film workers took part in the production of the film. As Michael Stoil (Sudar 2013: 19) argued, the film had ‘extensive assistance’. For example, Vladimir Afric, who directed one of the first big successes of Yugoslav cinema, Slavica (1947), took part as assistant director in this Soviet–Yugoslav coproduction. The situation changed after the breach in the relationship between Yugoslavia and the USSR and the two leaders of the federal states, Marshal Tito and Stalin, in 1948. This political divorce had significant economic, political

Coproduction History in Post-War Prehistory  •  43

and cultural effects. It instigated a period of decentralization that supported the model of self-­management.16 It forced the reshaping of Yugoslav politics in the international arena, as the influence, but also the economic support, from the ‘Big Brother’ diminished. Tito and his Yugoslavia envisioned a third way that could bridge socialism and capitalism; a state economy with consumer capitalism. In terms of culture and cinema, Yugoslavia was opened to international collaborations, unlike the other socialist countries, as well as to Western film trends. Cinema infrastructure (studios) was built in all the Yugoslav republics. For example, Bosna Film was founded in 1949. Distribution mechanisms were improved, as was the professionalization of cinema workers and artists. The number of film critics and magazines increased. These changes, as Goulding (2002: 35–36) argued, took place in three different ways. Enterprises that owned the facilities of production and postproduction could lease or rent these facilities. Studios became owners of the finished films and were allowed to contract the necessary artistic and technical staff to make them. Finally, unions were organized in each republic for all kinds of film workers (technical and artistic staff), and they all belonged to the centralized umbrella union of the federation. The artistic workers could freely negotiate their contracts in almost the same way as freelancers in the West did. ‘Professional migrations’ were always the case in Yugoslav cinema (Jovanović 2012). According to Skrabalo (quoted in ibid.), creators from other republics were ‘immigrants’ to Bosnia, a label that reflected more the feeling of post-­independence than the spirit of the time in which these mobilities took place, in the 1950s and 1960s. Creators as freelancers went where the best contract was offered. As my visit to the Cinematheque in Sarajevo taught me, crossing borders in the former Yugoslavia must have felt different to crossing independent nation state borders today, or even the borders of the Schengen Zone, as the feeling of belonging to a common country gradually became rooted (see Kukic 2019). In the following years until the breakup of Yugoslavia, Yugoslav cinema had to face the gradual expansion of television’s influence and a decrease in the number of viewers, as was happening all over Europe, as well as the emerging economic depression in the 1990s (Goulding 2002: 65). These shifts affected film production, limiting its numbers and budgets; however, during these three post-­war decades (1960–90), the Yugoslav cinema opened up to new cinematic styles and techniques in an aesthetic dialogue with the wider European cinema movements (cinema d’auteur and the nouvelle vague). Coproductions were not unknown in the cinematic landscape of the former Yugoslavia, but we should problematize what we consider a coproduction in the Yugoslav context, according to Nebojša Jovanović (2014: 34). For example, Triglav, the Ljubljana-­based national studio, had made

44 • Coproducing Europe

coproductions with the German-­speaking world (Germany and Austria) since the early 1950s (Irene v Zagredi/Irene in Noten, dir. Emerich Walter Emo, Helios Studio (Dunai)–Triglav Film, 1953) (Sirca 2014: 98–101). The collaboration was not temporary, but continued and produced almost ten films by 1960. Jovanović (2014: 24) described a similar case in Croatia with Dubrava, the technical section of Jadran Film, which collaborated in terms of technical provisions on almost thirty-­seven international films. Many of these films were Italian and were made in the 1960s, the period when coproductions were at their peak in Europe and the US. Jovanović stated that many of these films were not recognized as official coproductions, as the Yugoslav studios provided the locations and technical support, but no funding. At the same time, we can find internationally acclaimed films set in Yugoslavia, such as The Battle of Austerlitz (1960, dir. Abel Gance) and The Trial (1963, dir. Orson Welles), as well as other Yugoslav films that had a guest director from a Western or Eastern country (ibid.: 24). The coproductions in the period between 1960 and 1970 accomplished many goals for the Yugoslav state: they provided the Yugoslav economy with hard currency; the professional mingling of staff became an informal exchange of know-­how; and in some cases, like those of Battle of Neretva (1969, dir. Veljko Bulajić) and Battle of Sutjeska (1973, dir. Stipe Delic), both very expensive productions with the participation of big Hollywood stars, films became a showcase for the accomplishments of the Yugoslav regime and its leader.17 Smaller production companies were able to open during the same period. These companies contributed to the productions of a new generation of creators. In the 1980s, Emir Kusturica, born and raised in the city of Sarajevo, became the most celebrated film export of the former Yugoslavia. The above brief account of Soviet and Yugoslav coproductions is not exhaustive, but is intended to challenge the contrast between Western and socialist coproductions in scholarly discussion, which over-­stresses the ideological motivation for socialist coproductions. Cinema is a complex art, and the Soviet bureaucrats were not indifferent to industrial and economic aspects. Similarly, in the West, films were not immune to ideological propaganda. In other words, Cold War divisions were not completely sharp and rigid. The examination of Yugoslav cinema, which started as part of the socialist bloc and is often still considered in film histories (see Jovanović 2014), highlights the different trajectories and traditions that existed. In the next section, I will examine the state of coproduction today.

Coproduction History in Post-War Prehistory  •  45

Coproduction Cultures Today The day was hot, and we were at the end of our semester, just before exams. The topic of the day was the meaning of the categories European and global cinema. To provide an example, I referred to the Georgian film Corn Island (Simindis Kundzuli, 2014, dir. George Ovashvili). Ovashvili’s previous success with the film The Other Side (Gagma Napiri, 2008), which was nominated for an Oscar, gave him access to European funding. The almost EUR 1,500,000 that the film cost were funded from different production companies:1. Private production companies from Georgia, Germany, France, Kazakhstan, the Czech Republic, 2. National funding from the Georgian National Film Centre, the Institut Francais, Fond Sud Cinema Union Suede and Swiss Agencies of Development Cooperation, 3. Regional funding from Stadt Weke Halle Mittdeutsche MEDIAn Forderug, the Ministry of Education and Sports of the Autonomous Government of Adjara, and finally, 4. European funding from Eurimages   One of my students asked in genuine surprise, ‘is this considered a Georgian film?’ The class began to debate the identity of the film, referring to the criteria and the point system introduced by the EU’s MEDIA programmes, as well as to national film policies. The languages used, the nationality of the director and actors, and the film’s setting and locations played a significant role in the identification of the film, reminding us of the strong national traditions in Europe and how they are understood. Finally, I discussed with the class what was considered the success of the film in the press. Many reports underlined that Ovashvili’s film postulated the richness and cultural diversity of European cinema, and they praised the good choice by Eurimages to support the film. My student intervened again and concluded, ‘So, the film is European because it is “multi-­culti” [sic]’.

As Christian Fuchs (2007) noted, the post-­Fordist economy is based on strategies of capital accumulation encouraged by decentred and expanded networks, and a transnational way of thinking and acting. This capital accumulation is often connected to capital dispossession. The gradual dispossession of cultural institutions and activities from centralized authorities has been part of the state’s economic misappropriation since the 1970s. At the same time, the gradual transnationalization of borders through deterritorialization and the weakening of ties between culture and place have been central to the proliferation of investment in film and culture from non-­governmental agents. Lorenzen’s (2007) study of the economic conditions that support coproductions pinpointed that market size and the possibility of increased profit can compensate for the cost of film production. The formation of a European market helped create new sources of investment in European films. Lorenzen’s study stressed that the volatility of film investment requires producers to

46 • Coproducing Europe

increase film value (using big stars, impressive locations, and expensive and innovative visual effects) in order to address and attract larger audiences (economies of scale).18 Audiences have multiplied due to the increased internationalization of global production (more multilingual films, new screening habits such as videos on demand, web channels and platforms, the development of niche markets, regional clusters like HBO Europe, etc.), but consumption has also been globalized due to increased mobilities, diasporas and transnational communities. As a result, according to Norbert Morawetz et al. (2007: 435), coproductions have stopped being a big part of the film market, especially in Europe (more than 30 per cent of the films produced as coproductions). He introduced a typology of coproductions: coproductions driven by creative reasons, coproductions driven by the search for finance (industry-­driven) and coproductions driven by international capital (capital market-­driven). The first kind of coproduction is motivated by the narrative and the script itself. The second stems from the need for investment. The third is generated by the investors’ needs, for example for tax credit relaxation or for private equity (slate funding19 stems from the third category). Morawetz (2008: 186) argued that most coproductions belong to the latter two categories (industry-­ driven and capital market-­driven). In this approach, however, the economic aspects of coproduction overshadow all other agencies involved, such as institutions, policymaking, emotions and historical legacies, which are essential as capital-­generators. But how did coproductions become important in the European film landscape from the 1980s onwards? There is an interesting story behind the inception of European cultural politics, concerning one of the founding fathers of the EU, Jean Monnet. Allegedly, he admitted that ‘if I were to begin [to build the EU] again, I would start with culture’. As Marianna Liz argued (2009), however, it was Hélène Ahrweiler, the principal of the Paris Academy, who made the above statement and paraphrased Jean Monnet’s spirit in order to stress the importance of culture. In that version of the story, if the EU’s ideas had founding fathers, its cultural politics were sealed by a woman. There was no reference in the founding Treaty of Rome (1957) to culture as a specific sector of EU policy. Despite the slow advent of the cultural turn, the EU developed an early interest in cinema. There have been four directives since the 1960s (in 1963, 1964, 1968 and 1970). Their main interest was the freedom to establish procedures and arrange screen quotas for domestic films, something that became canon in the EU. In the 1970s, the EU’s cultural issues, according to De Vinck (2011: 205–6), were handled through the formation of two committees, the Commission Communication Memorandum on Culture (1972) and the Communication on Community Action in the Cultural Sector (1977). All these steps highlighted two things: first, the EU

Coproduction History in Post-War Prehistory  •  47

intended to develop an economic approach to cinema, and second, it tried to respect national sensitivities that considered cultural policies part of their core national policies. In the Single European Act (1987), however, there was a minor modification. The Act mentioned heritage in a dual sense. First, in the preamble there was an acceptance that respect for human dignity and the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination were part of the common cultural and legal heritage of all member states. In Chapter 1, discussing free movement, Article 36 noted that free movement should not undermine and put in danger national treasures of historic or archaeological value, provided that this protection does not prevent free circulation and trade. In the 1980s, there was an understanding in EU circles that the development of a European audiovisual policy could distribute and boost European identity. Such an identity would be strong support for integration. Global economic and technological innovations did not leave the EU indifferent, however. Jacques Delors commented in his first speech as Commission President to the European Parliament in 1985 that: Under the terms of the Treaty we do not have the resources to implement a cultural policy; but we are going to try to tackle it along economic lines. It is not simply a question of television programmes. We must build a powerful European culture industry that will enable us to be in control of both the medium and its content, maintaining our standards of civilisation, and encouraging the creative people amongst us. (Quoted in Collins 1996: 90)

The first Audiovisual Conference was held in Paris on 27  April 1989.20 The outcome was that on 8–9  December 1989, the European Council in Strasbourg launched the MEDIA programme (Measures to Encourage the Development of the Audiovisual Industries) (De Vinck 2011: 289–93). As Cris Shore (2006) argued, this shift to cultural policies should be examined through the lens of the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, wherein power relations are channelled into different mechanisms, discourses and practices that regulate the field of everyday life. Moreover, this everyday was on the verge of transcending national borders to become transnational and European. In this context, according to Shore (ibid.: 9), terms like ‘Europe’s heritage’, ‘European identity’ and ‘European civilization’ soon turned into ‘a new European jargon which aimed to produce the discourse on European construction’. ‘European engineering’ had been designed by the EU bureaucracy since the 1980s, and was applied to the social and cultural lives of European societies: this included plans for multilingual European television, the Euro-­lottery and the European Academy of Sciences, education exchange programmes, new school textbooks, the European week, European months, a series of European years, European cinema week, the European City of

48 • Coproducing Europe

Culture, a European anthem, the European literature prize, the European Youth Orchestra and the Jean Monnet Awards. This undertaking stemmed from different EU institutions, such as the European Parliament Resolutions and the agreements of Ministers of Culture, as well as the Committee on Youth, Culture, Education, Media, and Sport (ibid.). The EU ultimately started building audiovisual institutions such as the European Audiovisual Observatory (1992), which targeted the research, documentation and statistical analysis of the European audiovisual landscape. The fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1990s created further challenges for the EU. The new independent states of Eastern and south-­eastern Europe reclaimed their position in European history, politics and culture, stretching Europe’s spatial and cultural borders. In this framework, coproductions emerged as significant, but their long history as a part of cultural diplomacy was overlooked. Their transnational character, through cooperation beyond national borders and their entrepreneurial initiative, symbolized, according to Rivi (2007: 3), the struggle against ‘the opposing phenomena of localism, micro- and macro-­regionalism, and the new nation-­states that are puncturing the revised post-­1989 map of Europe’. So-­called European Added Value, which will be discussed in the next chapter, and the main criterion for the eligibility for funding of films tried to address the fact that films had to reach and diverse audiences through distribution and circulation in the cinemas. In this way, a European audience21 could finally emerge, producing an imagined European community. As Temenuga Trifonova (2007: 2) argued, stories of discontent, quests for identity and transformation, which explored the process of European identity-­building as an open-­ended project, emerged as a ‘pan European’ concern’. In a critical assessment of cultural policies in the EU, Eleftheriotis (2001: 7) noted that ‘European unity in the sphere of culture, then, becomes an objective rather than a given, and it is to be achieved through [the] measures and policies introduced’. As Deltsou (2014: 299), commenting on Shore’s work, stated, the EU programmes aspiring to the formation of unity engage social agents who do not have any institutional or professional relation to the EU, despite the fact that they are EU citizens. Often, this engagement is translated into a visible proof of these agents’ adherence to the EU vision, something that alludes to the Foucauldian technologies of the self (ibid.: 300). But, ethnographic research, as the following chapters will show, has postulated that this engagement is often much more complex; it includes multilayered and ambiguous interpretations of the EU agenda. In other words, EU policies may act as incentives for those applying to or participating in the projects, but how these frameworks take shape should be further explored. The multiscale space (European, regional, national, local) of the conception and application of

Coproduction History in Post-War Prehistory  •  49

EU policies is where EU coproductions take place today. The bureaucratic maze, the diversity of regional markets and the agents involved can ignite different emotions that critically reflect on European governmentality and often produce the embodied discontent alluded to in Kolozova’s remark about a ‘slap in the face’ regarding the rejection of North Macedonia’s EU membership. Approaching coproductions though the notion of prehistory helped me challenge any embedded ideas of ‘newness’. Exploring the history of film coproduction since the Cold War period in Europe postulated the politics of imagination that gave birth to Project Europe and the significance it assumed during the formation of the EU as a space beyond economic agendas. Coproductions were not a new practice introduced by EU film policies. They were a practice well known in film industries in Europe (and beyond) since the Cold War, and they were always involved with political agendas and left a mark on the cultural memory of these industries. Nevertheless, their inclusion in EU cultural policies from the 1990s onwards systematized their political instrumentalization and placed them in the midst of the reinvention of European cultural histories, at the point when the process of Europeanization was about to become interwoven with the biopolitics of enlargement. As the first MEDIA report in 1990 noted, ‘the significance of the audiovisual sector is “its socio-­cultural dimension” which acts as a vehicle for the wealth and diversity of European c­ultures . . . ­its development gives expression to the very essence of the Community’ (Council Decision of 21 December 1990: 1). The next chapter will explore the emergence of the two main film support mechanisms in Europe: Eurimages and MEDIA.

Notes   1. Coproductions now account for a significant proportion of film activity, especially in Europe, where they represent more than 30 per cent of film production (see Medici 2015).   2. Joseph Nye introduced the distinction between hard power (military and economic coercion) and soft power in the 1990s. The terms suggest a distinction that follows the old Marxist perception that culture is always an epiphenomenon to economy.   3. Before the coming of sound films in the late 1920s, film was exported by adding subtitles in the language of the receiving country. Sound films brought about a new reality. Often, films were shot twice in the same studio, but in different languages, with different stars and dialogue and plot adapted for the target audiences (Scott-­Smith and Segal 2013: 75).   4. The relationships between Greek creators and cinema in neighbouring countries were framed within official anti-­ communist propaganda and censorship. However, new research (see Chalkou 2021) postulates first that there was a public receptive to films from the former socialist countries and the Soviet Union; second, that Greek creators

50 • Coproducing Europe

  5.

  6.

  7.   8.   9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

participated in festivals in the neighbouring Balkans, for example in Sofia; and finally, that the Greek Civil War and political exile generated opportunities in various socialist countries and the Soviet Union for creators of ethnic Greek origin to work in the film industry in these countries. One of the best-­known examples is Manos Zacharias, who studied and worked in the former USSR, and another is Giorgos Sevastikoglou, who worked in theatre. Cinema in Georgia started much earlier than the Sovietization of the country. The first screening of the Lumières’ films in Georgia took place in 1896. Akaki’s Travel in Racha and Lechumi (dir. Vail Amshukeli, 1912), which followed Akaki Tsereteli, a Georgian literary figure, in his travels in advanced age to the mountainous regions in Racha and Lechumi was the first film saved in the archives. Cinema was important for the new Soviet regime. Anatoly Lunacharsky claimed that Lenin once told him, ‘in our country you have the reputation of being a protector of the arts. So, you must firmly remember that for us the most important of all arts is the cinema’ (Kenez 2001: 27). In April 1918, the government introduced a monopoly on foreign trade, which, of course, greatly affected the film industry, because the government did not easily give permission to buy the necessary material and equipment abroad. The foreign trade monopoly also affected the distribution of foreign films in Soviet Russia. Gradually, the importing of films stopped during the Civil War, as did private film production. The shortage of all necessary materials for film-­making, the closing of theatres due to the lack of fuel and electricity, and the general uncertainty that prevailed finally made film-­making impossible (ibid.: 26–40). In 1921, the Soviet authorities in Georgia organized the cinema section at the People’s Commissariat of Transportation Cargo, and in 1923 they founded the Goskinprom of Georgia. Kino Studia (since 1953, Kartuli Pilmi) was inaugurated in 1921. The Georgian film industry was one of the few national cinemas from the former Soviet Union, known abroad for artists such as Paradzanov, Iosseliani, and Abuladze. According to the First All-­Union Writer’s Congress in 1934. Socialist realism was an artistic language that demanded the truthful, historically realistic representation of the world in relation to its ideological transformation (Kenez 2001: 144). Socialist realism soon became synonymous with a formulaic representation of the world full of ideological ascriptions. It became a social norm for all cinema production from the ‘totalitarian’ regimes, another label that subsumed different cinema traditions. The father of the plans was Bolshakov, whose ultimate goal was to produce eighty to one hundred films per year and make Mosfilm one of the biggest film studios in Europe (Skopal 2015b: 89–107). This organization was founded in 1949 to support transnational economic cooperation in Eastern Europe. See Bollywood Art Georgia (n.d.). Bulgaria had studios that helped in the formation of coproductions. Indian–Russian coproduction started after the independence of India from the British Empire. The struggle for independence from the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century ran in parallel with the birth of Finnish cinema. Films in the Finnish language and with a historical or mythological focus were popular (see Salazkina 2010). Risto Orko, one of the leaders of Suomen Filmi, was a firm Finnish nationalist who made many films that portrayed Russians as villains and Finns as brave heroes (see Wood 2017). According to Irina Melnikova (2002), the coproductions with Japan were motivated by the political relationship between the Japanese socialist party and the USSR, and were encouraged by the rebirth of foreign relations between the two countries.

Coproduction History in Post-War Prehistory  •  51

15. In 1906, the German-­origin British film producer Charles Urban decided to make a series of documentaries about ‘Divlje Europe’ (wild Europe), a term used to describe the Balkans (Kosanović 1981–82: 154). Part of this series was a film dedicated to ‘Herzegovina, Bosna i Dalmacija’ (Herzegovina, Bosnia and Dalmatia). 16. Self-­management, the more decentralized system of Yugoslavia, was considered a ‘third way’, and a more human path to socialism. 17. One of the most important coproductions that Bosna Film participated in was Klisura (1956, dir. Bosko Kosanovic), a love drama with class insinuations. This coproduction was made with Titana Film München and Projekto-­film Wien. Another film was Oluja, a war drama (1958, dir. Alberto Lattuada), a coproduction with Italy (Dino Delaurentis and Gray Films-­Paris). In his interview with the film magazine Sineast (1975), the Italian director underlined the professionalization of the Yugoslav cinema. Another coproduction was Smede Oko-Zlo Oko (Brown Eyes-Evil Eyes, Bosna Films and Kay Lewis, 1967). In 1966, there was a French–Yugoslav coproduction, Les Fruits Amers (Soledad in French). A Second World War drama, Une Flamme sur l’Adriatique (Plamen nad Jadranam), was made in 1969, a coproduction between Studio Sarajevo and Les Films de Boetie, directed by Messa Selimovic and Alexandre Astruc. In the second half of the 1970s the new Law on Self-­Management and the Associated Labour made decision-­ making more difficult in film production. Increased regionalization also strengthened the self-­contained markets of the republics and limited inter-­republic coproduction and distribution (Goulding 2002: 148–49). The 1980s saw the dynamic introduction of television. There were several films coproduced between television stations and film production companies, for example Kuduz, a crime drama (1989, FRZ Bosna, Avala Film, Beograd Televiziya, Sarajevo I Raka Maric a Kenović), Gluvi Narut, a partisan drama (1990, DPForum Sarajevo, Beograd Film, Sutjeska Film Sarajevo, TV Sarajevo, Jadran Film Zagrab, Bahrudin Cengiz) and Ono Malo Duse, a coming of age drama directed by Ademir Kenovic (1990, Centar Film Beograd Televisiya). 18. Economies of scale are a very common phenomenon in risky markets like the film industry, whereby investors try to avoid losing money by increasing the volume of production, and thus the potential to reach more consumers. 19. Slate funding refers to the investment not in a single project but in various projects. 20. The first response to the call for a common European industry was the Television without Frontiers (TwF) directive in 1989. 21. This European audience is often characterized as cosmopolitan, in the sense that it is an audience shaped in the festival circuits, and as a result is considered more receptive to art-­house films. This approach, however, propagates a rather elitist view (not unrelated to the way that European cinema is defined) regarding the identity of festival filmgoers.

Chapter 3

EU Media Policies

h Athens, 11 April 2017 Nea Philothei is in the south-­eastern part of Tourkovounia, within the borders of the municipality of Athens. As I was not very familiar with the less central areas in the Greek capital, I took the tube to the busy station of Panormou and then continued by taxi. Nea Philothei, a residential area, is the new host of the Greek Film Centre (GFC) after its move from the busy and highly ­touristy – ­and expensive to ­rent – A ­ eropagitou Street, close to the Parthenon. As a public state institution, the Centre suffered from the political instability, economic recession and government shifts that took place in the country during the so-­called Greek Crisis. The long-­awaited change in the old legal framework regulating film policy from 1986 was finally voted on in 2010. However, things remained stagnant because the frequent elections, the changes in political personnel at the Ministry of Culture, and the subsequent changes to the council board and the presidency of the Centre itself prevented the stability needed by the film industry.   My meeting was with Mary, the person in charge of the MEDIA programme at the GFC. The first thing I noticed was her voice, which was low-­pitched, smooth but firm. I thought that this must act as a reassuring factor for creators who need a consultation for guidance through the maze of EU bureaucracy. Mary had no problem with me recording the interview, something that was not the case in other interviews. Before we started, she opened the file containing the new MEDIA call of interest. ‘Just in case we need it’, she said. During the interview, she often tried to consult the document to ensure accuracy, as changes were frequent, details mattered and the EU’s technocratic language can be confusing.

EU Media Policies  •  53

In the last chapter, I focused on the history of film coproductions since the Cold War in Europe, arguing that they were not a new practice in the film industries, nor was it the first time that coproductions were politically instrumentalized. But what was new was the scale of the EU governmentality that was reshaping the European. Film policies as part of the EU’s wider cultural policies were part of the new EU biopolitics that was shaping European subjects (Shore 2006). Inclusion in EU film support mechanisms was never just a funding tool, it was a technology of social and political ­refashioning – ­especially for new member states or candidate or aspiring members from south-­eastern ­Europe – ­as well as a sign of allegiance and acceptance of ‘EU power and authority’ (ibid.: 10). Moreover, this shift was not limited to cultural and film policies. Shore and Wright (2015), studying the audit culture in university rankings, argued that the introduction of the management of the (academic) self and life, and the increased expectations of quantified and measurable results that can result in a form of governance from a distance, can be traced in the interconnections between the military, industrial and bureaucratic worlds since the nineteenth century, which in the 1980s became the basis of the new public management (ibid.: 425). Therefore, a wider paradigm shift in terms of culture and knowledge was integrated into the economy, which would gradually become more interconnected and globalized. This chapter will discuss the gradual formation of film policies in Europe (by the EU and the Council of Europe) and their multiple layers: shaping new European subjects, constructing a more coherent European identity through an ‘authorized discourse’1 of experts and transnationalizing the European economy, in particular the creative economy. According to the Treaty on European Union (TEU, or the Maastricht Treaty, 7 February 1992, Article G3),2 the EU set out to make ‘a contribution to education and training of quality and to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States’. This provision added up to the introductory statement that the desire of the EU was to ‘deepen the solidarity between their peoples while respecting their history, their culture and their traditions’. In other words, the treaty tied culture to national diversity. In Chapter V, which discussed the common economic space in terms of taxation (Article 92/3), there was also extra provision for culture and heritage conservation where such aid impeded trading conditions and competition in the Community. Additionally, the TEU, in comparison to former treaties, included a specific section on culture (title XII, Article 128: 121–22). In detail, Article 128 declared: The Community shall contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States, while respecting their national and regional diversity and at the same time bringing the common cultural heritage to the fore. Action by the Community shall be aimed at encouraging cooperation between Member

54 • Coproducing Europe

States and, if necessary, supporting and supplementing their action in the following areas: • improvement of the knowledge and dissemination of the culture and history of the European peoples; •  conservation and safeguarding of cultural heritage of European significance; •  non-­commercial cultural exchanges; •  artistic and literary creation, including in the audiovisual sector.

In the above excerpt, the notion of ‘flowering cultures’ is interesting, as it employs a botanical metaphor (that of roots), which Lisa Malkki (1992) argued was used to naturalize, territorialize and essentialize cultures. Cultures can grow into flowers with the proper attention, but they can also turn into weeds, which should be eradicated. Who decides which culture belongs in the one or the other category? And what is ‘proper’ attention? These questions lead to another point: that of the traditional conceptualization of cultural heritage as an object of attention, reservation and management. More importantly, however, this conceptualization suggests that someone needs to be in the advantageous position of making the above decision. Similarly, regarding tolerance, Ghassan Hage stressed (2019) that diversity presupposes a privileged point of view, a position of power to decide which culture belongs to one category or the other. In Hage’s argument, white national supremacy was perpetuated in the allegedly multicultural context of Australia, a fact that prevented the formation of a space of equal reception of cultures. In the EU cultural context, elitist high culture did the same thing. The question here is what and whose cultural heritage should be treated in this way, and what about other heritages? It is the emphasis on high culture that could transform national differences and divisions into something higher, purer and European. Senka Božić-­Vrbančić (2009), in her examination of the cultural policies of the EU and the desire for an emotional attachment to the idea of Europe, noted that love is a powerful feeling due to its prolonged desire to become complete with the object of love. The promise of completion and fulfilment from this ultimate matching, whenever it may occur, engages emotions and resources. Similarly, EU cultural policies3 engage both imagination and anticipation. Imagination reshapes the past, memories, histories and heritage, in order to produce common (although diverse) roots. Anticipation invests in the future. The assembling and mixing of different things, scales, regions and experiences generates expectations about Project Europe regarding Europe’s borders and cultural identities. This adds up to European Added Value, which I will discuss below, and which seems to have  no  end,  to  be  able to include everything, thus, as Božić-­Vrbančić (2009: 191) argued, ­becoming an empty signifier that ‘can

EU Media Policies  •  55

stand for anything; it is constantly (re)filled by the continuous process of the ­idealization of Europe.’ The film industry was mentioned in Article 107 of the TEU, which declared state aid incompatible with the common market. It provided some exceptions, however, such as the promotion of culture and heritage conservation without affecting competition. From this brief study of the main treaties of the EU, it seems that culture gradually became part of a more EU-­integrationist vision, provided that this integration respected national sensitivities, but the inclusion of culture not only had political motivation but also supported a market-­oriented logic. The balance between the two (state and market) defined EU media politics in the following years. EU film policies postulated the emergence of a new type of economy based on knowledge and creation. Examining the various stages of the MEDIA programme will demonstrate how, instead of gradually putting capital into film production, distribution and exhibition, film policies stressed a need for the systematization of knowledge, or even more so, of know-­how. I consider the latter a more typified and quantified form of knowledge that increases knowledge’s transferability by authorized persons and institutions (experts, film training schools, workshops, etc.). It also puts emphasis on the development of skills for creators. The skills resulting from this transferability of knowledge had more to do with so-­called soft skills – ‘learning how to learn’ – rather than the learning traditions of writing, cinematography, or mise en scène: for instance, how to sell an idea (pitching), how to package promotional script material, how to network in the markets, how to scan the market to find the best coproducers, how to work with multicultural teams and how to inspire as a leader. These soft skills became crucial for post-­Fordism and the logic of late capitalism because they are compatible with flexibility, mobility and the so-­called transformative power of capitalism (Foray 2010: 18). This is because these soft skills can be dubious in relation to what is obtained; they are intangible, hierarchical (in the culture of experts versus trainees), individual-­oriented (customized and not embedded in a community culture) and continually in need of updates. Their goal is more to transform the self into commensurable units, capable of continuous circulation and mobility across various contexts.

MEDIA The first MEDIA (Measures to Encourage the Development of the Audiovisual Industries) programme (Action Programme to Promote the Development of the European Audiovisual Industry (Media) (1991–1995) was launched during the European Council in Strasburg on 8–9  December 1989. The

56 • Coproducing Europe

programme was voted through on 7  May 1990 by the Commission.4 Its target was the formation of an internal market without borders. The general objectives of MEDIA were: to improve the economic and commercial management abilities of the professional film industry, to rise above the fragmented and narrow market, to focus on small and medium-­sized enterprises, to focus on new technological trends (High Definition) and to exchange information and experience among professionals. In more detail, the programme stressed the development of managerial skills (an emphasis on professionalization), networking and the transnationalization of national markets to gradually shape a common European market and the dissemination of the digital revolution. The programme would be complementary to national-­level policies and efforts. Film productions were supported by three forms of funding (Léonet 2014): fiscal incentives (tax shelter, tax credits, rebates, spend-­based financing), industry-­based funding (minimal guarantees or TV presales are possible, but only from big market countries) and selective funding (based on statistics) that tried to form schemes shaped by the dynamics of the EU market and politics, for example alliances through minority coproductions. Instead, in terms of production MEDIA I pushed for: the enhancement of the conditions of film production, support for preproduction (foundation of the European Script Fund and European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs, or EAVE), reorganization of the animated cartoon industry, use of new technologies (digital TV, high-­definition TV, interactive TV) and support of archive material. In terms of distribution, the target was the widest possible circulation of films among European cinemas through the foundation of the European Film Distribution Office, the provision for multilingualism in television programmes through the extension of the Babel5 programme and the development of a common European media market for the dissemination of the work of independent producers. In terms of funding, MEDIA tried to stimulate financial investment through various programmes (Media-­Venture, Euro-­ Media Guarantee, etc.). Finally, and importantly for south-­eastern Europe, it provided for countries with smaller audiovisual production capacities or a limited geographical and linguistic area, such as candidate members or new members after EU enlargement. The original budget of the programme was EUR 200 million. The lion’s share was for distribution (43 per cent according to De Vinck (2011: 32), with 38 per cent for production). The first MEDIA programme demonstrated an important interest in production, mainly through development and training, and in distribution, which made clear the significance of distribution in the formation of a common European market. The support for production through MEDIA, however, was through the creation of skills and know-­how rather than direct funding for films. It was also clear that the programme emphasized the importance of independent

EU Media Policies  •  57

producers and scriptwriters, and also made provisions for weaker cinema industries in Europe. The second MEDIA programme (1996–2000) shifted its attention to ‘business plans’ and ‘slates’, as well as to multiple rather than individual projects (Jäckel 2019: 71). In comparison with the first MEDIA, it made clear the skills to be developed, for example, increasing the skills of producers (via better business plans and funding strategies) and the connection to the market. For example, it considered funding workshops and schools to help producers access the world market, and it supported the development of independent production companies. MEDIA II stressed the potential of coproduction not through direct funding, but through networking and via the development of skills, so that producers and their work could circulate in Europe. MEDIA Plus (2001–6, in force from 20 December 2000) tried to address through European funding two things: the impact of the digital revolution and the connection of the programme with the Framework Programme5 (FP5), stressing start ups and similar initiatives. There was also provision for funding through the i2iAudiovisual I­nitiative – i­n other words, to fund projects though European investment b­ anks – ­but it also stressed the potential of European production in the international market. The programme considered the way that new technologies could help the dissemination of European films. MEDIA Plus also supported EU enlargement towards Central and Eastern Europe. The associated countries of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Cyprus, Malta, Turkey and those of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA),6 which formed part of the EEA Agreement,7 were recognized as potential participants due to their mutual and balanced interests in the EU programmes, based on supplementary appropriations and in accordance with procedures to be agreed with those countries. In other words, MEDIA Plus strengthened the bond between market and creation. The above suggests that MEDIA Plus explored the benefits of the new digital technologies in order to ensure maximum distribution and promotion, as well as the training and networking of professionals. In this MEDIA programme, support for film production became entrepreneurial, as film creators had to seek financial support themselves through SMS funding (Small and Medium Size Enterprises) and i2i Audiovisual Initiative. Only film development and training were supported directly by EU funding as part of training. MEDIA 2007 (2007–13) was intended to ‘preserve and enhance Europe’s cultural and linguistic diversity and its cinema and audiovisual heritage, guarantee public access to it and promote intercultural dialogue’ (Decision EC of the European Parliament no 1718/2006: 14). Film development was supported through measures targeting preproduction via the improvement of skills among European audiovisual professionals (producers and

58 • Coproducing Europe

scriptwriters), the adaptation of their technical skills to digital technologies, and increasing audiovisual training activities supporting the networking and mobility of those involved (European film schools and training institutes with partners in the sector). The objective was to help scriptwriters develop techniques that would help them identify their target audience in an international film market and detect potential investors (producers and distributors). MEDIA 2007 provided distance learning, encouraging exchanges and partnerships between countries and regions with low audiovisual production capacity or a restricted linguistic or geographical area. In terms of development, MEDIA 2007 helped independent film producers learn how to finance their coproductions by supporting the development of production projects intended for the European and international markets. It encouraged companies to devise strategies for international screening, marketing and distribution, right from the development phase, but it also supported promotion through festivals. In other words, MEDIA 2007 was the programme that further opened the European audiovisual agenda to global markets; it stressed transnational networking and cooperation with the countries of the new EU peripheries, such as south-­east Europe (the western Balkans), and it emphasized the development and training of professionals so that they could approach markets for funding. The opening of the EU to new markets beyond Europe was reaffirmed in the subsequent calls of MEDIA International and MEDIA Mundus (2009), whose objectives were to extend MEDIA’s scope to countries beyond the EU (third countries). In summary, the MEDIA programmes all began to strengthen transnational cooperation between independent producers, focusing mainly on development (training skills for scriptwriters and producers) and distribution. Gradually, they shifted to improving the professionalization of producers and writers (helping them learn how to develop financial plans and funding strategies) and their ability to network, and to ensuring the widest possible circulation of European works through cinemas, broadcasters and festivals. The MEDIA programme ended in 2013 and became a subsection of Creative Europe.

Creative Europe As Mary, working for Greek MEDIA and described at the beginning of this chapter, noted, the creation of an umbrella programme with two subsections, Culture and MEDIA, was intended to enable ‘easier management of the bureaucracy and the budget of the various [pre-­existing] programmes’. The launching of Creative Europe (2013) made it clear that:

EU Media Policies  •  59

‘[C]ultural and creative sectors’ means all sectors whose activities are based on cultural values and/or artistic and other creative expressions, whether those activities are market- or non-­market-­oriented, whatever the type of structure that carries them out, and irrespective of how that structure is financed. Those activities include the development, the creation, the production, the dissemination and the preservation of goods and services which embody cultural, artistic or other creative expressions, as well as related functions such as education or management. (Creative Europe 2013: Article 2)

This suggests that an emphasis on high culture and cultural values continued to connect artistic production with education and management, and popular cultural products such as videogames with formal institutions such as museums. It also made clear the interwoven relationship between what was generated by the diversity of the EU programmes and what they wanted to safeguard and promote, creating a vicious circle. Characteristics such as mobility, extroverted behaviour, transnational collaboration, digital innovation and openness to d ­ iversity – ­all involved in the neoliberal logic of self-­ fashioning – a­ re portrayed above as necessary for the works funded, but at the same time as something that should be echoed in the results. Furthermore, the programme also tried to clarify the notion of European Added Value (Creative Europe 2013: Article 5), which was understood in terms of: • the transnational character of actions and activities which complement regional, national, international and other Union programmes and policies, and the impact of such actions and activities on the cultural and creative sectors as well as on citizens and on their knowledge of cultures other than their own; •  the development and promotion of transnational cooperation between cultural and creative players, including artists, audiovisual professionals, cultural and creative organisations and audiovisual operators, focused on stimulating more comprehensive, rapid, effective and long-­term responses to global challenges; • the economies of scale and critical mass which Union support fosters, creating a leverage effect for additional funds. (Ibid.: 226)

European Added Value emphasized transnationalism in forming networks and the circulation and promotion of films and policies. In other words, it was understood more in technical and economic terms than as identity-­ building. The width and diversity of the network supporting the project, but also the multiplication of the work’s impact within the EU and beyond, were some of the criteria included in the article quoted above. Through this impact, identity-­building was aspired to. The training via schools, workshops and the network of professionals and experts that all MEDIA programmes

60 • Coproducing Europe

provided was intended to create the conditions (transnationalism, circulation and networking) required to produce European Added Value. Once they were trained in this emerging European space, creators could make highly mobile films. Through this mobility, a European audience was intended to be shaped. How would creators succeed in attaining this mobility? Specific indexes can be used to reveal their success, such as distribution deals, participation in festivals, and sales and screenings in different EU countries. The first MEDIA subprogramme within Creative Europe was introduced in 2014 (Creative Europe n.d.). According to Article 9 (Creative Europe 2013), its priorities were to reinforce the capacity of the European audiovisual sector through transnational connections that targeted skills acquisition, such as networking, audiovisual and digital competences, market-­research tools and business development. In order to implement the priorities set out in Article 9, the subprogramme included training in skills development and activities to help professionals and production companies to network, thus increasing the potential for coproductions and creating a system of wider European distribution and promotion with the support of new technologies. The transnational mobility of professionals, films and policies was to be accomplished through the development of skills and networks facilitated by new technologies, increased visibility and business collaboration, the internationalization of European works through international ­coproductions – ­an element added after MEDIA Mundus, as Mary ­noted – ­and collaboration with television broadcasters. These criteria perpetuated a paradox, however. European Added Value was achieved through the wider circulation of the work funded. The work, however, had to first prove that it had internally embedded this value, and that it could therefore circulate transnationally. This paradox created a hermeneutic circle8 in which an inner logic is assumed (transnational mobility and circulation of films, which equal European identity). Transnational mobility increased the marketability of a film, and thus its European value. Coproductions raised the likelihood of a film circulating among different European markets, but to be included in Creative Europe, film projects had to prove their potential to circulate transnationally. European Added Value thus became tautological in defining European films. At the beginning of this book, I referred to the work of Powdermaker (1951) on the post-­war Hollywood of the 1950s, in which films served two functions: the accumulation of capital by the bosses of the big studios and the perpetuation of enchantment through stories and pictures. In her study of skills and self-­formation in the workplace, Bonnie Urciuoli (2008) reintroduced this idea of enchantment under neoliberal capitalism. She noted that the relationships between individuals (workers) and forms of development of knowledge under neoliberal capitalism became a fetish, mingling subjects with objects and economy with metaphysics. The term ‘fetish’ was

EU Media Policies  •  61

reintroduced to the economy by Marx (2005: 164–65) in order to describe the way that the capitalists of the Industrial Revolution had turned human labour and time into objects of circulation in world markets (a commodity). Social anthropologists, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, examined Marxist ideas in different local contexts to explore the ways that more traditional societies negotiated the introduction of capitalism into their economies, but also their belief systems. Michael Taussig (1977) drew from this Marxist tradition to study the way that Colombian rural workers came to terms with the introduction of exchange values and capital in their society. Trying to overcome these dualities between tradition and modernity, irrational and rational, Taussig went further to examine how local communities problematized the laws of the capitalist mode of production in order to integrate them into local metaphysics. In this process, capital was believed to possess innate powers of good and evil. For Taussig, this fetishism of commodities was not innate to traditional societies, but was endemic in the social relations and moral values embedded in money and capital, which were slowly developed when ‘modern’ societies in Europe were formed. Similarly, the values embedded in policies and funding mechanisms combined cultural values with economy, were considered European and turned film coproduction into an ideal, not only for producing film, but also for producing Europe. This ideal generated a transnational cinema space, involving training schools, workshops, festivals markets, cinemas, creators and films. The mobility and circulation of people and products in this space were believed to produce a European identity. Urciuoli was insightful in revealing how these forms of flexibility and employment were utilized and transformed in late capitalism into properties of subjectivity, propagating a continuous transformation and projection of the future. The production of Project Europe seemed to follow the same neoliberal recipe. In the context I am discussing here, by participating in Creative Europe, creators learned how to produce films and distribute them to European and global film markets. They also learned how to be European, or at least, what the EU policy agenda considers European. In Jean-­Claude Juncker’s (2014) words, the EU policy agenda should ‘teach European[s] to love Europe’. Cultural and film policies are part of this agenda of learning how to love Europe. I was very confused when I was reading policy papers regarding European Added Value. Trying to better understand how the policymakers themselves understood it, I asked Mary to explain it further. She did not seem sure, so she turned to the application showing the criteria and commented that the idea was not technocratic. ‘We are not talking about potatoes and tomatoes. We are talking about a creative work’, she said in the end. European Added Value does not seem to have been clear to Mary. She also wanted to stress the cultural value of films as works of art that could not be

62 • Coproducing Europe

reduced to specific measurable ­criteria – ­but what are the criteria involved? The selection criteria (common to MEDIA and Eurimages) for single film projects are based on their relevance and European Added Value, quality of content and activities, dissemination of project results, impact and sustainability, quality of the project team, country of origin (with a preference for low-­capacity countries) and target audience language (Eurimages Support for Coproduction 2018). There was an extra emphasis on innovation for slate funding. The above categories are, however, quite problematic. The first, European Added Value, as discussed above, seems self-­referential and is mostly confirmed through distribution and sales plans. The identification of a work as European is also connected by the above criteria to its national ­origin – ­in other words, the member states in which the main parties originated. The criteria introduced followed the old tradition of auteurs, where the director-­auteur was the owner of the creative production, instead of keeping up with contemporary trends whereby the notion of the creator (or creator-­ entrepreneur) is equally oriented to the market and the creative team. In other words, the art of finding capital for film productions has become almost as crucial a skill as talent. Finally, the dissemination and impact of the work are often interwoven with the capacity to circulate (European Added Value). The above criteria are quantified. Indicatively, in the Creative Europe, Media Sub-­programme Guide for Experts on Assessment of Development of Audiovisual ­Content – ­Single Project Applications (2014–2020), the following was included (ibid.: 6): Table 3.1.  Selection criteria Aspect

Points

Relevance and European added-­value Quality of the content and activities Dissemination of project results Impact and sustainability

55 10 25 10

The emphasis on greater quantification (a marking system) and standardization for all types of projects to create transparency made assessment more technocratic, but not more reliable in creative terms. When I discussed with Mary how smaller film industries can benefit more from these policies, she explained that an affirmative policy for the lower-­capacity countries was not always successful because the system of categorizing countries was not based on reliable data. As she said, ‘there are a couple of reports each year to show the statistics of successful applications from each country, and if there is a noticeable increase, the country is placed in a different category’. This meant

EU Media Policies  •  63

that the country was upgraded, but this could result in the termination of the affirmative policy. As De Vinck (2011: 106) noted, MEDIA’s initial funding was based on a (semi-)automatic selection process following quantitative criteria, except for scripts (which underwent qualitative assessment). External experts were called in, but only in a later phase. MEDIA thus fostered and encouraged the formation of authorized spaces to enable skill development and networking, but there was another factor that was very important: the experts. As some officials told me at all three festivals I attended, festivals create an ecosystem (I will come back to this term in the next chapter) of experts who can help the creators taking part in the coproduction markets or the other workshops hosted by their festivals. What are the skills of these experts? The production of a European film policy in recent decades has combined a cultural element deriving from the tradition of nation states and transnational aspects stemming from the EU’s economic agenda. While the economic dimension aimed at flexibility and mobility, the cultural dimension insisted on more traditional approaches to identity. The introduction of Creative Europe resulted in the better administration of the two subprogrammes, Culture and MEDIA, but it did not change the hermeneutic circle that I described above.

Eurimages Athens, 8 April 2017 Exarcheia is known as a troublesome neighbourhood in the heart of the Greek capital. The presence of young so-­called anarchist groups, drug trafficking and police inertia have made this neighbourhood synonymous with violence and guerrilla fighting. Despite this, people live there with their families, and they seem to enjoy a sense of familiarity, as I could tell from people stopping for small talk with each other. In Exarcheia, I was meeting Demos, who worked for the Greek delegation of Eurimages. Eurimages delegates had always been well respected as high-­ranking representatives. The current Greek representative for Eurimages was also a professional film-­maker who worked and lived abroad. I was meeting Demos, one of his assistants, in a coffee house in Exarcheia. He arrived on his motorcycle, a safe way to arrive on time in Athens. He was tall, with fuzzy grey hair. He talked quickly, sometimes pausing to remember the proper Greek word, although he had no accent. He did not allow me to record as he did not have good memories of interviews.

One of the issues that came up in our discussion was his own ‘cosmopolitan’ background as a quality that made him suitable for his current position. He spoke several European languages fluently, had lived abroad for many years, had travelled the world and had coproduced films. He was the exemplary

64 • Coproducing Europe

European. The objective of all the policies developed since the 1980s has been to shape citizens like Demos, educated, mobile and familiar with different European contexts and languages, who feel at home everywhere in Europe. This was also the European ideal for the Council of Europe (CoE). The CoE was set up in post-­war Europe, in 1949.9 According to CoE Article 5.4.1 (Statute of CoE 1949), ‘The CoE is the first culture-­oriented European-­level organization that saw the light immediately after the Second World War, focusing on human rights, democracy and rule of law’. The CoE did not have the power to enforce policies, only to make suggestions to governments, but it had strong symbolic power. According to John Schofield (2014: 44), who carried out research among the so-­called European experts, the CoE was the institution perceived as perpetuating the principles of the Enlightenment. The emphasis on principles, and not austere agendas and measures, allowed the CoE to be more open and inclusive in comparison to the EU. Currently, it is the biggest institution of intergovernmental cooperation in terms of member states in the northern hemisphere. According to its foundation act, the CoE’s aim was to ‘achieve a greater unity between its members for the purpose of safeguarding and realising the ideals and principles which are their common heritage’ (Article 1, Statute of CoE 1949). In the CoE’s view, this could contribute to the members’ economic and social development. Once again, this idea of common values goes back to the founding principles and presuppositions of the idea of Europe as a political project. Both the CoE and the EU aspired to the formation of a space generated by ideoscapes, a repertoire of ideologies, discourses and agendas of power and governance, according to Appadurai (1996), that were identified as European values. This repertoire of values (human rights, democracy, transparency, equality, diversity, etc.) permeated cultural policies that were used as blueprints, especially in regional development and the so-­called transition of the Balkans, as well as the perception of a wider European neighbourhood. As Sue Bridger and Frances Pine (1998: 7) noted in their edited volumes regarding different strategies of economic and social survival in various postsocialist countries: The problem with the terminology of ‘transition’ is that it assumes that coherence still remains and hence that the move from socialism to capitalism has continuity at this level at least. This model of transition p ­ resupposes – ­and here we would argue that it is aimed as much at the western as at the eastern ­audience – ­that capitalism is still fully functioning; it fails to acknowledge the fundamental shift in patterns of production and consumption.

The linearity of the concept of transition could neither describe nor explain the more complex and fragmented realities of the post-­Fordist economy and the interconnected ‘global village’. Transitions seemed to reiterate prejudices

EU Media Policies  •  65

regarding the homogeneity of the ‘socialist bloc’ and a linear future shaped by international donors such as the IMF, the World Bank and the EU. In the field of cultural and film policies, there seemed to be a similar agenda of transition drawn from the agenda of European values discussed above. In 1989,10 the CoE developed the Eurimages Fund. Its main objective was to provide financial aid for coproduction, distribution, broadcasting and promotion. The initial design foresaw a minimum three member states participating in coproductions11 (or non-­member states, comprising no more than 30 per cent of investment). The aid was intended to support the annual film production of member states or associate members. Coproduction funding was allocated12 in the form of grants, loans at preferential rates or advances on receipts. Another cornerstone of film production was the European Convention on Cinematographic Coproduction, which was launched in 1994 with forty-­ three signatories. The Convention replaced bilateral coproduction treaties between European countries.13 It introduced a definition of European work based on a list of criteria and a points system, like that adopted afterwards by MEDIA, and had a total annual budget of EUR 25 million, some 90 per cent of which was dedicated to coproduction. However, the number of member states meant that the amount of money was limited. If a coproduction could gather fifteen out of a possible nineteen points (the criteria followed were discussed above regarding MEDIA) in terms of ‘Europeanness’, it fell under the scope of the Convention. As Demos stressed, Eurimages remained from its foundation ‘the most constant and solid mechanism that creators could turn to for funding’. This ‘consistency’ is significant, if we consider the shrinking public funding for film production. Since the 1990s, the Eurimages budget for all sections had increased from almost EUR 14 million to EUR 20 million for all types of films (fiction and documentaries) (see Coproduction Funding History 2021), and if we consider again the number of states involved, this was a small increase (De Vinck 2011: 10). For multilateral coproductions, the conditions required to obtain coproduction status, according to the Convention, were that the contribution would not be less than 10 per cent or more than 70 per cent of the total production cost of the cinematographic work. When the minimum contribution was less than 20 per cent per producer, the party concerned would take steps to reduce or bar access to national production support schemes. There was a territorial clause. In other words, any state, at the time of signature or when depositing it for ratification, acceptance, approval or accession, should specify the territory or territories to which this Convention would apply. These economic clauses show that these coproductions consisted of economic hierarchies reflected in the distinction between major and minor

66 • Coproducing Europe

coproductions, and that these inequalities were not restricted to the economic sphere, as the subsequent chapters will show. There were four calls per year in which each creative team needed to prove the following criteria:14 quality of the script (originality, subject, visual style), quality of the creative team (director, scriptwriter, producer, crew, casting), artistic and technical cooperation, circulation potential and their financial plan. The criteria seem more creative than technocratic, but if we consider the points system and the emphasis on circulation and a financial plan, Eurimages seems to share common objectives with MEDIA. When an application is submitted, there is a phase during which the Eurimages office in Strasbourg checks its eligibility. The successful applications are then transferred to the different working groups, in which national representatives take part. Demos suggested that the national representations met once or twice a year, which might be increased for representatives of bigger countries such as France or Germany. Each representative participates in a working group with seven to eight other countries, and each country has one vote. There are two to four calls a year. Each representative is the advocate for their country’s films. They make a presentation supporting the film’s artistic quality, the strength of the financial plan and its significance. In a very passionate voice, Demos admitted that the representative’s work lies in presenting the portfolio for each film, its artistic quality and economic efficiency, and how it fits into the European ­landscape – ­the current changes, needs and debates within the European film markets. The work of producers is important not only in obtaining the money, but also, according to Demos, in how well they manage to address their film’s script in a way that can be ‘heard’ by others, not audiences in their country (in this case, a Greek audience), but different audiences. The potential for distribution at a European level, to ‘the other audiences’ that Demos mentioned, is important for a successful application. The Board of Management then makes the final decision. The cross-­cultural communication that Demos described above is the real work of contemporary production: knowing how you and your work can be heard not nationally, but transnationally and globally. All professionals working at the film festivals and film centres that I interviewed in the three countries agreed on this. They believed that the goal of their job was this bridging between the local and the global. This is why the training and networking (in schools, workshops, etc.) funded by the EU, which I described earlier, has been so focused in this direction in recent decades. Comparing the profiles of the national representatives from Greece in Eurimages and in MEDIA, it seemed that in the former, the Greek choice was someone with symbolic capital (a well-­known and established professional), instead of the more technocratic profiles of the people working for

EU Media Policies  •  67

MEDIA.15 There are many reasons for this. For example, Eurimages is constituted by national delegations and not technocrats. As Eurimages supports film production directly, there is a need for people who know the process of film creation from the inside but are also aware of the needs of European film markets and audiences. This is why the Greek delegation to Eurimages combined what Demos called his ‘cosmopolitan background’, which often entailed expert status, with political capital.16 Representatives from Bosnia– Herzegovina and Georgia had more technocratic skills. There seems to be a process of formation of experts within the space generated by EU policies (festivals, training schools, etc.) that will gradually replace the more vernacular process of shaping the ‘European’ described by Demos. What is the background of the experts who evaluate scripts for Eurimages? Who is defined as an expert? How many experts are there? Do they share the same skills so that all applications go through the same scrutiny? How is transparency guaranteed?17 What kind of alliances are formed among members to support their national projects? Levent Yilmazok (2010) undertook research interviewing Turkish producers and Eurimages professionals, analysing the films funded and performing a quantitative analysis to examine the influence of supranational funds such as Eurimages on national cinema. One of his findings was that the national representatives tried to offer support, when there were more candidate films than funding available, to the films that fulfilled the most Eurimages ideals (democratic ideas, diversity, a vulnerable population, the fight against fanaticism and xenophobia, etc.) or to younger directors who needed the funding more than their recognized colleagues. Demos also noted that the young generation of producers in Greece had adopted ‘a changing attitude. They have travelled, and they have studied abroad.’ This made them more open to cooperation and coproductions, and more aware of the requirements for communicating a story abroad in the European landscape. For example, he himself considered whether the film projects applying for funding could be understood not only by Greek but European audiences. He agreed, as Yilmazok suggested, that there is a long tradition of collaboration between Turkey and Greece, built over the years that the two countries have participated in the Eurimages fund. Similarly, in Sarajevo, my interviewee from the national Eurimages team said that the former Yugoslav member states of the CoE were ‘natural allies’, as they all spoke the same language. In Georgia, however, my interviewees seemed to emphasize ‘natural’ alliances less, due to historical legacies, and instead emphasized the work they did to develop these alliances. These differences will be elaborated further in the subsequent chapters, but they show both the disparities between the different cases and the importance of political and cultural capital.

68 • Coproducing Europe

Eurimages supports smaller film industries. The distinction between major and minor film industries and coproductions seems to run through the system of funding. Major coproductions (max. 70–80 per cent of funding in two-­party coproductions) are considered national coproductions, whereas minor (or minority) coproductions (from 10 to 20 percent of all funding in two-­party coproductions) play a more supportive role, but are still significant for the coproduction agreement. As the next chapters will discuss, the big industries, such as France and Germany, especially in the context of south-­ eastern Europe, often played the role of major partners, especially when the smaller countries and industries were taking their first steps in the world of EU film funding. However, the recent economic crisis changed this balance, as coproduction seemed to involve multiparty partnerships in which more partners shared the cost. Minor coproductions, however, are considered a first step towards the internationalization of a national film industry, access to know-­how, and new partners (via networking). Big film industries such as those of France, Germany, Italy and the UK are clearly the backbone of the tradition of coproducing, something that my research results support, as detailed in the following chapters, as France and Germany are the two most important coproducers in south-­eastern Europe. As Roberto Olla (Pham n.d.) noted, ‘Contributions fluctuate. They are based on a handful of principles of solidarity. The first principle is that the richer and bigger countries pay more. The second ­principle . . . ­is that the more you co-­produce, the more you pay.’ As he explained, at first the richest countries contributed the most; however, in recent years, the fund has tried to make it ‘fair’ for them. The fund made it compulsory for the countries that used Eurimages resources the most to pay more. The results of this change should be assessed in the future, as it may backfire. Offering more support to the biggest film industries does not take into account each member state’s film resources and funding opportunities. Another issue that has played a significant role in forming coproduction networks, especially since 2008, is geographical proximity. De Vinck (2011: 479) argued that national origins in coproductions vary; however, there are indications that geographically and culturally neighbouring countries cooperate more frequently. For example, France and Belgium; Belgium, Switzerland and France; Belgium, Germany and France; Belgium, France and Italy; and Belgium, France and Luxembourg are common combinations in Eurimages coproductions. De Vinck suggested that this was the result of sharing high costs, something that Yilmazok’s (2010) research also noted. For Central and Eastern European coproductions, De Vinck (2011: 472) argued that ‘countries had a limited presence but a high selection rate’. France and Germany often acted as the majority coproducers18 for smaller countries, such as Greece, and my research supports this to a degree.

EU Media Policies  •  69

It seems from the above discussion that Eurimages and MEDIA contributed to the diversification of the European cinema in terms of funding resources, partnerships and content. They also supported smaller and weaker film industries, especially in the 1990s. This was very important for many national cinemas. The two programmes guaranteed the effectiveness of coproductions of their new member states in the first years of their membership, compared to bigger industries, which often looked only for a source of funding for non-­commercial creators. The two programmes were often complementary, as films that received grants from the Eurimages coproduction fund also applied to the different MEDIA calls (for development, distribution, etc.). The two programmes also often acted alongside each other in regional or national grants, creating a nexus of public-­transnational and supranational funding for European films. What many producers suggested in our interviews was that MEDIA appeared to be more technocratic and bureaucratic, whereas Eurimages seems to be a more friendly programme for creators; however, they both suffer from the same weakness, which is their reliance on a pool of expertise for processing numerous applications, and this means the consumption of time and labour with results that challenge the quantified ideas of the EU regarding transparency. MEDIA is often criticized for supporting bigger companies and producers, rather than independent ones from smaller countries (Mitric and Sarikakis 2016: 437). The system of national representatives also creates problems for Eurimages, in which political alliances seem to become more important, especially for new member states. This is why Demos referred to the legacy of relationships. As Mitric and Sarikakis (ibid.: 426–27) noted, if we consider that Eurimages funds sixty to seventy coproductions for the thirty-­six members each year, with almost 15 per cent of the film’s budget for each project, and compare this contribution to the film budgets of bigger member states, it will become obvious that this is a rather modest contribution. The evidence supports the conclusion that EU film policies often support national mechanisms first and foremost, and, in this way, seem to privilege national cultural politics even today, while also leaving the economic burden on national authorities. In the last three chapters, I have examined the shift to culture as part of the EU’s policies. This shift saw the gradual shrinking of nation state funding (but not its significance), and the rise of more transnational, supranational and international policies regarding the needs of the emerging global markets in film industries. The cultural turn of the 1980s instrumentalized culture as part of European identity politics. Today, culture in the EU is not only an aspect, but a significant part of the European economy and governance. The interrelationship of the economy and culture became embedded in EU film policies through both MEDIA and Eurimages, which shared the same logic, that of developing creativity through specific skills generated in

70 • Coproducing Europe

interconnected authorized spaces (training schools, festivals and networks) and with the contribution of authorized expert voices. Shore and Wright (2015) underlined that the development of EU governmentality in sectors that produce knowledge generated processes of marketization, competition over collaboration, objectification and hierarchies of knowledge. In this way, Europeanization seems to have become standardized through specific development of structures and enforcement of policies that were transferable to different regions. Similar processes emerged in the field of film policies as well. Integrating these policies increased both regional conformity and visibility. In other words, as the following chapter will examine, taking part in film coproductions was possible as part of EU membership of different sorts (as member states, candidate countries, neighbours, etc.). At the same time, this participation and adoption of these policies was a sign of European integration. As many of these coproductions were motivated through regional film markets and were often part of regional collaborations, they could act as a symbol of regional integration. But this process, as I will discuss, should not be taken for granted, as it generated ambiguous feelings and debates among creators. My presentation of MEDIA and Eurimages has postulated that this authorization was embedded in the agenda of the late capitalism, which praised transformation through continuous training in schools and workshops, networking, mobilities and the experts generated by these programmes. In comparison, in Eurimages, whose political status as part of the CoE was still high in member states, experts were seen less as technocrats. The interrelationship of political and economic hierarchies has also been demonstrated. The production of film networks did not just form part of film policies and mechanisms, but was part of a wider political project of producing a new narrative (as the title of the project New Narrative of Europe indicated in 2014; see Bondebjerg 2018: v–x). My discussion has postulated that the distinction between major and minor coproductions is not value-­free. Instead, it showed that despite the economic profiles of the two programmes, they are also political mechanisms. This is something that will also become clear in the next chapters.

Notes   1. I borrow this term from critical heritage studies and from Laurajane Smith (2012), who introduced the term ‘authorized heritage discourse’ to underline how the shift to heritage recognition and support can lead to the formation of a mechanism that includes organizations, experts, institutions and policies promoting authoritative ideas about heritage.

EU Media Policies  •  71

  2. In the Treaty of Amsterdam (2 October 1997, Article 128.4), the Treaty of Nice (2001, enforced in 2003) and the Treaty of Lisbon (23  July 2007, enforced on 1  December 2009), culture was included with reference to areas supporting actions in education, vocational training, human health, industry and administrative cooperation. Culture was also mentioned in the Treaty of the Functioning of the EU (TFEU), Article 167/ Title XIII (ex Article 151 TEC). After the inclusion of the ‘culture Article’ in the TEU (now Art. 167, TFEU, 2012), the EU introduced a cultural policy agenda.   3. The same process has taken place in the field of education as well. For example, Benjamin Feyen and Ewa Krzaklewska (2013) tried to trace the ways that the Erasmus programme succeeded in shaping a generation of European youth. They stressed that, although Erasmus produced a strong awareness and interest in European public affairs (environmental issues, processes of democratization and inclusion, social issues, etc.), it still lacked a wide basis of participation, as it concerned a limited number of students. Elizabeth Murphy-­Lejeune (2002), who underlined in her study of Erasmus that the programme had a strong elitist base, made a similar argument.   4. Decisions about the programme are taken under the co-­decision system of the EU; in other words, the European Parliament and the European Council define the budget jointly.   5. The Babel programme under the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) subsidized multilingual EU coproductions.   6. Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.   7. The Agreement on the European Economic Area, which came into force on 1 January 1994, brought together the EU member states and the three EEA EFTA ­states – ­Iceland, Liechtenstein and N ­ orway – ­in a single market, referred to as the Internal Market.   8. I borrow this term from hermeneutics, where the circular process in the interpretation of a particular text is projected onto a whole culture, postulating an inner logic.   9. The statutory act was signed by the governments of the following members: the Kingdom of Belgium, the Kingdom of Denmark, the French Republic, the Irish Republic, the Italian Republic, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Kingdom of Norway, the Kingdom of Sweden and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It now has forty-­seven members. 10. Before the 1980s, there were several recommendations, such as no. 341 (1973) on ‘Freedom of expression and the role of the artist’; ‘Telecommunications’ (Munich 1974); and ‘The democratic renewal of the performing arts’ (Athens 1976). In 1979, recommendation no. 862 was based on the results of a symposium that took place in Lisbon from 14 to 16  June 1978 and discussed issues of education and culture. The recommendation highlighted the significance of film as part of culture (see De Vinck 2011: 88–110). 11. Today, the minimum is two. 12. When Eurimages was set up, a flexible financing system was put in place. Members were obliged to make contributions, but they were free to choose the amount they contributed. This non-­compulsory approach was followed to increase the fund’s resources, but in the end it did not work. As member states reduced their contributions, the contribution became mandatory. The contributions of the biggest film industries (Spain, Italy, France and Germany) were tied to their cinematographic output over a ten-­year period (De Vinck 2011: 466–67). 13. It should be stressed that there are different traditions regarding the supremacy of the European Convention in regard to the national bilateral agreements. For example, France privileges national agreements, whereas the UK, Ireland and the Nordic countries

72 • Coproducing Europe

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

prefer direct agreements between production companies, issuing official certificates only for EU funding (see Medici n.d.). See Council of ­Europe – ­Eurimages (2014). Previous Eurimages representatives included Costas Vretacos (1996–2006), a novelist, and Alexis Grivas (2006–16), a cinematographer. Currently, the director Timon Koulmassis is the representative for Greece. See the discussion about the suspension of Alexis Grivas, the former head of the Greek delegation to Eurimages (see Kranakis 2016). In order to tackle the problem of transparency, in 2009 Eurimages introduced a system involving two reviewers who remain anonymous (in an intermediate phase), and for big coproductions (over EUR 3 million), the fund introduced a collection agent who can oversee and guarantee the economic procedures and rights of each party involved (see Pham 2008). Majority coproductions are considered national productions and are also financed nationally. The financing of minority coproductions is more challenging, but beneficial, especially for smaller film industries, as it gives them access to new markets.

Chapter 4

Film Festivals in EU South-Eastern Peripheries

h Thessaloniki, 25 April 2018 The new campus of Aristotle University is located in the suburban area of Thermi (in the south-­eastern part of Thessaloniki). The current administration of the university would be able to save money by cutting down on its rent expenses. The plan to move the entire central campus, however, failed. Most Greek universities are found in city centres, supporting the local economy and urban life. The distance from the city centre did not make the new location appealing. I had to change buses twice, something that, by Thessaloniki’s standards, signified a considerable distance, using the city’s public transport that almost collapsed at the start of the economic crisis.   The event I attended was organized by the Faculty of Fine Arts. The guest speaker was the Artistic Director of Thessaloniki International Film, Orestis Andreadakis.1 He noted that the most difficult task for festivals today, either ‘big’ or ‘small’ – although as he stressed, ‘the definition of the two qualities is not clear today’ – was to create their own ‘distinct identity’. The festival needed to extend beyond its traditional activities. As part of this vision, he introduced a theme each year, a concept that would define the festival’s film selection and motivate different creative activities beyond film (exhibitions, book readings, etc.). These other activities could be spread throughout the city, transforming it into a ‘polis-­festival’. Students attending the event were enthusiastic about this idea, as it could bring opportunities for them to get involved and exhibit their work. They claimed that as young artists living and working in Thessaloniki, they lacked the opportunities to show their works and make the connections that their colleagues from Athens had. Returning home, I checked the local

74 • Coproducing Europe

press to see that in that year (2018), the festival had commissioned a series of works under the theme of ‘Caritas Romana’. Many of the artists involved had more international than local profile.

The Venice Film Festival, according to its website, was organized for the first time in 1932 (as the Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica International) on the terraces of the Hotel Excelsior. In the big hall of the hotel, as shown in pictures of that period, the elegantly dressed audience participated in the screening of films from nineteen different countries (see Dudley 2009: 66). The festival emerged ‘under the ideology of the League of Nations’ as a new ‘Esperanto’ uniting the world (ibid.: 66). Today, according to Stephen Follows’ survey (2013) there are around three thousand film festivals taking place every year. In an attempt to delineate the field, De Valck (2007; see also De Valck and Loist 2009) postulated the following main axes of research. Firstly, festivals are often examined through the politics of space and identity, whereby regeneration projects, neighbourhood formation and lived experiences related to cities, cultures and different publics are studied. Secondly, festivals are considered hubs of international networks and circuits. Here, the circulation of films, creators and audiences is examined as part of economic and cultural relations. Thirdly, festivals are studied as institutions embedded in national, transnational or supranational cultural policies and politics. This multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary situation is often complemented by a variety of methods (ethnographic, archival, discourse analysis, etc.). On the negative side, however, this plurality always runs the risk of lacking ‘a systematic and focused approach’ (Iordanova 2008: 5). One thing often connected to film festivals is networks. De Valck (2007: 34), drawing from Latour’s work on the mutual formation of the social, natural and technological, stressed that film festivals should be considered ‘­interdependent . . . ­circulating entities’ between human and non-­human actors, for instance, creators, festival officials, policymakers, agents, broadcasters, audiences, tourists, city officials and films. I found Latour’s notion of the mediator (Andrew 2005) useful to capture the conglomerations of different agencies engaged in the formation of networks. Being a mediator cannot predetermine an outcome. This is significant for the study of festivals, as one of the main goals of the people working at festivals is to constantly expand and pluralize their connections, and, in this way, to increase their impact and symbolic capital in the festival circuit. This is an ongoing process with no guarantees. Nevertheless, these agencies are not developed in limbo. According to Latour, power does not exist prior to a network, but instead emerges in ‘discreet instances’ (McCarthy 2015: 9) as the network is constituted. This can, nevertheless, be problematic. In order to overcome this

Film Festivals in EU South-Eastern Peripheries  •  75

problem, De Valck (2007: 36) referred to Luhmann’s idea of a system as the capacity (or even genius) to survive by adapting. It is interesting that she used an animate metaphor, despite actor–network theory’s (ANT) reservations about privileging human agencies over other kinds. Similarly, an idea coined by festival officials in recent years, which has in many instances replaced the concept of networks in my research, is that of the ecosystem. Festival people (organizers and workers) often used this term to describe the interconnections between festivals at a global level. This reference to nature could be challenging for an anthropologist. The notion of ecosystems entered the anthropological discussion of a more systematic, anti-­essentialist theorization of nature. It is not a coincidence that its first uses come from the tradition of cultural anthropology in the US, drawing from Boas’s work on cultural regions and environmental adaptation. Julian Steward (1972) developed the most systematic examination of human adaptation to specific ecological conditions from the 1950s (the functionalist approach), whereas Clifford Geertz in the 1960s proposed ecosystems as an interesting heuristic and all-­encompassing idea to understand the intersections of human activity and physical processes (Moran 1990). The ecosystem approach contributed to a more holistic approach to nature and nurture, a distinction often generated by the crude functionalism of that period, and an urge for more cohesive modelling regarding this relationship. The use of the term ‘ecosystem’ in festivals bears similarities to its use in anthropology, as it tries to capture large-­scale and shifting connections, and to integrate them into a stable formation, an imagined assemblage. As Stewart and Strathern (2019) noted, a core aspect of ecosystems is their resourcefulness in reaching and maintaining balance. As in ecological anthropology, however, the idea of the ecosystem fostered the danger of naturalizing these connections and bound them to specific regions. As Escobar (1999) reminded us, the discourse on nature, of which ecosystems form a part, was constituted by discourses and practices of power, the ‘game of truth’ (ibid.: 27) that needed to be unpacked. How do film festivals come to be understood as ecosystems? How does this understanding link to the ideas of regions and peripheries, categories that similarly delineate the literal and symbolic space of festivals? The study of festivals by social anthropologists is not new. In studies of ‘traditional’ societies under the Durkheimian influence, festivals were often connected to the ‘religious, and the formation of coherent ties and social solidarity’. A more performative approach emerged from the 1960s, especially in the work of Victor Turner, drawing attention to lived and embodied experience. This shift tried to overcome the abstract binarism of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ and recontextualize festivals in the urban context, where migration and tourism cultivated an emerging discourse of nostalgia about authenticity

76 • Coproducing Europe

and heritage. The contribution of social anthropology to festival studies was until recently quite limited despite the proliferation of multidisciplinary interest in festivals and the different methods engaged (Frost 2016). In his introduction to social anthropology and festivals, Frost (2016) suggested that the limited presence of our discipline in festival studies could be tied to the mistaken view that social anthropologists study more marginal or traditional societies. The fact that ethnographic methods place anthropologists in the midst of festival processes is often considered by festival policymakers less instrumental for their agendas, or too academic, as ethnographic accounts of festivals are often theorized in connection to cultural meaning and identity (re)making. Even in Frost’s work, there seemed to be a particular take on festivals that connected them to carnivals and tried to reconfigure the traditional understanding of festivals as part of rituals in specific contexts. There was no mention of film festivals in Frost’s article. Konstantinos Aivaliotis (2014), who studied the Documentary Film Festival of Thessaloniki through extensive fieldwork, noted that film festivals are quite different from similar public events. The difference stems from the multivalent and multilayered engagement of film festivals with mass culture, which multiplies their social impact but also their economic significance as part of the film industry. My research also corroborated Aivaliotis’s impression that the budgets and economic interests involved in film production differentiated aspects of film festivals from other type of festivals. Their embeddedness in a transnational and global circuit of similar networks produced a different scale of connections with global markets. But what does this mean? Are film festivals and film markets deprived of a more ritualistic character? Do they produce less liminality? My answer is no. Rites and liminality are important for enabling film coproduction markets to fulfil their agendas. In a sense, producing rituals and liminality is part of festivals’ ecology, to use festival jargon, and they are found in both festivals and film markets, as I will discuss in the next chapters. Toby Lee (2013, 2020) did ethnographic research at Thessaloniki Film Festival in the midst of the years of Greek austerity. Her research explored the formation of public culture during the festival period, cinema as cultural production and the neoliberal impact on cultural funding and support, which in Greece, but also elsewhere, became part of a significant public debate. Working though different notions of cultural citizenship (on the one hand, a more human rights-­centred approach, and on the other, a Foucauldian subject-­formation approach), Lee considered in her ethnography the film festival as a space where ‘cultural production meets the practices and discourse of the state’ (2020: 20). This space, though, as Lee stated, is not without rupture, often sudden and unexpected. Nevertheless, public performances that produce the festival space try to assure that any kind of crises can be

Film Festivals in EU South-Eastern Peripheries  •  77

addressed and overcome. In this sense, Lee understood that the celebratory and ritualistic aspects of the film festivals are embedded in their core as way to go beyond the rigidity of the ‘economizing logic of the neoliberal state’ (ibid.: 47) and to include different, even conflicting, voices. In my research, this insight was valuable as it helped me trace the complex ways that festival markets work through rituals that try to work with this ‘economizing logic’. It also helped me understand how festival space is not homogenous. Film markets are much more bonded to industry and market, and it can be more difficult for rupture to become voiced. In the previous chapters, I examined the ways that EU policies and experts understand their mission and the policies they apply, producing, even unconsciously, Europeanization. Here and in the following chapter, I will explore the connections between three regional film festivals on the so-­called European periphery, tracing interfaces between the festivals and the host cities, and how these interfaces produce regions and peripheries; I will also explore the different rites the festivals employ to do this. I will start in this chapter by focusing on how film festivals are connected to the three host cities, shedding light on both the politics and policies of space. I will explore how festivals are interrelated with the process of Europeanization and the (re)production of new peripheries, and how this peripherality emerged as an economic and political project in recent decades. After this initial discussion, the next chapters will turn to film coproductions as data, and to the ‘magic’ of data to support both the significance of festival networks and the production of regions within EU cultural policies (Chapter 5). Then, I will turn to the rites adopted by festival markets (Chapter 6).

Festivals after the Cold War Festivals proliferated in post-­war Europe. Migration from the south to the north of Europe, or from the former colonies to the metropolitan centres, created a need to maintain ties with the home. This need was intensified by the multicultural politics that many European governments adopted in the 1970s to accommodate their migrant communities and make them more visible. At the same time, there was a gradual increase in tourism, which also emphasized the question of ‘authenticity’. In this framework, festivals emerged as a space for questions of remembering and celebrating the ‘roots’ of these migrant communities, often through the lens of nostalgia (see Kockel et al. 2019). This post-­war proliferation of festivals as part of European identity politics also seems to have been important on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Their role there was also multidimensional, and it was not only to serve the

78 • Coproducing Europe

regime’s propaganda. Studying festivals in the former USSR, Rolf (2013) noted that their role in the formation of Soviet citizenship was to reinforce citizens’ allegiances with the Soviet state through the development of social and cultural life. Socialist festivals secularized rituals of the past during de-­ Stalinization, thus participating in social engineering and strengthening the development of nationalities. Festivals would contribute to the production of a space for Soviet citizens that was less regimented by the state bureaucracy . Film festivals also offered regimes in both ideological blocs the opportunity to showcase their national cultures, making them internationally visible, and also to forge ideological alliances (see Razlogova 2020 on Moscow and Tashkent Film Festivals, and Ostrowska 2020). The three festivals I am discussing in this chapter, however, have another shared characteristic: they are viewed as peripheral. The connection of festivals with the notion of peripherality, and also with the three regional ­cities – S­ arajevo, Thessaloniki, ­Tbilisi – b­ ecomes significant for understanding how creative economies and Project Europe are constructed. How are the notions of peripherality and regionalism related to the three festivals and their host cities? In the anthropological tradition, region and regionalism were often identified through the study of ethnicity and the boundedness of culture and territory (Bitusikova 2009: 201–5). In the 1990s, the dissolution of the former Soviet space programme and the process of enlargement of the EU boosted interest in the shape and meaning of the local and its various expressions. Arjun Appadurai (1996) drew from this point, the formation of the global and the local, to critique the ways in which the understanding of both these categories is generated by different epistemologies and agendas (especially in the US). He defined regions as ‘contexts for themes’ rather than ‘fixed geographies’ in this context (ibid.: 7). European regions and neighbourhoods were contexts generated by historical legacies, and economic and political agendas (local, national or supranational), which became political geographies of development and integration in an idealized vision of the EU. Regional integration into the EU often assumed a need for economic and political development, as in the case of the European south in the 1980s or south-­eastern Europe in the 1990s, which gave these regions a peripheral status. This status not only produced ‘dependency’ but also ‘ruptures’ for other futures, as Kušić, Manolova and Lottholz (2019: 9) stated. Festivals can be a space in which to trace these complex relations of dependency and rupture. Hadjimichalis (2019) discussed the notion of peripherality in the context of Europe and argued that it emerged in the post-­war period as part of the agenda of development, and through dividing the world into a core and a periphery. The ‘core’ included all the alleged ‘birthplaces of European and North American capitalism’ and the periphery included the ‘rest’ of the

Film Festivals in EU South-Eastern Peripheries  •  79

world (ibid.: 63). Developing the European regions was a project inspired by historical hierarchies and politico-­cultural discriminations, a Western-­ centric, linear perception of development that connected rurality to backwardness. In this context, peripherality was understood as an endogenous (local) problem that needed exterior intervention. The first regional policies began to be developed within a national context in the 1960s–70s and were connected to welfare logic (development of public, social and cultural infrastructure) (ibid.: 65). This logic started to shift in the 1980s and 1990s. In that period the increase in scale, the gradual shrinking of public funding and the competition for profit on a global level (see Dalakoglou 2020) produced strife among different regions as a result of their attempting to gain competitive advantages (Powell 2009). David Harvey (2005) argued that the production of unequal geographies is the product of an unequal circulation and accumulation of capital. Europeanization, which envisioned the equal development and political integration of regions and the eastern peripheries, instead increased hierarchies and competition for scarce resources and political recognition. The application of this vision was therefore neither equal nor inclusive, and it resulted in the production of peripheral identities. Postsocialism coincided with the above economic changes and facilitated the introduction of neoliberal policies in Eastern and south-­eastern Europe, such as the deregulation of national economies, the shrinking of state property, an increase in accessible financing (debt accumulation) and the depoliticization of markets in the sense of making markets less controlled by national political decisions. At the same time the EU planning regions and neighbourhoods were combined with Orientalist ideas of the past, conceptualizing regional development in an unvarying and uniform way that created (or perpetuated) peripherality as an ideology of distance and difference for this part of Europe. The states and societies of Eastern Europe had to be ‘tuned’ into the (EU) present, as they lacked coevality, and their citizens had to be re-­ educated to become eligible to join (or develop a relationship with) the EU. According to Hadjimichalis (2019: 68), this project of regional development included a specific ‘toolbox’ of ‘best practices’ such as ‘learning, innovative and intelligent regions’ (ibid.: 68–69), through flexibility, clustering and creative cities. This blueprint of development became the engine for the EU’s enlargement towards the eastern peripheries, especially after the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Film festivals in recent decades have become embedded in these discourses through the formation of creative economies in cities. Research has shown that film festivals have different effects on their host cities according to each festival’s size and the city’s profile as an economic and cultural centre (Chatelin 2004). For instance, a comparison between Cannes, Venice and Berlin showed how the Cannes festival overshadowed the identity of Cannes

80 • Coproducing Europe

as a coastal French city, whereas the other two cities had other distinct identities (Berlin as an economic centre, Venice as a cultural centre). As Rüling and Pedersen (2010) stressed, however, festivals have developed in recent decades beyond major urban centres, as local authorities often endorsed hosting them as a way to brand their cities (see also Pendersen and Mazza 2011). According to the Cultural and Creative Industries in Employment in Southeast Europe report published in 2005 (Primorac 2007), the economic impact of these industries on Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania was between 8–9 per cent for 2004 (2007: 130–131). In Greece, according to the Annual Report of the National Bank of Greece (IOBE 2014), the cultural and creative sector employed 110,688 employees in 46,370 businesses, adding value to the Greek economy of approximately EUR 2.1 billion and contributing 1.4 per cent of its GDP. Most of the festivals take place out of season, generating capital in dead periods for tourism (Wallin, Collin and Hull 2012). Sonya, a producer who was employed at CineLink in Sarajevo, and Sophia, an official at the Agora (the film market at Thessaloniki Film Festival) in Thessaloniki, both noted the importance of Sarajevo and Thessaloniki as host cities for shaping a distinctive identity for their markets. Sonya noted that their objective in the market was to foster a ‘relaxed’ atmosphere in a ‘city of a human size, where people can go for a walk and a coffee or for sightseeing’. The attitude at the Agora was similar, and many of the market people seemed proud of their location at Limani, the port of Thessaloniki, and its old warehouses. Markos, who had worked at Thessaloniki Film Festival first as a volunteer and then as a contractual worker, explained that people in the film industry preferred to come to Thessaloniki gia ti thea (‘for the view’). ‘People come here from north or central Europe during the winter or early spring, and they arrive here next to the sea and under the sunshine. They can have great food, drinks, they can relax and do business as well. Who wouldn’t come to Thessaloniki?’ Comparing what Sonya and Sophia said, it seems that they both considered the distinctive identity of their markets a plus, while what they offer to the participants in their markets is very similar. Does this similarity not provoke competition? Thalia (another officer at the Agora) noted that films from Thessaloniki continued their circulation in film festivals and markets in the region, such as meetings in Sofia or Sarajevo. She herself travelled very often to regional markets and festivals to select works. In other words, Thalia considered the role of regional markets complementary in helping creators and projects to find their way to the screen. However, shaping a distinctive identity makes the connection between the regional film markets and festivals and their hosts cities stronger and more significant. Trying to find new partners to invite to the market, whether in the Middle East for Thessaloniki,

Film Festivals in EU South-Eastern Peripheries  •  81

or in the Gulf States like Qatar for Sarajevo, seems to be crucial for their existence in the festival circuits.

Thessaloniki Film Festival Thessaloniki, 8 February 2019 I grew up in a small city called Katerini in northern Greece, an hour from Thessaloniki. The new flat that we moved to in the 1980s (just after Greece joined the European Community) did not have a back alley as a playground like our old house, but it had magic. The balconies looked over an open-­air cinema. The cinema’s usual repertoire included Greek family comedies, martial arts films (Kung Fu films, as we used to call them back then in Greece) and German pornography. We used to watch the first two genres as a family while we were eating watermelon with feta cheese. The German pornography was a different story. Mum firmly closed the shutters so that we wouldn’t give ‘the neighbours any excuses to talk’, and I had to spend the night in another part of the flat.   At the heart of the Greek summer and the summer sales, when Katerini was full of tourists from the former Yugoslavia and Greek labour immigrants from Australia and Germany, the cinema hosted special screenings dedicated to festivalika films (festival films). These films had previously been shown at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. The audience for these films was limited to a few couples, and single men who kept coming back every night as if they belonged to a secret community.

The notion of parea (a group of peers) seemed to inspire the organization of the first film festival in Thessaloniki. Following Bourdieu, taste since the nineteenth century has been dominated by the formation of class allegiances and the production of different publics. Both taste and common experiences were at the centre of forming parea. The boundaries of parea2 were not fixed, and were always part of negotiations among peers. In 1960, a group of Greek intellectuals, editors of the journal I Tehni sti Thessaloniki (Art in Thessaloniki)3 and members of Techi Cinema Club (Art Cinema Club), which included the literary figure Pavlos Zannas, launched the Elliniki Evdomada Kinimagografou (the Week of Greek Cinema), supported by HELEXPO (the National Institution for the Organization of Exhibitions, Congresses and Cultural Events). The Week of Greek Cinema became the basis for the organization of the Greek Film Festival in 1966. Cinema in Greece struggled to survive in the 1970s and 1980s, due to television and VHS. Young film directors, often called the New Greek Cinema and inspired by the French Nouvelle Vague, brought a new vision to cinema in Greece in the 1970s. As Rea Walden (2018) argued, these artists experimented with form and tackled new topics,

82 • Coproducing Europe

such as the lives of rural people or the working classes, and political issues, such as the Greek Civil War.4 Their cinema did not target a wide audience, and their films were screened at the Thessaloniki Film Festival where a smaller but dedicated audience, as my memories demonstrated, could watch them. The Thessaloniki International Film Festival (TIFF) was institutionalized as such in 1986 (Law of 1986, Chapter 5/Articles 30–33), and since then it has been rooted in the city’s cultural memory and identity. The TIFF gradually became the ‘city’s festival’, something that, in addition to its wide acceptance, alluded to the competition between the ‘Athenaiko kratos’ (the Athens-­centric state, a term pointing to the power of the political elites, based in the capital, in Greece) and Thessaloniki. The tension between Athens and Thessaloniki is inscribed in the term symprotevousa (‘co-­capital’) and is based on the history of the formation of the Greek state and its borders in the nineteenth century, but also on the ideological opposition between the conservatism of the royal Athenian centre and the northern borderlands that it wished to control,5 which were inhabited by cultural minorities that became ethnic minorities due to the various Balkan nationalisms. The post-­war period and the Cold War perpetuated the monitoring and surveillance of the region. In addition to this history, the centralization of political and economic power was always a poignant point for the elites of Thessaloniki and led to a popular complaint about being the second best city. My mother, who was a professional singer in the 1960s, used to remember: We used to gather after our work in Dore [the famous artistic coffeehouse and restaurant near the White Tower, which had been the old headquarters of the festival]. There, you could see all the stars, singers and actors who had come for the festival from Athens. We used to eat and drink there after our work in the morning. We, the young artists, went there in the hope of meeting famous composers and getting an invitation to Athens. You couldn’t have a proper career here in Thessaloniki.

This narrative is rooted in the relationship of the centre and the periphery, not as geographical poles but as political, economic and symbolic systems of signification, which seem to have become an internalized hierarchy in the above excerpt. Placing this narrative in the wider context of European regionalism, which was intensified in the 1980s, the point at which Greece became an EU member could be an interesting starting point in the study of hierarchies and the formation of regions and peripheries. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the political transformation at the northern borders of Thessaloniki in the 1990s became an opportunity for a repositioning of both the city and the festival within the region, but also in the landscape of European festivals. The internationalization of the festival

Film Festivals in EU South-Eastern Peripheries  •  83

in 1997 coincided with European enlargement, and the shift of Thessaloniki towards its other pasts (Ottoman, Jewish, etc.). The collapse of the formerly divided world and the EU politics of identity that celebrated multiculturalism opened the way for a re-­examination of the city’s past under the umbrella of cosmopolitanism, as an Ottoman city-­port (Agelopoulos 2000; Stroux 2015). This nostalgic vision of the imperial past as inclusive seems to have been interpreted as an innate characteristic of the city in order to host the increasing number of immigrants from its neighbours in the Balkans,6 but it soon proved an illusion (see Hatziprokopiou 2012). These changes were linked to economic reforms as well, for example, privatization of the port and other public infrastructure. The shift was connected to a more systematic policy for the attraction of tourism to Thessaloniki as a means of economic development. In this way supranational, national and local discourses from various sides (policymakers, politicians, municipalities, merchants) were tuned to the vision of Europeanization. The internationalization of the festival took place in a newly gentrified space: the old docks. The gentrification plans first transformed the old commercial area of Ladadika (adjacent to the port), which had fallen into decay since the 1960s and 1970s when the city started to expand eastwards and westwards. The regeneration of these areas included a new law on the protection of cultural heritage funded by the EU and national sources. The urban planning tried to capture and materialize the EU vision for cities, wherein cultures and heritage became central for urban economies (Gospodini 2007). The city and its port suddenly became central for the connection of the eastern Mediterranean and the inner Balkans. This change was intensified in the 1990s with the announcement of Thessaloniki’s selection as the European Capital of Culture. Ladadika turned into a zone for cultural industry, focusing mostly on entertainment and tourism (bars, coffeehouses, galleries). The docks became a space of high culture, hosting the festival as well as four museums. In parallel, there was an organized effort to turn Thessaloniki into a city-­break destination (see Patikas 2015). The project coincided with Yiannis Boutaris’s term as mayor of the municipality (2011–19),7 during which he introduced more revisionist memory politics regarding the contested past of the city (concerning Jews, Turks and Slavs) (Sintès and Givre 2015). In 1997, the Thessaloniki International Film Festival became international, with a mission to promote new cinema from around the world and to showcase Greek production (see Papadimitriou 2011, 2014, 2016). The festival was divided into two branches, the Greek and the international sections, and it organized a market and strengthened its educational activities all around Greece, with special programmes for schools and specialized publications. In terms of administration, the new law continued to maintain the balance between the local elites (municipal and the HELEXPO) who

84 • Coproducing Europe

sat on the board of directors and the political centre (the political elite); for instance, the head of the board was appointed directly by the Ministry of Culture. A film market (the Agora) was also founded in 1997. Greek and foreign film-­makers and other professionals could meet each other there, but the festival also launched a special section, the Balkan Survey (Maties sta Valkania) (1994), which promoted and exhibited the cinematic creation of the Balkans as a way to bridge difference (Kerkinos 2013: 251–52). Processes such as the gentrification I briefly described above or the shift to a creative economy (tourism and festivals) are some of the tools Hadjimichalis (2019) described above as the recipe for regional development and the wider agenda of global neoliberal economics that resulted in the unequal production of space (Harvey 2005), such as peripheral cities, festivals and identities. This inequality involved not only official public discourses and policies, but also the inhabitants of Thessaloniki and the festival’s audience. For example, a group of film-­makers calling themselves I Kinimatoghrafistes stin Omikhli (Film-­makers in the Fog) emerged when Toby Lee (2013, 2020) was doing fieldwork. The main target of the group was the state system of awards, structures and the distribution of funding and selection. Although this movement was mainly directed against the (Athenian) state and national film policies, as Lee’s ethnography argued, the group’s agenda induced reactions from various other groups in Thessaloniki that believed that the creator’s demands put the festival and its relationship to the city at risk. These groups included people of different ages and statuses (students from the film school who acted as volunteers at the festival, audiences, artists and academics from the city) who interpreted the group’s protest as part of the centre–periphery conflict, and an ‘attack’ on the city’s interests. In this sense, although the Film-­makers in the Fog accused the state’s film policies (in other words, the Athenian centre) of corruption and clientelism, accusations that were also part of local artist criticisms of the Athenian centre, they did not seem to address local worries. These local publics allied with the state, whereas the Film-­makers in the Fog challenged the system of (state) patronage that controlled their artistic expression and described the locals’ discontent as provincial. Lee (2020) traced the explicit conflict between the local and the national, produced in the context of globalization and neoliberalism. Rightly, she argued that ‘the more politicised, contentious public sphere was replaced by a more “civil” one that better served the interests of that cultural economy’ (ibid.: 200). The economic crisis that the city went through multiplied the significance of the international festival, as the latter was often used as a symbol of openness, creativity and art that could go against the provincial and backward representations of Greece by international media during that period, and could instead stress the potential of the country and the city for a different

Film Festivals in EU South-Eastern Peripheries  •  85

future (see Deltsou 2017). Following a similarly outward-­looking artistic event, Salonica Otherwise,8 organized by an activist group in 2019, Deltsou (ibid.: 145) stressed that the ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ of the event drew from the potential of arts and creative industries for the future of the city. The event, nevertheless, tried to support the city’s ‘coeval and coequal participation in hegemonic Europeanness’ (ibid.: 137). In its adhering to this hegemonic vision, Deltsou reflectively wondered how much this event fostered a crypto-­colonial condition whereby even an alternative future was embedded in a hegemonic becoming. Similarly, Eric Hirsch and Sharon Macdonald (2007), whose argument I discussed in Chapter 1, argued that the EU vision of creativity entails a hegemonic understanding that ties creativity to novelty and the entrepreneurial self. As a result, the depoliticization of the social and cultural space was a truly political project, multilayered and complex, that helped to form the different scales of globalization, and in this way, it created the new and diverse political engagements that went beyond traditional Greek national politics. The festival and arts played a significant role in this process of internationalization and Europeanization of Thessaloniki, as part of the emerging creative economy that was at the heart of these changes. What did these economic and cultural changes signify for the other emerging regional festivals and film markets and their host cities?

Sarajevo: The Festival of Hope 18 March 2017 Ana, my host (40), was born in the city of Sarajevo. She was in the city during the siege and suffered personal losses during those days. She then left to study and work in Western Europe, and after that she returned to contribute to the rebirth of her birthplace by joining an NGO. We were now sitting at the centre of the Baščaršija (bazaar) for a few minutes after iftar (the evening meal during Ramadan). Next to us was a group of women, two in their fifties and one in her twenties. The young one had two children. We were waiting to be served the standard menu after fasting for the day: tsorba (soup) and dolma with vine leaves, cabbage-­leaves and onions, accompanied by juice. Although Ana did not practise religion, she loved iftar. ‘It is such a vibrant time, there is sunlight until late in the night [iftar was in June], the shops in the market are open until late and people are in the streets.’ She was right. Men and women of all ages with headscarves or Western clothes (or both) poured into the market for dinner or an ice cream or baklava. Ana asked me questions about my research, and I told her about my visit to the festival’s headquarters.   In Ana’s words, ‘The festival started as a community thing, a people’s festival, but now it is more [pause] transnational.’

86 • Coproducing Europe

  A few days later I was in the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide (1992–1995). The lighting was dim: there were only candles brought to the hall by the audience. Haris Pašović, a film and theatre director among other things, addressed the audience. ‘This film tells us about travelling and dreams. And it talks about freedom. And this festival within Sarajevo, it tells us that freedom exists even beyond the end of the world’; these are the words of Pašović and a short documentary (1993) about the first festival. The first festival took place in 1993, when the city and its people felt that they were living through the ‘end of the world’. Back then, the city was looking for a fragment of light in those dreadful times, when underground passages and shelters meant life, whereas ordinary public space such as streets and squares, and even flats, were exposed to death. Watching a film was a risky business during that time, but more than ten thousand people attended the opening of the festival. I was alone in the room when I watched the film in the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity. The theme of the room was civilian resistance practices during the siege. The reality of today’s festival was quite different, however, as Ana’s comments indicated.   Outside the museum the streets of Sarajevo were full of people. Branilaca Sarajeva (Defenders of Sarajevo Street) runs west to east in the centre of the city. In 1993 the street was divided into two halves, Branilaca Sarajeva and Zelenih Beretki (Green Berets), the latter referring to the volunteer army unit formed in 1991 to defend Sarajevo. The two streets were not far from Obala Kulina Bana, the street next to the bank of the Miljacka River and the Latin Bridge, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914. This moment was represented in the film The Day That Shook the World (1975), a coproduction between the former Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Germany. The film was one of the main exhibits in the City Museum, which was located just a few steps from the bridge, reminding us of the fragile boundaries between cinema and reality.

Kenneth Turan’s (2002) book about festivals and their connection to global, national and local politics argued that the Sarajevo Film Festival strongly pushed a geopolitical agenda in comparison to the old festivals of Cannes or Venice. Film festivals have in fact always pushed a political agenda. In Mila Turajlić’s documentary Cinema Komunisto (2010), the shot of Tito and his wife at the Pula Film Festival, and their parties for the festival winners, related the story of a country that envisioned a middle way between Western capitalism and Eastern socialism. Tito, like the early Bolsheviks of the October Revolution, was a great cinema lover. His republic organized film festivals shortly after the Second World War. Tito’s love and support for film propaganda and education was translated into the construction of a solid circuit of festivals: the Pula Film Festival and the Yugoslav (now Belgrade) Documentary and Short Film Festival in 1954 made the former Yugoslavia one of the most advanced countries in cinematic festivals in the post-­Second

Film Festivals in EU South-Eastern Peripheries  •  87

World War period. Pula showed national productions (films produced in Yugoslav studios), whereas the Belgrade International Film Festival (FEST) principally focused on international cinema production. In the 1960s alternative festivals, such as the Genre Experimental Film Festival (GEFF) (1963, 1965, 1967 and 1970, Zagreb), ANIMAFEST in 1972, the amateur film festival MAFAF (1965–90, Pula) and the Alternative Film Video Festival (1982–90) were introduced (Jelenković 2020: 84–89). As Jelenković noted, most of the festival dates coincided with important dates for the Yugoslav republic, such as victories in the Second World War (ibid.: 80–81). Today, the Sarajevo Film Festival is a reminder of many things. It had two beginnings: one was under the blockade, as a festival of the people organized around the International Theatre Festival and led by the Dramatic Arts Academy Professor Haris Pašović, who launched the Beyond the End of the World Sarajevo Film Festival. The other beginning was after the war in 1995, when the team of the Obala Art Centre, a non-­profit organization, launched the second Sarajevo Film Festival, borrowing the idea of an open-­ air festival from Locarno. They initiated the Metalac Open-­Air Cinema in the spacious playground of the First Sarajevo Grammar School. At first the size of the festival was moderate, with the objective to screen international films already shown at other film festivals that combined regional production with Hollywood blockbusters, but soon, the Sarajevo Film Festival became a leader in the periphery, both as a regional cinematic market and as an artistic event where regional talent was discovered. The Sarajevo Film Festival was not the only thing that had two beginnings, however. The city itself seems to have had many new beginnings in recent decades. The XIV Olympic Winter Games in 1984 were a pivotal moment for the city, just after Tito’s death and during an economic crisis that had started in the mid-­1970s. Mega-­events such as the Olympics promoted an agenda of modernization and globalization, according to Maurice Roche (2011). In the context of Sarajevo’s Olympics, as Zlatko Jovanovic (2017) argued in a paper discussing the impact of the Winter Olympics on strengthening a Yugoslav identity, the economic crisis was postponed for some years and the collective imagery of the city as a miniature Yugoslavia and the ideal of the socialist brotherhood was made stronger. In practice, it meant short-­term jobs and new housing infrastructure (ibid.: 772–73), but also ‘bold post-­modernist attempts’ at public architecture, such as the Canary Building in Sarajevo (Zejnilovic and Husukic 2018: 24). The Olympics in post-­Tito Yugoslavia was a successful experiment that showed allegiance to the late leader’s ideals. For Sarajevo itself, the Olympics promoted the Yugoslav identity of the city and were turned into ‘a trope inseparable from the very idea of Yugoslavness’ (Jovanovic 2017: 780), and they internationalized its reputation and recognition. As a result, it seems that both Thessaloniki and Sarajevo went through

88 • Coproducing Europe

a process of change in the 1980s related to internationalization and openness (the Olympic Games for Sarajevo and the EU funds for Thessaloniki). For Sarajevo, however, the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia had catastrophic results. It was only after the war that the city started to find its feet again. In 1998, the Sarajevo Canton Development Strategy until the Year 2015 started to take effect. The project initiated the first post-­war reconstruction of the city, which was supported by the international community (the World Bank, IMF and EU), involving privatization, the formation of public spaces and support for public buildings. As Martín-­Díaz (2014: 309–11) noted, the cooperation of local and international donors working closely with local authorities was of the utmost importance. In 2015–16, Bosnia–Herzegovina started its accession process as a potential candidate for membership of the EU. The reconstruction not only supported the city’s redevelopment after the war, but also, as in Thessaloniki, envisioned turning it into a leading city of the periphery. Today, the Sarajevo Film Festival has a transnational character, according to Ana. EU funding and Eurimages9 contributed to the festival’s costs, but also to the development of the new Bosnian film industry. In addition to EU funding, the festival is supported by many private and other sponsorships (local and international private companies, NGOs and embassies, mainly from Central and Northern Europe, but also from the Middle East). The film industry used more and more resources from the Creative Europe fund, a sign of the industry’s gradual adaptation to the European and global markets’ demands for financing movies. Every year, the festival concentrates almost one hundred thousand visitors in Sarajevo (Jukic 2015) and has an impact on the city’s economy (Petkovic 2018). Many of the visitors are professionals involved in the film industry, coming from all around the world, but predominantly from the Balkans and the former Yugoslav region. The festival programme includes a section of national cinematography connected to the Association of Bosnia– Herzegovina, European and international film production, and also special screenings that showcase films from other regional festivals (Sofia, Istanbul, Transylvania and so on). There is also (since 2018) a special section called True Stories, in which testimonies and histories of the war period are presented to creators willing to produce a film based on those stories. In 2019, UNESCO recognized the festival ‘as an event in line with the priorities of the Organization aimed at promoting dialogue and tolerance through the arts’, contributing to peace-­building in south-­eastern Europe (Sarajevo City of Film 2019). This was something that the city embraced wholeheartedly. The City of Sarajevo has also invested in the festival, despite its difficult economic conditions. For example, the municipality gives a special Sarajevo City of Film Project grant to directors who bring a film to their city. Thessaloniki’s

Film Festivals in EU South-Eastern Peripheries  •  89

authorities, although they recognize the significance of the festival for international promotion, seem to lack stronger policy strategies regarding the festival. A report by Olsberg SPI in 2018 showed that the festival generated USD 30.8 million for the local economy and provided jobs for 1,385 workers (CINETALKS 2018). ‘For a week, it seems that we live somewhere else, but then nothing changes’, said Pedram, a freelance web designer and film lover who I interviewed in June 2017. Like Ana, Pedram worked in a creative industry; however, although he was a fan of the festival, he was more sceptical in terms of its impact on the real needs of Sarajevans. Although Ana and Pedram shared in the festive atmosphere, they seemed to feel excluded for the rest of the year in terms of its effects on the city’s economy. Festivals shape a cosmopolitan audience in the sense of an audience prone to difference and Otherness (of language, cultures, experiences and identities). Ana and Pedram’s comments gave transnationalism and internationalization (see Beers, Berghall and Poot 2007) a different meaning, however, as they postulated that socially and economically stratified inclusion is generated. This discontent seems to allude to the very processes of integration of the city into global capitalism, but also to the expectations that these young people have of economic and social dignity, which they seem to be deprived of by their precarious jobs. The discussion of the Thessaloniki Film Festival postulated the different scales of the discourse of Europeanization (EU, national and local) and the ways that they were connected to Thessaloniki’s urban transformation, but also its peripherality as part of the division between the Athenian centre and the periphery where Thessaloniki’s inhabitants felt that they belonged. Similar trends of regeneration and transformation can be found in the case of Sarajevo. The end of the war and Europeanization set the groundwork for a new beginning whereby the peripherality, due to its socialist past, of the Sarajevo Film Festival was an opportunity to create a leading event in the region; but as in Thessaloniki, it also highlighted divisions centred around economic inequalities, as the festival in Sarajevo holds a more prominent position in the economy and culture of the city (and the country) than that of Thessaloniki. The film festivals in both cities cannot be considered only as ruptures in quotidian city life or regular rites held over time, but as multidimensional spaces that have different effects on the cities and their people. Some of these effects seem to continue the liminality that these cities or their people feel in relation to dominant economic and political orders.

90 • Coproducing Europe

Tbilisi’s Festivals 17 June 2018 When I did my PhD fieldwork in Tbilisi (2003–4), Rustaveli Cinemas, one of the first multiplex cinemas in the capital, was considered, alongside the McDonalds, a sign of change. Originally, the building was used as a theatre that could hold twelve hundred people. It was an example of the Stalinist architecture on Rustaveli Avenue, the main boulevard of the Georgian capital, and combined colonial and socialist architectural elements. In the façade, in the vaulted niches on the second floor, there were four statues that depicted the different social groups of Soviet society. In 1999 the theatre was turned into a cinema that hosted the latest American blockbusters and many premieres. My first visit to Rustaveli Cinema was the world premiere of the independent documentary Power Trio (2003) by Paul Devlin, an American who arrived in Georgia when the Georgian government privatized Telasi Electricity and sold it to the US corporation AESCorp. His experience as an employee of the company was revealing of the experience of transition. Rustaveli was filled with both young and older people, and the red carpet hosted many of the local participants in the film. I revisited Rustaveli after the war in South Ossetia in 2010 when the Georgian film War and Marriage premiered. The film fictionalized a real event from the war when a Russian attack interrupted a Georgian marriage in Samachablo/South Ossetia. The hall was almost empty, and the 8–10 people there did not seem very impressed with the film. The young girl sitting behind my seat was complaining to her boyfriend that they should have gone to Toy Story 3.   Today, big posters of the US blockbusters dominate the main entrance hall of Rustaveli, together with the popcorn machines. English was substituted for Russian in dubbing (see Sherouse 2017: 139 on competing modernities), especially after the so-­called Rose Revolution of 2004. Discussing coproductions and festivals in the back yard of a renovated house that had been turned into a fashionable café-­bistro with freshly made cucumber lemonades and light salads, Tamuna seemed critical of the lack of infrastructure in Tbilisi. She noted, ‘there are no Europa10 cinemas in Tbilisi. Festivals are hosted in commercial cinemas such as Amirani and Rustaveli. It’s terrible. You go to the festival, and you see a poster of James Bond!’

Another term was introduced in the 1990s to describe the shifts in the urban centres of the socialist world, that of the ‘postsocialist city’. This term tried to capture the impact of the transition on the former socialist cities (the collapse of the public sector, state funding and infrastructure; de-­urbanization; the increase of informality; and privatization) (Hirt, Ferenčuhová and Tuvikene 2017). It was soon realized that the term was not adequate to capture all the interconnected processes and experiences of the cities emerging from the socialist framework. Twenty-­five years after the collapse of the socialist bloc, the IMF (Roaf et al. 2014) issued a report on the changes that had reformed

Film Festivals in EU South-Eastern Peripheries  •  91

the former socialist societies. It included certain photographs from before and after. The photographs depicted the transition from state monopoly to private ownership, the rise of the free market and improvement in public transport in an almost iconic way. I imagine that the change I described above in the façade of Rustaveli’s Theatre could be a visual testimony to that change. The introduction of structural reforms was rapid and violent, and led to excessive brain drain, inequalities and class divisions, reshaping the old elite and creating a new one. The launching of two festivals in Tbilisi was not irrelevant to the urban transformation that the city went through after the 1990s. As Salukvadze and Golubchikov (2016: 3) noted, Tbilisi lost almost 15 per cent of its population in the 1990s due to emigration, or people returning to the provinces, to deindustrialization and de-­urbanization, and also to decline in birth rates. It was only in the 2000s, after the Rose Revolution, that the real estate market started to recover, with new housing projects funded by international donors and public funding. Examples of this new era include the renovation of the Iberia Hotel as part of the Radisson hotel chain and the gentrification of Old Tbilisi (ibid.: 8–12). The war in South Ossetia/Samachablo and the economic crisis of 2008 slowed these changes down (see Georgia Urban Strategy 2015), but Tbilisi seemed to be following the same path, metaphorically speaking, as Sarajevo and Thessaloniki (Pilz 2018: 57–81). The auspices for the Tbilisi International Film Festival were not very good. It started in 2000, and by 2002 was in serious threat of closing for financial reasons. Despite the tradition of All-­Union Festivals (festivals that involved all the Soviet republics) in the former USSR, which subsidized the organization of festivals and used them as a political mechanism to show off the republic’s artistic accomplishments and to celebrate ethnic pluralism, the contemporary festivals in Tbilisi (both for documentaries and fiction films) were the results of private sector investment. They were founded by the Prometheus Cinema Art Centre, a civil society organization.11 In this sense, compared to the festival in Sarajevo, Tbilisi International Film Festival was also an initiative of ‘the people’, albeit a limited number of intellectuals. According to Gaga Chkheidze (Micucci 2014), the head of the festival, who used to work for the Berlin Film Festival (in the Focus on New Cinema section), they inaugurated a festival that would promote the first and second feature-­length works of directors. In 2004, Prometheus12 received funding from the Georgian National Film Centre, and in 2006 it received support from the Georgian Ministry of Culture and Tbilisi City Hall. The festival now involves more than thirty sponsors as various national, transnational, public and private partners, including the Ministry of Culture and the Georgian National Film Centre. There is a regional sponsor, the Adjara Autonomous Region, and many private companies such as hotels, wine

92 • Coproducing Europe

factories, telecommunication companies and banks. The festival’s objectives are to introduce the Georgian public to new works of high artistic quality, to communicate new trends in the art of cinema and to support the development of the Georgian film industry after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The festival includes national and international film sections and special screenings supported by different embassies. The Tbilisi festival seems to envision its role as taking different but interwoven directions. The first is in the preservation, recognition and promotion of Georgian cinematography and film-­makers, both past and present. The second is in promoting new European cinema, as well as world cinema, in Georgia. Georgian cinema is thus intended to be well embedded in and networked with current cinematic trends in Europe and in global production. The special section on German cinema should be noted. As I will discuss below, Germany is an important partner for the festivals and coproductions in Georgia. Both the German Embassy and the Goethe Institute played a significant role in the festival’s funding. In terms of content, the Tbilisi festival hosts a variety of cinemas in the competition programme. There is an emphasis on films from Southern and Eastern Europe, however, as well as from the former Soviet Union. It also acts as a space to present regional cinemas, from Armenia, Azerbaijan and also Ukraine. Unlike Sarajevo, Tbilisi does not have a section dedicated to documentaries, but has had an independent documentary festival, CineDoc-­Tbilisi, since 2013. This festival, the first documentary festival in the region, is run by an NGO, Noosfera, and has a promotional, educational and cultural mission. Noosfera organizes screenings and training sessions for film-­makers and media professionals, and is also active in advocating human and social rights in Georgia. The festival is funded by various national and international donors, such as the European Union (Creative Europe/MEDIA), Amnesty International/Movies that Matter, the IDFA Bertha Fund, the Reserve Fund of the President of Georgia, Tbilisi City Hall, the Ministry of Culture, the Georgian National Film Centre and the Open Society Foundation Georgia. Noosfera organized Doc Stories Black Sea in 2012, in partnership with IDFA and Art-­Doc (Romania), a workshop that trained documentarists in storytelling and took place consecutively in Tbilisi, Sibiu and Amsterdam. Apart from the similar missions of these three festivals, their shared values include the recognition of national and European film cultures, audience formation and educational programmes. It seems that there is an emerging pattern in the Sarajevo13 and Tbilisi festivals that differentiates them from that of Thessaloniki. Both these festivals were initiated through the efforts of the people, often called civil society. The formation of civil society in the former socialist societies has been a major goal, as it was connected to the agenda of democratization and the

Film Festivals in EU South-Eastern Peripheries  •  93

funding invested in those countries. Discussing this issue in the period of transition in Poland, Michal Buchowski (1996) argued that civil society is both a technology of governance and a form of pressure on the ruling government. This pressure does not always conflict with the government. In this sense, socialist political systems were inspired by the Aristotelian idea of the coexistence of society and state. Socialist political engineering encouraged an institutional pluralism representing different social interests in central political mechanisms through ideological conformity. This centralized pluralism gradually became a solely bureaucratic system that did not represent social plurality, but the Party’s agendas and individual interests in Party politics. Nevertheless, Buchowski argued that society evaded the tight rule of the authorities even within this institutional pluralism, and thus, various informal groups of people found a way to challenge the dominant discourse. For example, there were instances of emerging publics expressing discontent with the impersonal and bureaucratic state socialism in the former USSR after de-­Stalinization. In 1956, there were protests in Tbilisi against Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s politics. As Blauvelt (2009: 652–68) argues, this protest, one of the first in the Soviet republics, taught the local administration and elites a precious lesson; it showed that playing out national sensitivities in public space could offer significant leverage in the power struggle with Moscow. For Blauvelt, this demonstration was inspiration for the following protests in the 1970s when the Soviet Supreme Court tried to change the status of the Georgian language. Following Buchowski’s argument, I would say that Western expectations of transition and international donors seemed oblivious to local understandings and expressions of emerging publics and solidarities, and this privileged a specific blueprint. This blueprint, as Steven Sampson (1996) argued following his study of postsocialist Albania, was connected to specific perceptions of democratization related to hegemonic political understandings of the socialist East, due to Cold War antagonism and the political agenda of democratization, which was market-­oriented. In this framework, a toolbox of best practices regarding programme management skills and sustainability was developed. As I have discussed, this vocabulary was not limited to ‘transition’. It was part of the shift to the new economies of knowledge and a creative economy that tried to integrate all aspects of social life and culture into the logic of late capitalism. Introducing this logic in the context of postsocialism offered Western capitalism the opportunity to apply its blueprint to the heart of Europe. As Susana Narotzky (1997) explained, the penetration of the exploitative logic of capitalism has extended in recent decades beyond the traditional production and labour of industrialist societies. Becoming hegemonic in the capitalist turn, culture itself was often invisible, or as Narotzky stated, ‘appear[ed] to be

94 • Coproducing Europe

de-­economised’, introducing relationships of exploitation (ibid.: 220). The agenda of transition was often neutral as regards this economic exploitation, under the pretext of bringing the EU peripheries into the orbit of the free market and development. The former socialist societies allegedly had to be trained and re-­educated in new skills and vocabularies and a new political and economic ethos in order to be accepted as equal (at least in theory) members at the end of enlargement (see Ghodsee 2017). The development of film festivals by NGOs, at least initially, was funded by Western and EU sponsors in order to build democracy and civil society. The internationalization of the festival of Thessaloniki in the 1990s was also part of this hegemonic (economic) culture, but Greece’s full membership of the EU made this shift part of a new strategic plan by the central government. The centralization of economics and politics in Greece in the 1970s did not allow for a multiplication of publics. The initial launching of the festival was an initiative of the young, leftist parea, who had strong symbolic capital due to the origins of their families. Their goal was to bring the new generation of Greek film-­makers into contact with European avant-­garde auteur cinema. In a sense, they tried to bring Greek cinema closer to the heart of Europe and European (high) culture, which, as discussed, was part of an elitist ­bourgeoisie – ­even if it was left-­leaning culturally. On the contrary, the projects of Europeanization in the 1990s had a more holistic target. They aimed to bring the whole of society closer to a specific idea of Europe. In his work Normalizing the Balkans, Dušan Bjelić (2016) underlined that the colonial condition entails first and foremost the imagination (and knowledge). EU enlargement is a process of imagining Europe, integrating differences into a common vision, and in this sense it draws from the colonial legacy that Bjelić addressed. This legacy was transformed during the past decades into a project in which diversity, difference, change and transformation are praised but still regulated and funded by the framework and technologies of Europeanization. The interconnections among festivals that have been represented as an ecosystem emerged within this process and these mechanisms of Europeanization. They should not be considered natural, but as products of complex geographies of power that aspired to integrate the periphery of south-­eastern Europe. Internalizing hierarchies and notions of inferiority within Europeanization, but also within the notion of postsocialism, the production of peripherality risked becoming an all-­encompassing idea of identity-­building. However, as the following chapters will postulate, the process provoked all sorts of mixed and ambiguous emotions that attempted critically to collaborate with Project Europe.

Film Festivals in EU South-Eastern Peripheries  •  95

Notes   1. The event took place at the School of Fine Arts, Thessaloniki, 24 April 2018.   2. Toby Lee (2020: 168) often refers to parea as ‘spaces of provocations, differences’.   3. The Techni Art Society was founded in Thessaloniki in 1951 by a group of local academics, writers, artists and intellectuals who aimed to revive the arts and public culture in their city after the ravages of the Second World War and the Greek Civil War (1946–49) (Lee 2013: 102).   4. The festival opened to these artists mostly after the fall of the military Junta (1974).   5. Thessaloniki became the capital of the Greek state when the Cretan politician Eleftherios Venizelos, supported by the Entente powers, went against the will of the king and the Athenian state, which did not want to enter the First World War on the side of the Allies.   6. For a critique of the use of modern terms such as ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘tolerance’, and their instrumentalized use within EU politics and policies, see Agelopoulos (2000).  7. Boutaris was the offspring of a wealthy wine-­producing family. His presence in the municipality increased the expectations of the city after many years of a series of conservative local governments accused of corruption. Boutaris developed friendly policies with all Balkan countries, even North Macedonia, which for years had been a taboo due to the political conflict regarding the name of the former Yugoslav country, and also with Turkey and Israel. He was also more open to social issues like LGBT rights, the burning of the dead, and so on. This openness caused reactions in 2018 when followers of the extreme right physically attacked him.   8. This event included various activities such as workshops, exhibitions, photo blogs and public interventions that imagined Thessaloniki as a public space in more outward-­ looking ways.   9. Bosnia–Herzegovina became a member of Eurimages in 2005 and Creative Europe in 2012, with full participation in the Culture and MEDIA subprogrammes since 2015. 10. Europa Cinemas is a network of cinema halls sponsored by Creative Europe/MEDIA for the promotion of European cinema. 11. The founding members of the Prometheus Cinema Art Centre were Gaga Chkheidze, Nino Anjaparidze, Lasha Bakradze, Davit Bukhrikidze, Besik Danelia, Guga Kotetishvili, Gaga Lomidze and Giorgi Kajrishvili. 12. This name is also used for the two main prizes, the Golden and Silver Prometheus. 13. Specifically, the second launching of the festival.

Chapter 5

From National Cinemas to European Coproductions

h Coproduction in the Greek Film Industry Athens, 9 April 2017 I met people from the Agora in Athens, home of the festival’s headquarters. There was a majestic view of the Acropolis as I left Aeropagitou tube station. Groups of tourists were out in hordes, with cameras and fancy smartphones, and young waiters and the employees of shops selling souvenirs and jewellery boutiques were trying to draw the attention of potential customers. Thinking back to my first impression of that encounter, my mind went to something the head of the festival had said in a speech at the Faculty of Arts at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, regarding the festival’s closer connection to Thessaloniki, which did not seem to apply in terms of the location of the headquarters at the Agora. The festival’s headquarters were in a rather unimpressive building with a dark entrance. At the front door, there were some posters. The offices were small, with boxes full of leaflets and information about festivals and films. People seemed to be busy. At the end of my meeting, Sophia and Thalia provided me with some of the festival material, and notably the annual catalogues that listed the participants in Thessaloniki’s coproduction market since its inception. They insisted that I should carefully examine the catalogues, as they included all the information that I needed.

The first coproduction market,1 in the form we know today, was created in Rotterdam. The CineMart, the film market of the Film Festival of Rotterdam, was founded in 1983, at first as a regular market for film sales. Subsequently,

From National Cinemas to European Coproductions  •  97

however, there was a need for investment in film, especially for creators at an early stage in their careers. A glance at the projects accepted in the market (from 1993 onwards) shows that CineMart was and still is a world market.2 Coproduction markets have been an important feature of film festivals since the 1980s. In the last chapter, I discussed the ways that film festivals in the three cases I am examining were developed in relation to their European perspective and Europeanization since the 1990s. In this chapter, I am going to consider the results of the film markets in terms of film coproductions funded by MEDIA and Eurimages. An Agora/market is a place described in the traditional Balkan and Mediterranean way as a family business. Our family are the eternal searches [sic] of important films (i.e. producers, sales agents, distributors, festival representatives), and as a loving mother we want to make sure they succeed. (Macia 2010: 3)

The above are the words of Maria-­ Pierre Macia, head of the Agora at Thessaloniki Film Festival. Her words made a strong connection between geographical and cultural proximity and between economics and creativity, and also symbolically used the language of kinship. She characterized the Agora as a big family, something that I will discuss in the following chapters. Most of the catalogues I analysed included a similar statement in the first pages. The catalogues, a genre of writing that I will also analyse in the next chapter, gave a short presentation of the film projects that participated in a similar way in both the Thessaloniki and Sarajevo markets, and some concise tables indicating the number of participants. In this chapter, I will discuss how coproductions were incorporated into the national policies of the three film industries I am examining. I will also postulate the ways in which official discourse and data (the ‘numbers’) were included in the catalogues and film databases from 1991 to 2016, the first twenty-­five years of MEDIA and Eurimages. As I will show, my examination is centred on regional clusters, very different from families, but also different from the way that Europeanization produced south-­eastern Europe. In 2002, the Thessaloniki International Film Festival launched the Balkan Script Fund, which contributed to the development of screenplays in the Balkan countries. Back then, the fund was unique in the regional film landscape. According to Christina Kallas, a scriptwriter, ‘the participation itself and the dialogue between colleagues was a positive experience for all the participants’ (quoted in Lee 2013: 87). The fund awarded four to five film projects EUR 10,000. The only prerequisite for the scripts was that they should premiere at Thessaloniki International Film Festival. The only exceptions from this restriction were the festivals of Cannes, Berlin and Venice. As one

98 • Coproducing Europe

of the people from the Agora noted, ‘you have to follow the flow and the flow stressed the importance of markets for film festivals’. The industry c­ entre – ­the ­Agora – i­n Thessaloniki was inaugurated in 2005 and was a spin-­off from the Balkan Fund. The Agora received support from the EU European Regional Development Fund under the Periphery of Central Macedonia (ESPA 2014–20) and Creative Europe/MEDIA. One of the Agora’s main missions was promoting coproductions. According to a report by the Foundation of Economic and Industrial Research in Greece (IOBE 2014: 9), one in every five films made in 2011 was a coproduction. Coproductions began to be developed in the 1980s in the Greek film industry. Film policies in Greece were non-­existent during the post-­war period. The Greek Ministry of Industry controlled cinema policies (similarly to other European countries). In the 1970s, the Greek Film Centre was founded under the label General Film Enterprise (Geniki Kinimatografikon Epichiriseon). The centre was affiliated to the Greek Bank of Industrial Development (ETBA). In 1980, the Ministry of Culture became responsible for the film industry and submitted the first Law on the Cinema (597/1986). In terms of production, the law ensured that 50 per cent of tax from public spectacles was distributed for the development of ‘art films’, and introduced tax rebates, loans and credits for producers. In 2002, Greece signed the European Coproduction Convention (3004/2002), which filled the void of bilateral agreements for the Greek film market. The economic crisis hit the Greek cinema market hard, causing a fall in ticket sales and restrictions in state funding (Papadimitriou 2018; IOBE 2014: 13). Coproductions became a lifeline for Greek creators, as in other countries of the postsocialist Balkans. A new law was passed in 2010 and took effect in 2013. According to this law, international coproductions within the region of the European Coproduction Convention could be funded with a maximum sum of EUR 50,000, and EUR 80,000 for other international coproductions. However, the lack of infrastructure (studios, film offices etc.), which was being developed in neighbouring countries in the meantime (IOBE 2014: 53–54), and a complicated bureaucracy acted as impediments to attracting film productions to Greece.3 According to UNESCO, Greece was placed just below average among the twenty-­seven EU member states in 2011 (ibid.: 9), with nine coproductions per year (forty-­three films is the average for the EU). This number was increased to forty-­three in 2015 (UNESCO Support for the Film Industry and Film Culture 2016), showing the gradual significance of coproductions in the landscape of the Greek crisis. The effort that supported this direction was a joint French–Greek coproduction fund in 2018 (‘Symfonia Sybaragogon’ 2018). The biggest achievement was that noted by Karalis (2012: 280): ‘[l]ocal stories must be told for the local communities, but in styles defined by global discourses and the challenges of a technology developed in different contexts

From National Cinemas to European Coproductions  •  99

Figure 5.1.  Timeline – Greece. © Eleni Sideri.

and for diverse needs.’ A similar argument was made by Demos, from the Greek team at Eurimages, in our interview. The participation of Greece as a full member of Eurimages from 1988 and of MEDIA from 1990 gave Greek creators the opportunity of extra European funding. At first, many collaborations were formed ‘blindly’, as one of the Greek representatives of Eurimages explained. The only aim was to obtain money. High-­status actors or directors of photography were thus used. Another practice was to decide to shoot in different locations, in different countries, without any reason in terms of the script’s needs. These coproductions were superficial and with no artistic value.4

It seems that at first, economic attractiveness was the only motive for creators from that generation to get involved in coproductions. Creators found a way

100 • Coproducing Europe

to ‘cheat’ the system. However, this ‘cheating’ was a practice connected to the creators’ feelings of mistrust, as I will discuss in later chapters. The introduction of the Agora and its various sections further supported coproductions.

Coproductions in the Bosnian Film Industry CineLink was launched in 2003. In the 1990s, cinema in former Yugoslav territories such as Bosnia–Herzegovina collapsed. Its revival was marked by an international coproduction (France, Italy, UK) that won first prize in the local festival and also the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film: No Man’s Land (2001) by Dani Tanovic.5 From that point onwards, coproductions became an essential feature of the cinema, as budgets and state funding were limited or non-­existent for years in post-­war Bosnia–Herzegovina. As Jasmila Zbanic (2006), the director of the acclaimed film Grbavica (The Independent 2006), noted: It’s kind of absurd to make films in Bosnia. We don’t have a single 35mm camera, we don’t have film laboratories, many professionals have left the country, most of the cinemas are destroyed. . . . We get some money from the federal film fund, some money from Bosnian television and sponsors, but it is 30% of the budget, max. We must go for European coproductions.

At the national level, the Association of Filmmakers of Bosnia and Herzegovina was founded in 1950. In the post-­war period, this association collaborated with the Film Fund on cinema promotion, development and education in the country. It organized the Festival of Film from Bosnia– Herzegovina (from 2003) during the Sarajevo Film Festival. The association’s activities are primarily directed towards directors’ professional training, funding, freedom of artistic creation, the dissemination of their work within the community and the improvement of cultural policies. The Ministry in the Republic of Srpska had a smaller budget for activities such as supporting film production or exhibitions (Zajec 2013: 161–62). There is also an Association of Filmmakers in the Republic of Srpska.6 The republic’s government has not set aside funds for cinematography; however, coproductions were initiated with the neighbouring Serbia in 2007 (ibid.: 167), and in 2009, a new law on cinema was passed that considered the Republic of Srpska an independent territory. The act announced the establishment of the Film Centre of the Republic of Srpska, a public institution that would deal with the administration of funds and serve as a film commission providing information. The economic crisis in Europe, however, reduced the republic’s budget by 70 per cent (ibid.: 168).

From National Cinemas to European Coproductions  •  101

At the city level, the Sarajevo Canton provided a little economic support for film producers who made films located within the city of Sarajevo. Theoretically, all cantons had the same power, but they did not have the means to use it. As Zajec (2013: 168) argued, this transfer of power to the cantons was ‘a hypocritical and ineffective project, since the cantons (especially the smaller ones) have no actual resources (financial or other) at their disposal’. In this complicated landscape, Zajec argued, different kinds of films were funded from different sources. For example, social films and documentaries were often sponsored by NGO funding (ibid.: 169–70). This short sketch of the political system and film institutions shows that the federal and city resources for the film industry are very limited. This is why Bosnia–Herzegovina’s participation in the European mechanisms of economic support was an important step for making films. Bosnia–Herzegovina became member of Eurimages in 2005 and Creative Europe in 2012 (European Commission Staff Working Document 2018), with full participation in both Culture and MEDIA sections since 2015. The MEDIA desk is based in Banja Luka, the capital of the Republic of Srpska (Zoran Galic, personal communication, 9  May 2017), and that of Culture in Sarajevo. Participation in the two programmes had a positive effect. CineLink (the Sarajevo festival’s market) developed and boosted a coproduction culture in the country. More than a thousand professionals participated in CineLink, and it ‘has become a major hub for Southeast European film professionals and has played a crucial role in the expansion of cinematic

Figure 5.2.  Timeline – Bosnia-Herzegovina. © Eleni Sideri.

102 • Coproducing Europe

coproduction in the region’ (CineLink Industry Days n.d.: 16). The market is supported by sponsors such as Creative ­Europe – ­MEDIA, Eurimages, IDFA, EAVE and Cineuropa; transnational organizations such as ARTE, HBO Adria, the North Macedonian and Czech Film Centres, the British Council, Berlinale, the US Embassy and Cinemas of India; regional organizations such as Al Jazeera Balkans, Robert Bosch Stiftung Berlin-­Brandenburg Board and Filmfurderung Hamburg Schleswig-­Holstein; and private sponsors such as Coca-­Cola. Both the Agora and CineLink tried to develop a multidimensional agenda to attract the industry’s interest. Both markets, apart from their main role in forming networks of creators, producers and distributors, tried to follow the main trends in the industry, such as the rise of online platforms and the popularity of television dramas, and new technologies and the ways that they affected cinema (3D, effects and so on). They also provided training sessions for professionals. Both markets also seem to have had one particular country among the big European film industries as their distinguished partner. France seemed to have a special position in Thessaloniki, with French experts holding key positions in the festival (e.g. the head of industry and head of the festival), and Germany had a similar position for CineLink (as a sponsor and a country that trained festival professionals and experts). In terms of procedures, there seems to have been a standardization. For instance, regarding selection, festival officials at both festivals told me that they tried to keep the number of selected projects small, around fifteen, so as to provide the best quality of services. Nevertheless, there has been increased interest in participating in film markets in recent years. Both markets said that ‘they receive more than a hundred projects each year’. People in both markets were adamant that they had a representative sample of cinema from south-­east Europe in their market activities. At the same time, they always had politics in their minds. For instance, as an Agora employee told me, when they selected a project from Israel, they would try to have work from Palestine too, provided that the quality was not compromised due to politics. For Sophia, this proliferation of submitted projects in Thessaloniki’s market is a sign of its success: ‘The crossroads shaped a festival culture for creators’, she said. Similarly, a female Bosnian cinematographer, Jema, who participated in CineLink for three years in a row, noted that her back-­to-­back participation had helped her develop a network, although she felt that her ‘veteran’ identity did not allow her to access resources available to younger colleagues. Conversely, Andrian, a Romanian cinematographer who had participated in the same market for the first time, complained about his lack of opportunities as a beginner. Although these are contrasting remarks, they stress the acute lack of funding and the competition it generates among the film-­makers.

From National Cinemas to European Coproductions  •  103

As the head of CineLink noted in many interviews in the local and international press, coproductions were not only considered investment tools but also part of widening the influences of the festival on a broader territory (see Lodderhose 2021). This was also noted by Dusan, an experienced cinematographer who started work in the last decades of Yugoslavia. He attends various festivals annually, including the AFI festival (Los Angeles), Berlin, Cannes, Rotterdam, Sarajevo and Toronto. In his opinion, the most important elements in a festival’s success are promotion and distribution. ‘Festivals contribute to coproductions, especially regional ones. But coproductions also mean festivals don’t end up being “self-­contained”’. The last word is crucial to the significance of coproductions in the festival circuit. For Dusan, coproductions generated connections that prevented festivals from becoming elitist, addressing only the interests of intellectuals and film critics. What, however, is the wider territory that the film market in Thessaloniki and Sarajevo seemed to generate? In terms of the countries represented in CineLink and the Agora, participants originated from Balkan or Eastern Mediterranean countries. As Sonya, a producer working for CineLink, told me in a coffee break during the workshop in Sarajevo, the success of CineLink is based on the limited number of works selected and a clear regional focus that creates a constant and continuous relationship between the festival, film-­makers and industry people. Discussing the countries participating in the Agora and the presence of neighbouring countries, Sophia was adamant that geographic and cultural proximity was the key to success in fixing a coproduction: Balkan people speak the same language. It’s very easy to coproduce among ourselves rather than with other people. In other words, it is easier to coproduce as a Greek with a producer from Turkey: the distance is small, we are interested in the same issues. We can understand each other in an easier way. The Czechs and Slovaks do it all the time.

Sophia’s sense of proximity was drawn from geographic and cultural closeness and a natural and symbolic common language. Regarding the position of the big countries, such as France or Germany, she was firm: ‘we are talking about an economic system, where we have a centre and a periphery. Europe, France and Germany are the centre and all the others, such as us, come afterwards; it’s an industry.’ Similar comments were made by CineLink’s officials. People from neighbouring countries speak the ‘same language’, symbolically or literally, and this was important in terms of cost reduction and audience tastes, and thus for broadcasters, sales agents and advertisers. I examined the projects participating in the coproduction markets of the two festivals, and tried to map the networks generated.

104 • Coproducing Europe

Figure 5.3.  Participation in Crossroads – Thessaloniki Film Festival. © Eleni Sideri.

Most of the countries taking part in Crossroads in Thessaloniki had already formed a collaboration with at least one coproducer. For example, France participated in fifteen out of the twenty-­four entries as coproducer. The most common coproducers with Greece were France, Canada (with whom Greece has a bilateral agreement), the US, Albania (as leader), Bulgaria (as leader), Germany and Cyprus. There was also a tradition of coproduction partnership with Turkey. The situation in Sarajevo’s market was similar.

 
  
 

 ,/

,.

,,

,+

4 1

3

1 1 1

0

.

- - - - - - -

, , , , , , , ,

! "&   

#



#  "& "  !

(! " ! & ! % 

$!   "  '
"  

&

 !

,1 ,/ ,,+ 3 1 / +

Figure 5.4.  Participations in CineLink – Sarajevo. © Eleni Sideri.

From National Cinemas to European Coproductions  •  105

It should be stressed that after their first participation in the CineLink market, the former Yugoslav countries seemed ready to participate with an established coproduction partnership. Serbia, after participating twice in a row, took part in 2009 in a partnership with Austria. Similarly, after participating seven times, Bosnia–Herzegovina participated in a partnership with Canada in 2013. North Macedonia did the same in 2015 with the Czech Republic after their first participation. In a sense, CineLink plays the role of a debutante ball, and this metaphor is not chosen lightly, as will be discussed regarding the process of matching the film projects with producers in the following chapters. In Sarajevo’s CineLink, as in other regional festivals, new countries are trained in how the rules of the game work internationally.

Coproductions in the Georgian Film Industry The acceptance of the country in Eurimages in 2011 and Creative Europe in 2015, as the first country from the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), allowed Georgia to access European coproduction funds, which created a lifeline for the Georgian cinema industry. Cultural policies were introduced by the Ministry of Culture, which supported and funded all the film institutions in the country, including the National Film Centre (NFC). The NFC had a limited budget for films and festivals, and mainly tried to create an outward-­looking film culture among industry people, organizing seminars for professionals and providing a consultancy on policies for the state. What stood out in Georgia in comparison to the cinematic landscapes in Greece and Bosnia–Herzegovina was that both festivals in Tbilisi were connected to civil society: Noosfera-­NGO was behind the documentary film festival, and Prometheus Cinema Art Centre was behind Tbilisi Festival. There were also some regional sources of funding, such as the Regional Film Fund of Adjara, and also Tbilisi Municipality, which provided some funding for films that used the city as their main location. According to Tamara Tatishvili, former president of the Georgian NFC: European coproduction is the future of sustainable development for the Georgian film sector. Due to the small and relatively underdeveloped distribution market, as well as limited financial support for production, European coproduction will certainly add value to local film output. It will also bring benefits to European countries, which are constantly looking for ‘fresh blood’ and new stories. (FNE Staff 2010)

Encouraging European coproductions was a key part of the Georgian NFC’s strategy for the development of the Georgian film industry. This was

106 • Coproducing Europe


 ,+

4

4

3

3 2 1

0

0 /

.

. , +

,

,

,

,

,

,

,

, +

+

+

,

+

-+,1 -+,0 -+,/ -+,. -+,- -+,, -+,+ -++4 -++3 -++2 -++1 -++0 -++/ -++. -++- -++, -+++ ,444 "


"!

Figure 5.5.  Timeline – Georgia. © Eleni Sideri.

confirmed in my interview with people from the MEDIA desk in Georgia in June 2017. Georgia launched its coproduction scheme for feature films in 2010 and launched a new call for documentary coproductions in March 2014. Traditional large cinema industries such as France and Germany had a strong presence at the restarting of Georgia’s film industry. As was the case of Bosnia–Herzegovina’s film policy, Georgia tried to create a regional hub, but political problems and weakness in film infrastructure in the wider region made it harder (e.g. unsolved conflicts, political tensions with Moscow). Participation in Eurimages (from 2011) and in Creative Europe (from 2015) were stepping stones for coproductions in Georgia. The first coproductions in the independent Republic of Georgia (formed in 1991)7 were with France due to the ethnic Georgian diaspora living in that country. One such case was that of Nana Dzhordzadze (1948–), one of the few female directors from the former USSR known in the West. She won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes (1987) with her film Robinsonada or My English Grandfather. Dzhordzadze left Georgia for France in 1990. Until 2010, France was predominant in Georgian coproductions. The situation started to change when Georgia joined Eurimages. In total, from 1995 to 2016, Georgia coproduced thirty-­ five films. Georgia was the leading partner in twelve of these, and in twenty-­three it had a minority role. Most were multiparty coproductions with an average of three countries. Other coproductions included Ukraine and Luxembourg, and one included Denmark. As noted by the representative of Creative Europe/ MEDIA in the Georgian Ministry of Culture, ‘it’s always France’, stressing the importance of France for coproductions in Georgia. The bilateral agreement

From National Cinemas to European Coproductions  •  107

between the two countries was signed in 1993 (French Decree No. 93-­1072) in Cannes. The agreement comprised not only a coproduction agreement (a funding division of 20:80 per cent between the two states, infrastructure use, technicians and artists’ collaboration) but also an agreement on promotion, distribution and exchange of films. The above information shows that there is limited cooperation among the former Soviet republics, and even more limited partnerships among the neighbouring countries of the South Caucasus. The cinematic ‘neighbourhood’ of Georgia mainly involves France and Germany, then Russia, Ukraine and Slovakia, then Romania, Poland and Turkey; finally, the weakest connectivity is with various countries of south-­east Europe, such as Greece and former Yugoslav republics like Slovenia and Croatia, but also with Spain, Italy and Estonia. France and Germany dominate the coproductions of the region, as in the cases of Bosnia–Herzegovina and Greece, turning these two countries into the engines of the film industry in Europe. Initially, the two countries were often major producers in two- or three-­party coproductions. Over the last decade, Germany seems to have been more active in that role, as it is less affected by the economic crisis. When I visited the Documentary Festival Headquarters in Tbilisi, Lado’s office was full of posters of documentaries that had been part in the festival, as well as a map of the area. He saw that I was looking at the map, and pointed out the emphasis put on regional networks. We are trying to make Georgia a hub for the region. No other country in the region has a documentary film festival. There is weak effort in Baku. There are political issues. We collaborate with independent film-­makers from Russia [and] Turkey.

Concerning coproduction markets, Lado explained: We introduced Pitching Doc two years ago and we organize summer schools for training and funding opportunities. During the festival days we also organize meetings between Georgian creators and investors, such as Germany and Holland, who are interested in the former Soviet countries.

Lado, the head of CineDoc, raised two issues. The first was the formation of a network with Tbilisi as the epicentre. This network extended into neighbouring countries such as Russia, Turkey and Azerbaijan, as far as I could see from the map of the Black Sea hung on the wall of this office, which included all these countries. One of the festival’s agendas was building a strong regional (film) identity in the South Caucasus, based on ‘a unique culture, common history and cultural values’, as Lado said in our discussion. As he noted when we spoke, coproduction is a way to ‘internationalize one’s production by

108 • Coproducing Europe

creating networks and broader distribution channels, and especially bringing a third eye to one’s film’. Proximity also plays an important role, however, as Lado noted. Major coproduction partners for Georgian documentarists are Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. For this reason, CineDoc Tbilisi has organized B2B Doc since 2014, an event at which creators from the region (Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Moldavia and Belarus) meet producers from abroad (Northern Europe, Scandinavia and the Baltics). There are also pitching presentations for documentarists to present their work.8 Similar events were organized by Tbilisi International Festival. This festival organized the first Industry Days in 2014, at which film-­makers from the Southern Caucasus could meet regional and international professionals (from Turkey, Serbia, Germany, the Netherlands and Luxembourg). Directors Across Borders (DAB) also participated in 2014, and the festival promoted the Regional Coproduction Forum, which was first organized in Yerevan, Armenia in 2007 (at the Golden Apricot Festival). The forum strengthened collaboration among the Eastern Partnership members and offered training and masterclasses. In a sense, these initiatives created the region, but also its peripherality (its dependence on the EU). Locality mattered, however. Tamara, a Georgian director of the new generation, noted that the economic and sociopolitical conditions in Armenia and Azerbaijan made it difficult to repeat the intensification of coproductions that characterized the former regional presence in the Caucasus, which is mostly limited to Turkey and Ukraine. As in the case of the former Yugoslavia, political instability and a lack of regional cinema leaders such as those found in Slovenia and Croatia, could act as an impediment. At the same time, new countries seemed to rise as mentors, transferring know-­how and knowledge. These countries are mostly connected to the EU, for example the Baltic states, but also the countries of the Visegrád Group (Dangerfield 2021). Tamara explained that coproducers with an interest in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union create a niche market. ‘They don’t profit from that but at least the cost is minimal’, in comparison to other EU film industries. When I asked Tamara, who was born in the 1990s, what the post-­Soviet category meant to her, she could not give an answer. After a couple of minutes, she said that it was just a label, ‘a brand’ – something that will come up in my discussions with other creators in the next chapters. Exploring the dematerialization of branding in every aspect of social life (from commercial products to ideas and nations) in the recent decades of globalization, Paul Manning (2010: 46) concluded that ‘[b]rands serve as semiotic figures for the characters on the stage of the global economy; however, they are frequently taken to figure the logic of the global economy itself.’ Labels such as the ones Tamara ­used – ­Eastern Europe and the post-­Soviet ­space – ­could shape a space that may be more marketable in terms of the

From National Cinemas to European Coproductions  •  109

cinema’s needs and lure audiences with interests in these ‘marginal cinemas’ of Europe. These labels could also consolidate an essentialist ontology of what ‘these margins are revealing legacies of past stereotypes and ideological hierarchies that are latent in economic categories’ (ibid.: 46). This branding produces clusters of geographic proximities and cultural geographies, in my case cinematic geographies (see Petridou (2012) for a discussion of the role of branding in the production of gastronomic geography in Greece). How do these clusters coincide with the EU’s clustering of regions? Furthermore, how does this clustering connect to the process of Europeanization?

Coproducing Cinema/Coproducing Regions Commenting on the significance of film festivals in the Balkans, Iordanova (2020: xxvi) argued that ‘[i]n the absence of strong regional distribution networks, the festivals, which also feature project markets, enable a variety of Balkan collaborations, often structured around linguistic trajectories’. These collaborations have a strong transnational character that overcomes strict taxonomies, like ‘Balkan cinema’. Trying not to reiterate these taxonomies, Iordanova, following Mette Hjort, considered these networks as spaces of intimacy and symbolic affinity, something that is supported by the mission statement of the EU film support mechanisms that promote the production of these spaces (often funded by the EU) as European. These affinities often stem from linguistic similarities, something that was also postulated in my research; language emerged in my discussions with officials and creators as an important denominator for connection or as having a ‘globalizing character’ (ibid.: xxvi). This character is often found in collaborations that the EU officially considers paradoxical (De Vinck 2011). In the past, there has been a gradual increase in labelling cinema production beyond national categories, such as ‘Greek cinema’ or ‘French cinema’. Categories such as ‘world cinema’ and ‘ethnic cinema’ were coined in the 1970s, often to describe postcolonial cinema industries that reached the festivals of the USA and Europe through the work of specific creators (auteurs), gaining world recognition. As critics have argued (see Dudley 2009), these labels perpetuated hegemonic and Western-­centric perceptions of cinema, reproducing bounded categories. What seemed to become differentiated in the 1990s, and emerged in many of the discussions I had in the field, was the gradual regionalism, geographic and political, that shaped the new categories launched after postsocialism, such as Balkan, Soviet and post-­Soviet, socialist and postsocialist, and Eastern European cinema. Although Greek cinema did not become such a category (it is not branded as Balkan), it is not excluded from branding. Maybe this lack of

110 • Coproducing Europe

fixed categorization deepened the lack of internationalization among film productions from Greece. What is known of the Greek cinema is reflected in its coproduction history and relates to the work of specific creators such as Angelopoulos and Lanthimos. Branding the work of these auteurs was also made possible within categories analogous to the above ones, but not in their specific clustering. For instance, Angelopoulos’s work was connected to world cinema in the 1970s, and Lanthimos with ‘weird cinema’ in the 2000s. These labels seem less territorially bounded and draw from the perceptions of high art attached to the European cinema. Today, as I have discussed, European cinema is significantly connected with the transnational collaboration and circulation of films supported within the framework of European integration. In their edited collection about Balkan cinema, Papadimitriou and Grgić (2020: 11) underlined that film coproductions should be considered mostly (but not only) as economic opportunities. These opportunities, though, should be examined in connection to the different scales involved. For example, in EU discourse, film coproductions are instrumentalized as political bridges as well, without losing their economic significance. Rightly, therefore, the two scholars pointed out the ways that film coproductions ‘reinforce pre-­existing cultural links’ but also generate ‘deep transnational links at a regional level’ (ibid.: 12). What interests me here, nevertheless, is the way that this branding contributes to these links and corroborates what Manning (2010: 46) described above as ‘the logic of global economy’, but also the politics of Europeanization. It appears that in the period of economic and political transformation since the 1970s, cinematic clustering reproduced colonial and hegemonic forms of knowledge-­production through taxonomies of meaning and power. The proliferation of these categories since the 1990s coincided with the global processes of deterritorialization, circulation and open markets, which increased competition in global film markets, but also with the political processes of neoliberalism that reshaped the world’s hierarchies. No former centre or periphery could escape the exigencies of the global economy. As Elsaesser (2005: 511) argued, ‘European cinema itself could be considered today as another label, addressing the world, in the world’s terms’. In other words, today, global market competition provincializes the cinema of Europe. Coproductions are not value-­free artistic choices, but emerge as strategies of economic and political planning. Two issues should be noted. The first is that the major participation of big countries such as France or Germany has not given them an advantage in the final selection via European film mechanisms. Affirmative policies often favoured the weaker member states. Secondly, the participation of countries such as France and Germany in coproductions with smaller film industries was capitalized on through the increase of their economic and cultural influence in the emerging regions.

From National Cinemas to European Coproductions  •  111

Nevertheless, network formation is not irrelevant to each country’s position within EU hierarchies. For example, the partial membership of Georgia in MEDIA affected its capacity for the distribution and exhibition of its films. Each country also presented a unique situation. The economic crises in both Bosnia–Herzegovina and Greece accelerated the opening of their film creators to multiparty coproductions. Coproductions do not follow a pre-­inscribed path. As a Eurimages official explained to De Vinck (2011: 476), European producers benefited from the fund, but they ‘have set up more “unusual” constructions recently’. The personal histories of creators and producers often lead to unusual collaborations, the official noted. In the final section of this chapter, I will try to map some ‘usual’ and ‘unusual’ collaborations in order to postulate how coproduction networks often challenge the formation of the regional clustering that emerged in the categories I discussed above. I used the open-­source programme Gephi to visualize the mapping. Most of the factors involved in the visualization of these maps, including frequency, modularity and density, captured proximity in a digital way, but as with physical mapping, the visualization can be problematic and privilege conceptual hegemonies. For example, the maps were produced by making the country under examination –Greece, Bosnia– Herzegovina or ­Georgia – ­central in each case. This is not irrelevant to the EU policy system that privileges nation states and members. Taking that into account, I treat the below visual mappings as partial, and will further challenge them in the following chapters, which will reveal how festival practitioners and creators (re)shape these networks in the space and practices of film markets. In the Map 5.1,9 from 1990 until 2016, it seems that Greek coproduction privileged the large, traditional European cinema industries, such as France (FR), Italy (IT), Germany (DE) and Spain (ES) (darker nodes), but also Turkey (TR). Slovenia (SL) appeared to be significant, but its connection to Greece was mediated through countries such as France or Italy, and it appeared in fewer coproductions. Greece seemed to have a strong relationship with Cyprus (CY), but the number of films produced was modest. The relationships that Greece developed with the grey-­coloured countries were significant. Most of the Southern and Eastern European and Black Sea countries were found in this network, including Albania (AL), North Macedonia (MK), Croatia (HR), Serbia (SE), Slovenia (SL), Georgia (GE), Romania (RO), the Czech Republic (CZ) and Poland (PO). Key countries for these collaborations were France and Germany, as they seemed to participate in all Greek agreements with the countries from south-­eastern Europe. Due to its decades of participation in Eurimages and MEDIA, Greece also opened its networks to coproducers (light grey-­coloured) that seemed paradoxical, such as partners from Brazil (BR), Australia (AU), Jordan (JO) and Syria (SY).

112 • Coproducing Europe

Map 5.1.  Coproduction networks – Greece. © Eleni Sideri.

These partnerships tended to be one-­off agreements and did not evolve into dedicated partnerships. Map 5.2 shows Bosnia–Herzegovina’s (BA) geographic proximity to, and the legacy of, the former Yugoslav countries in terms of collaboration. There has been an outward-­looking culture in Bosnia–Herzegovina since the 2000s, due to restricted national resources that led creators to take part in coproductions. As discussed above, Bosnia–Herzegovina was usually the minor producer. This connectivity is thus mediated by other countries. The predominant role of the neighbouring countries Croatia and Slovenia is significant in Bosnia–Herzegovina’s network. The important role of Germany should be noted; this country seems to have taken a central position within the Bosnian cinematic landscape due to its political interest in the Balkans. Map 5.2 suggests that the former Yugoslav space (via collaboration with Serbia (SE), North Macedonia (MK), Croatia (HR) and Slovenia (SL)) was reintroduced as a potential new cinematic market with financial benefits that shared cultural and geographic proximity with Bosnia–Herzegovina. Coproductions were central in the formation of this new, creative former Yugoslav space. Coproductions also seem to have acted as a centripetal force towards the old European centres (cinematic and otherwise), such as Germany and France, but also Austria (AT), a new EU country at the time

From National Cinemas to European Coproductions  •  113

Map. 5.2.  Coproduction networks – Bosnia–Herzegovina. © Eleni Sideri.

that envisioned playing a role in the neighbouring emerging markets of south-­eastern Europe. As discussed above, no similar neighbourhood is found in Georgia due to political reasons. France was the most frequent partner for coproductions with Georgia, due to its active political interest in the latter country, but also because of the Georgian diasporas in France since the early twentieth century. The ties to France mediated Georgia’s collaboration with countries from Eastern Europe, such as the Czech Republic (CZ), Slovakia (SK), Serbia and Montenegro (CS), North Macedonia (MK), Latvia (LV) and Estonia (ES). Georgian coproduction also reveals connections with EU countries such as Spain (ES), the UK (GB) and Belgium (BE). Georgia also seemed to have a relationship with Ukraine (UA), Turkey (TR), Poland (PL) and Romania (RO). Russia (RU) had numerous coproductions with Georgia, but fewer connections were mediated by this relationship. The only exception was the neighbouring state of Armenia (AM), again due to the strategic alliance between Russia and Armenia. Conversely, the relationship with the other Caucasian republic, Azerbaijan (AZ), followed a different path via Romania, Iran (IR), Ukraine and Turkey. Focusing on data and maps often creates an illusion that policies generate connections almost automatically. Drawing on the work of Annelise Riles (2000) on Fijian NGOs helped me to clarify this illusion. In her book, The Network Inside Out, Riles travelled to Fiji and found that although networks were often envisioned as remote and distant in the NGO reports and data collections, they were in fact embedded in multiple personal relationships, and even affinities, depending on the perspective from which they were

114 • Coproducing Europe

Map 5.3.  Coproduction networks – Georgia. © Eleni Sideri.

examined (local, national, regional or global). Networks in Fiji thrived due to personal relationships and connections. Personal networks transformed these relationships into various forms of capital. As Riles put it, networks and the language used to describe them could be metaphors for making the legitimate intimate relationships involved in the production of these connections. These relationships were often stigmatized from the Western-­centric perspective as corrupt, lacking transparency and meritocracy. I think Riles’s argument could be important for the Balkans as well, if we consider the stereotypes involved in the discourses of transitology and the clustering they produced in terms of regional presuppositions. The passage from the ‘Balkans’ to ‘south-­eastern Europe’ during the process of European integration were followed by a repertoire of policies drawing from discourses of modernization and economic and political development. These policies (re)produced both regional clusters and political hierarchies.

From National Cinemas to European Coproductions  •  115

Nevertheless, what the above maps showed was that these clusters in film practice can be relational. The cinematic neighbourhoods described above are shaped through fleeting connections based on economic and artistic agendas. Appadurai (1996: 178–88) coined the term ‘neighbourhood’10 as a space of sociality that can be ‘relational’ and ‘contextual’ (ibid.: 187). Appadurai’s work addressed the spatial turn that had already started to alter the social sciences in the 1970s, with a more socially sensitive and political engaged production of space. In this framework, locality became an aspect of social life, whereas neighbourhood was defined as a produced (by politics and policies) context, but also as a space generating context through living within it. Through the instrumentalization of the term ‘neighbourhood’ in the production of regional policies in the EU, such as the European Neighbourhood agenda, the idea was fixed and bounded both in terms of geographical proximity and content. This content emanated from the grand narrative of Project Europe, which ideologically motivated the process of Europeanization. Institutional shaping of the region, such as that launched by the EU integration ­processes – ­according to Anna Ohanyan (2018: 385), who studied international politics and regionalism in the post-­Cold War ­period – ­allowed a Western centre to ‘indirectly consolidate its economic presence and normative influence’ in the emerging markets and statehoods within a fragmented and volatile political environment. The failure of these regional designs, however, was often limited to the policies from above of elitist or privileged regional actors such as Western-­funded NGOs, which did not allow the broadening of regional integration (ibid.: 371–73). Conversely, the production of the cinematic neighbourhoods mapped above was in the conjunction of a policy-­oriented discourse and the desires of creators to make their films at all costs. Regions clustered within official political designs and policy-­orientated blueprints (in the language of technocracy) cannot be treated as real entities in as much as clustering people in families, as anthropology has taught us, cannot be seen as something more than a powerful metaphor. The visualization of cinematic neighbourhoods above should be considered as instances of the process of Europeanization in conjunction with specific creative agencies, but also with global crises (see also Bjelić 2018). For example, for the Greek film industry, the financial crisis of 2008 was a booster for film coproductions. Placing the material of this chapter within my fieldwork in the following two chapters will help me further determine how networks of film coproduction become meaningful for film market officials and creators. How are these networks generated from these people’s desires and emotions?

116 • Coproducing Europe

Notes   1. The first major market was organized in the Marche du Film at Cannes (1959). The producers Emile Natan and Bertrand Bagge thought that an annual meeting of professionals would also help to bring creators and international buyers together.  2. However, the countries involved in my study had a limited presence in comparison to the peripheral markets I examined in the same period: Georgia appeared with two projects, in 1991 (La Chasse aux Papillons, dir. Iosseliani) and 2010 (A Fold in My Blanket, dir. Russadze); Bosnia–Herzegovina had three projects, in 1995 (Perfect Circle, dir. Kenovic), 2001 (Gori Vatra, dir. Zalica) and 2002 (Kod Amidze, dir. Idriza Zalica); and Greece had two, in 2005 (Mirko Egklima, dir. Georgiou) and 2013 (The Lobster, dir. Lanthimos).   3. One example is the case of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018), which was transferred to Croatia even though the producers had intended to produce it in Greece, as bureaucracy forestalled the beginning of the shooting.   4. I would like to thank Pericles Choursoglou, who drew my attention to this aspect of the history of Greek coproductions.   5. This film is not recognized as a Bosnian coproduction in the Lumiere database, but it is considered the first Bosnian coproduction by the Association of Directors in Bosnia– Herzegovina.   6. I tried to contact them via email, with no luck.   7. In the 1980s, there was a coproduction between Basque TV in Spain and Soviet Georgia, for an adaptation of Don Quixote.   8. The legacy of the EU-­funded programme Black Sea Stories can be seen here.   9. I studied three factors to visually map the networks with Gephi: (1) betweenness centrality: this represents the significance of a node (the country examined in my research) in the formation of a network. It is the node that plays the role of mediator in the development of coproductions; (2) degree: this shows the number of collaborations (coproductions) for each node (country); (3) closeness centrality: this represents the distance of a node (country) from other nodes. The shorter the distance, the greater significance a node has for the network. The data is based on the databases I studied and the official data from the film markets of the three festivals, and concerns EU funding. 10. The concept of the neighbourhood has a long history in the study of urban centres, ethnic groups and racial policies. These policies have been interwoven with new takes on social and cultural citizenship centred on housing, education and urban development.

Chapter 6

Matchmaking

h Athens, 6 April 2017 Sitting opposite Sophia, one of the key persons at the film market at Thessaloniki Film Festival, in her very small office in Athens, a word stood out: matchmaking, the process by which creators are matched with the industry. I could discern the enthusiasm in her voice: We receive more than a hundred works [from which] to come up with the participating fifteen projects. Each project is read by three people, one independent expert (not a member of the Agora team), an Agora official and the director of the Agora. We check the budget, the creative team’s bios and the script. When the projects are selected, we produce our catalogue. This is a very important step. The catalogue provides the ID of the project [name and short bios of the creative team, synopsis of the script, creator’s vision, characters found in the script, some visual aids to put potential buyers in the mood and the aesthetic world of the film]. We send the catalogue to different producers, broadcasters and sales agents to whom we think the project could be of interest, and then we make a list of the appointments [rantevou in Greek, from the French rendez-vous, ‘a date’]. We put the tables and chairs in one of the warehouses at the docks [Thessaloniki’s old docks where the TIFF takes place] and our volunteers help them (film-­makers and producers) to make the connection [she uses the English word], to form a professional relation. The dates last thirty minutes to an hour. We don’t have a public pitching in our Agora because they can be stressful for the creators. Then again, for me as a professional, pitching can be helpful to check a project and a creator.

118 • Coproducing Europe

Sophia describes above a long process of selection and matching based on different steps, including screening and expert choices. Sophia did not study cinema before joining the festival. Although she is not a writer, she became an expert in script mentorship by attending a series of professional seminars funded by MEDIA and the EU. This is why one of the readers engaged in the selection process is a scriptwriter. Next, the full catalogue of partners of the Agora (the same structure was followed for the catalogue in Sarajevo) – broadcasters, production companies and sales ­agents – ­are matched to specific projects and creative teams. The submitted projects are subject to strict screening based on four criteria: (1) the quality of the script, (2) the economic strategy, (3) the team and (4) the creative background of the director. During her detailed description of the process, I could see how much Sophia cared about these projects. I began my discussion of regional film markets with reference to the head of the Agora in Thessaloniki. She referred to the Agora as a family, and to the role of the people working in the market as motherlike. Furthermore, in the last chapter, it was stressed that film networks are like affinal milieus that are initiated by spaces like film festivals funded by the EU. However, the production of these networks is regimented by EU policies, As this chapter will show, this affinity is linked to different legacies and agencies. Here, I will examine the vocabulary of kinship in relation to the central rite of coproduction markets, the matching between creators and film market professionals, including producers, sales agents, broadcasters and others. Moreover, this familial terminology recalls Riles’s argument that different languages coexist and compete with one another when collaboration and alliances shape networks. In the previous chapter, I postulated that the process of Europeanization gave rise to two kinds of languages. On the one hand, it has produced an apparently technocratic language, promoting specific skills, developing a toolbox of practices and prompting structural change. On the other, as this chapter will examine, it has also created a language used on the ground by professionals working in film markets, namely a language of kinship, emotions, intimacy. As the previous chapters argued, this discourse is not irrelevant to emotions. Europeanization is embedded in a deeper wish for attachment among European states and citizens as a way to create a European home. Social anthropology has long engaged with kinship. Studies of kinship were formative in the very shaping of the discipline, as kinship related to core issues of the universalism and relativism of human societies and cultures. Kinship, and its taxonomies and vocabulary, allowed early-­twentieth-­century social anthropology to establish its empirical and positivist loyalties. This framework shaped two main schools: the British School, which emphasized descent and genealogies; and the French School, where marriage and alliance

Matchmaking • 119

theory prevailed (Pina-­Cabral and Leutloff-­Grandits 2012). In the 1960s and 1970s, debates regarding kinship challenged the meaning and utility of these taxonomies, as research from different parts of the world provided more context-­sensitive arguments about the symbolic meaning of the relations among kin. Those relations were described as interdependent with categories like gender and the social performances involved in the everyday understanding of families (see Carsten 2000: 19–20). As Carsten (2000: 154) stressed, the legacy of these debates was the ‘embedded power of transformations and adaptations’ of kinship relations as they ‘emanated from the emotional and practical circumstances of people’s everyday lives’. This transformative power is important for this chapter, which traces the generative power of kinship as a metaphor for ­symbolic – ­national, transnational or ­supranational – ­families. This chapter will also explore how this generative power encourages emotional engagements among people and projects, which can be decisive for creators’ decision-­making regarding coproductions. These metaphors, as Carsten discussed, are used to form communities of different kinds and scales: they produce ‘a living actuality’ (ibid.: 162), which is transformed into allegiances with practical economic or cultural results. I will consider the use of the language of kinship as part of the transformation of cultural and geographic proximity into concrete agreements, like the production of films, networks and audiences. A central performance for generating this transformation in every coproduction market, and the central event that takes place at film markets, is matchmaking. According to Jovan Marjanović, head of CineLink: ‘Projects are chosen on our taste, on a hunch and on a personal knowledge of directors’ and producers’ work. We stand behind our choices and it is clear to the industry that the selection is curated’ (Senjanovic 2015). The personal ‘hunch’ or ‘feeling’, in the words of the people working in film markets, is developed from experience, a latent knowledge built up by these professionals. It highlights the difficulty of developing specific, standardized criteria for selecting film projects. There are always rumours among creators about corruption and a lack of meritocracy. For example, at both Thessaloniki and Sarajevo creators shared with me their suspicions regarding affirmative action policies encouraging participation by minorities, such as creators from ‘smaller’ countries, women or members of the LGBT community. These rumours demonstrated the growing competition and lack of funding, but also an awareness of the EU’s political agendas, and of how those agendas can affect film markets and festivals. Matchmaking is the heart of the coproduction market. Speaking Greek, Sophia used the French word rendez-vous (‘appointment’) to refer both to business appointments and personal dates. Her description of the process first recalled speed dating. That process, too, takes place in a room with

120 • Coproducing Europe

tables and a fixed amount of time made available to each potential couple. Although aspiring partners ‘can choose to which table they go’ or which producer they will meet, in Sophia’s words, the organizers send invitations to a list of specific partners. Nevertheless, there are also open days with meetings in a freer style. As Sophia admitted, if a film-­maker at the market wanted to meet another producer who was not on their list of rantevou (appointments), they could do so by asking the organizers to squeeze the meeting in during the breaks. Sophia recounted a successful case: a female scriptwriter and director, who was not included in the initial list because her film project was in a very early stage and she had not applied for the market, joined the Agora. There, she met her producer. Sophia shared this story to underline the importance of the market, especially for less established creators, and to demonstrate that it was good practice for all film-­makers to participate. As Sophia concluded, the young film-­maker’s case was a successful matching due to both sides’ ‘aesthetic proximity and good chemistry’, both of which are important for the process. Although I will discuss the question of chemistry in more detail in the next chapter, it bears noting that the entire matchmaking process is established to promote intimacy and chemistry. The term rendez-vous was probably introduced to the Greek vocabulary in the late nineteenth century, when a French-­speaking bourgeoisie prevailed in Greek urban social life and economy.1 It alludes to the language of courtship, a central institution for the extension of kinship and family formation. Sabean and Teuscher (2007), studying the history of kinship in Europe, underlined the significance of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a transitional period for state formation and capitalism. This transition made kinship a central, time-­consuming activity for families, as it allowed them to maintain or even increase their social status through successful alliances of ‘horizontal order’ (ibid.: 16). In other words, families began to spend time and resources on finding their offspring a spouse of the same social milieu and class as their own, or a better one. In this context, the goal of courtship practices became finding the right match not for the young man or woman, but for the family as an economic and social unit. Drawing from the above study, Marilyn Strathern (2014, 2020) explored the meaning of ‘relation’ in the post-­Enlightenment British context and the ways in which that term was connected to the vocabulary of kinship. Strathern’s work described a double labour. On one hand, ‘relation’ emerged as a philosophical term, especially during the Scottish Enlightenment, that shed light on scientific and philosophical connections of ‘ideas, events, entities and to and to the narration of a story’ (Strathern 2014: 6). Strathern emphasized the importance of a form of narration that emerged in the eighteenth century: the report. During colonialism, reports postulated

Matchmaking • 121

connections between different sets of ideas and realities within the specific power hierarchy of the colonial and colonized worlds. At the same time, relation became connected to affection through kinship. This interpretation should be linked to the legacy of liberalism, which I have already discussed. Persons becoming free from their kinship relations transferred their intimacy and affection onto new connections. For Strathern, this transfer of affect was linguistically represented by a metaphoric understanding of relation, whereby ‘whoever is united to us by any connection is always sure of a share of our love’ (ibid.: 10). This use of metaphor creates a double understanding of relations: as part of the production of knowledge during Western colonialism and as part of a symbolic kinship and affective proximity. Strathern described how this shift gradually shaped the dominant binary of colonial Western discourse, which emphasizes similarity and difference, proximity and distance (ibid.: 19–20). These dualities were adopted by the vocabulary of various nationalist movements, which extended the application of the notion of biological families to nations. Women played a significant role in the shift described above. In her account of nineteenth-­century marriage practices, Joan Perkin (1989) argued that throughout the eighteenth century and at least during the first half of the nineteenth, marriage was part of a highly designed project in which mothers played the most crucial role in selecting husbands and (to a lesser degree) wives. The fiercely competitive ‘marriage market’ (ibid.: 64) was rigorously structured by a specific time p ­ eriod – ­the ‘Season’ (ibid.: 6) – and rules. Mothers would task themselves with gathering information about eligible future spouses and show off their daughters in proper spaces, like salons, picnics or debutante balls, many of which were orchestrated for this specific purpose. When biological mothers could not escort their children on all occasions, a chaperone selected by the family played this role, guaranteeing the chastity of the young women and allowing potential couples to date in public.2 So, as mothers or players of other motherlike roles, women historically had significant positions in the matchmaking process until the first part of the nineteenth century, especially in the upper classes.3 Since then, individualism and romantic love have often been described as having revolutionized dating and the love market. Since the 1960s, new findings from around the world and more historically contextualized research from various Western societies have challenged the understanding of romantic love (see Lindholm 2006). I will return to this subject in the next chapter. As an official at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, Sophia draws on this historically female role of finding the best mates. Her work consists of selecting the best film partners based on a long process of scanning and investigating the profiles of creators and companies and of arranging dates in the monitored space of the coproductions markets. Her criteria are customized to each

122 • Coproducing Europe

film project, and the potential coproducers are connected both to the regional networks and the reputation of each market. The market becomes a space of transformation: from purely geographic proximity, which I examined in the previous chapters, to an affective proximity. Nevertheless, these networks are continuously updated through new connections and participants. These connections are made by the festival officials through frequent visits to other markets and festivals and the relations of trust they build with creators and other professionals. Focusing on women’s roles as brokers and future brides in matchmaking practices in recent decades, Yeoh et al. (2017: 227) described matchmaking’s development into ‘mediating, multi-­scalar flows of capital, information, and migrants themselves amidst increasingly sophisticated state bureaucratic mechanisms . . .’. In this context, the broker’s role consists of information-­ hunting and knowledge-­management. Often, brokers profile and categorize potential partners according to ethnicity, race, gender, class, education or locality. In other words, they construct abstract classifications of symbolic affinity to maximize the potential success of a match. Based on their potential clients’ personal data, they make a selection, produce shortlists of candidates for clients and fix the dates. The description is like Sophia’s own description of her job. The similarity of the phases and processes of matchmaking among biological couples and in the coproduction markets points to an internationalization and transnationalization of markets and economies of emotions: love and marital interests in the first case, film production and creators’ desires in the second. In coproduction markets partners are classified as in biological matchmaking. For example, based on creators’ professional experience (training, participation in other networks or coproductions), previous works (films they have produced) and artistic vision (aesthetic imprint, genre and style), officials categorize film projects and connect them to specific producers, broadcasters or other parties, bearing in mind a specific project’s capacity to penetrate certain film markets. The market officials assess where a film could be screened and which audiences it might appeal to. Here, personal experience and instinct are highly valuable. Furthermore, regional markets may be a good choice for reasons of cost-­effectiveness and cultural affinity. A good broker, like a market official, should be able to provide options of geographic regions based on their insights and specialized knowledge. In the economy of emotions of film markets, market officials also negotiate hierarchies of power between film industries of various sizes and creators with various levels of experience. They must also sympathize with and care for the new projects that participate in the market and their creative teams. Now, let me turn to fieldwork and to how things look on the ground.

Matchmaking • 123

The CineLink Drama Workshop During my fieldwork, I attended two different matchmaking sessions: one in Sarajevo for television drama and one in Thessaloniki for documentary films. Both involved projects at various stages of production, from rough ideas to more developed film scripts. The teams involved consisted of either the scriptwriter alone or the creative team of scriptwriter and producers or director. The matching had been done by the market officials before our arrival. When I asked Marica, a producer from Sarajevo, how they matched us, she responded that they first scanned the ­applications – ­both the script and the CVs of the t­eam – ­and considered who matched the criteria of their market. The criteria that they looked for were ‘quality’, but also ‘how a project can fit into the market partners’ needs’. By partners, Marica referred to the broadcasters, producers and sales agencies who had for many years been participants in Sarajevo’s markets and workshops. Many came from Eastern and south-­eastern Europe, but some from Central Europe, France, Germany and regions of the Eastern Mediterranean like Israel. Many of the professionals attending our workshop would return for the festival, while the festival organizers were always looking to update and extend their network of collaborators. For instance, in our hotel lobby, a former jewel of socialist architecture, a tutor of British origin based in Singapore, who was attending as a script advisor, was complaining of jet lag because he had just completed another workshop in South East Asia. My participation in the CineLink Drama workshop was possible due to a friend of mine who had worked for years in the film and TV industry in Greece. A creative team from a small production company was looking for funding for a TV series. Given my research interest, I was introduced to them, and after a discussion I suggested that they should apply for the CineLink drama workshop. I participated in the application process, helping the team to create CVs for an international competition workshop and translating some of the texts included in the portfolio. In exchange I became part of the team and participated in the workshop. A few days before the workshop, we were sent the twenty-­page catalogue of the participants. Every project had an extensive presentation, including the title, the names of the creative team members (scriptwriters, directors, producers), their biographies, a synopsis of the project, the creator’s notes (giving some details of their vision) and the production company’s profile. Creating the catalogue was an important task for each film market and its people, as it was a text that served multiple purposes: setting the tone for each market, signalling its identity and providing an introduction to the participants. The people working for CineLink Drama seemed to be experts trained within EU mechanisms. As their CVs in the catalogue showed, they were

124 • Coproducing Europe

in their twenties, educated in arts and trained in Prague, a city where, in the past decades, training schools like Ex Oriente and the Midpoint, funded by the EU among other investors, have targeted film-­makers from the former socialist bloc. The structure of the workshop was dual. On the one hand, we had plenary lectures from professionals (producers, festival curators, broadcasters or sales agents), and on the other, each creative team had one-­and-­a-half-­hour personalized meetings with the experts. Again, the selection and the matching of the tutor with the creative team was done by the market people. For example, in the case of our team, our script doctor, Tim, was in his forties, with a laidback attitude in comparison to other tutors, and spoke fluent English with a German intonation. He worked at the Berlinale and other script development schools in German-­speaking areas. He received scripts from all over the world and prepared them for markets and industries. He was a permanent presence at the Sarajevo workshops. During the sessions, we went through a full-­scale presentation of the script and a more detailed consultation on characters and plot. He asked incisive questions to understand the creators’ intentions and tried to avoid lecturing. Moreover, he often referred to well-­known series and films of the same genre as our film project that he had consulted on in the past and discussed how they had made it to the market. This empirical approach had the primary goal of establishing his expertise, and also aimed to provide positive examples and encouragement and to generate empathy and connection. His catchphrase was, ‘We are a team for the three sessions’. Tim: You always have this question [of ] what the market wants and how it shapes genres or storylines. But you can compare when you are dealing with projects from different markets how they develop similar stories, what metaphors they use, how they shape the characters, what genre they follow. You can say the same thing in many ways. For example, it seems that there [in South East Asia], they like ghost stories very much, demons, these sort of things, and they believe in them. ES: And how do you deal with these differences? Tim: Well, you always try to think the big through the small. [He clarified, in response to my puzzled look:] I should think how local stories can travel globally, can touch global audiences, especially with platforms like Netflix.

It seems that in these spaces of film-­related skill development and training, things are quite messy and ambiguous. I was impressed, first, by the fact that matchmaking took place at different levels. First, in the participantand expert-­screening phase, the market professionals decide who is matched with whom. Then there is the matchmaking between tutors or experts and participants or trainees. There is also the process of connecting projects with

Matchmaking • 125

experts. It is no coincidence that, often, when market officials talk about matchmaking, they do not talk about people or creators, but about projects. In a way, the project or object consumes or stands above the creator or agent. That is why agency cannot be attributed only to the subject–object relation: rather, it consists of an assemblage of subject and object. Second, there are different scales involved. Tim discussed the relation between the local and global, which came up several times and in different contexts over the course of my fieldwork. This local–global bridge is also reflected in the relation between peripheral markets of south-­eastern Europe and the experts, who often come from Northern or Central Europe. This connection between the local and the global emerged in several discussions and lectures in relation to what the broadcasters and audiences wanted. However, as a content developer for one of the biggest European broadcasters admitted, ‘we don’t really know what the audience wants or who belongs in the audience’. CineLink Industry has successfully shaped a distinctive regional identity, which is invested to a great extent in the former Yugoslav tradition, emphasizing the geographic, linguistic and cultural proximity of the neighbouring countries. This identity was not shaped in a vacuum or only during the festival itself. Workshops like the one in which I participated deepened and strengthened this distinct identity and generated networks. For example, all the participating experts were frequent members of CineLink, taking part in both the workshops and the festival. Moreover, several creators had already participated in different sections of the festival. One such section is the Talent Campus, which, since its inception in 2007, is a collaboration with the Berlinale. The above discussion shows that coproduction markets do not only involve the exchange of films, which is their central feature. They also involve exchanges of knowledge, know-­how and skills, representing the fact that cultural and creative industries in Europe are part of an economy of knowledge that develops entrepreneurial skills and networks for creators. It also generates emotions, which I will discuss in the final chapter. Emotions are important to the creators’ choices about collaboration and coproductions, but also to choosing to participate in one market or another. As a director from Georgia, Tamuna, told me, ‘I prefer to go to Leipzig because it feels good to me there’. As I will show, this ‘feeling good’ is generated by historical legacies, linguistic skills and education, but also social characteristics and cultural etiquette, or even the scale of the market, the weather or the nightlife of the host city, as the officials from both Sarajevo and Thessaloniki stressed in their interviews. Perhaps even more unprocessed affective responses, along with emotions, play an important role in both how projects are chosen (as the content developer above underlined), but also in how economic and emotional matchmaking takes place.

126 • Coproducing Europe

So, matchmaking can be truly integral for a film project. Fixing the dates and allowing time for potential partners to develop relationships in highly hierarchical economic, political and cultural contexts is a multivalent process involving the choices, emotions and power relations between all sides involved. For decades, arranging matches was considered a feature of less modern societies, ‘left over’ from the past, as Carolin Leutloff-­Grandits (2021: 409) argued in her work on cross-­cultural marriages in Kosovo. But, as she noted, in a context that was both economically and territorially fragile, arranged marriages were revived due to ‘insecure economic times and a neo-­ liberal, consumer-­oriented culture’. I believe that her argument applies here. The precarity suffered by film-­ makers, young ones especially, makes participating in a market a ticket to realizing their dreams. Considering coproduction as cross-­border and cross-­ cultural economic and cultural matchmaking allows us to explore how these partnerships are products of different regimes of power. Matchmaking is not an exact science. As market organizers described, selection involves combining expertise developed in different workshops and festivals with experience. It also requires a good knowledge and vision of the neighbourhood: what other regional festivals offer and how a distinct identity can be shaped among the competition. Furthermore, this geographic proximity is interwoven with cultural memories and legacies and economic factors related to cost and efficiency. However, in these geometries of power, creators should not be considered powerless. As Sophia said, the market offers opportunities, but creators themselves must make the most of it (or not). As Leutloff-­Grandits (2021: 410) argued, the positions and access to ‘political and societal realms’ of the people engaged in Kosovan cross-­border marriages distinguished their opportunities in these marital arrangements and empowered or disempowered them in new ways. In the creative economy, film markets are spaces where transnational imagination becomes localized and gives birth to new imaginations. Peripheral markets especially act as vibrant spaces that fuel this imagination, adding to creators’ social and cultural capital. Film-­makers are aware that their participation can be vitally important to producing their films. On the other hand, attracting talent and quality films is vital for peripheral festivals, which target the main pool of creators, investors and regional audiences. As Sophia concluded in her interview, the ‘film industry is an industry, and the centre–periphery relation is important’. Europe’s creative economy is an economy of emotion, with intensive transnational circulation across borders and boundaries. Similarly, industry people, such as producers, broadcasting organization executives or sales agents, usually try to sensitize professionals to ‘target’ their audiences, a marketing term. Nevertheless, as they underline, these audiences

Matchmaking • 127

should not be understood solely through marketing indicators, for example profiling according to age, gender or class characteristics. Instead, marketing experts try to sketch a broader and more culturally sensitive idea of the audience by answering the million-­dollar question: what is the audience interested in? Audiences’ tastes, in the past, were a mystery. Most industry people confessed that instinct, a non-­consumable and non-­transferable asset developed through years on the job, was the most significant criterion. There were many failures, especially in the recent decades of the digital revolution and new ways to watch films and television on platforms that have brought diversified audiences into the centre of interest. As a result, marketing experts tried, in their consulting, to discern those aspects from a script that would respond to constructed ideas of European or global audiences by fashioning the local in a way that could communicate with the global. This process can be challenging, as all these labels are dynamic, shifting, contextually interwoven and historically produced, while simultaneously generating new meanings and imageries in relation to each professional’s experience and personal networks. As a result, finding the ‘right vocabulary’ to shape, write, edit or present a project is achieved by negotiating all these factors, and not by enforcing narrative models, structure or meaning. As Lydia Papadimitriou (2018: 230) argued after interviewing Greek creators taking part in Eurimages coproductions, the ‘coproduction process affects the creative result of a film in more subtle and specific ways’ connected to the creators’ experience of what living in Europe means to their everyday lives. These ‘subtle and specific ways’ are at once generated by, but also fertilize, the process of Europeanization. In contrast to the participants and trainees, who originated from local markets, the experts in attendance seemed to be of Northern European origin (from Germany, France and the UK) with backgrounds either in marketing, media studies or narratology, and with a professional history. Professionally, they were involved in the audiovisual industry (mainly in ARTE, HBO Europe or Israeli production companies), either as broadcast executives or freelance script tutors at institutions or festivals funded by MEDIA. Prague-­ based institutes seemed to provide CineLink with an important pool of tutors. These experts seemed highly mobile, well beyond Europe, as they followed television market and festival circuits from the Toronto Film Festival, the Berlinale and Torino Film Festival to the National Film Development Corporation in Mumbai, India, and beyond. To complement these experts, certain creators from the region who had achieved success in coproductions and whose careers had been launched by CineLink were also invited to give lectures. This profiling of the experts demonstrates how different coproduction markets produce and circulate networks of human and symbolic capital, including knowledge and distinction gained through participation

128 • Coproducing Europe

in festivals, winning prestigious prizes and having work screened on popular channels or platforms with access to global audiences. Editors and tutors were invited to contribute to this circulation of human resources and know-­how by transmitting them to professionals in earlier career phases. This circulation and shared knowledge generate the European capital that is promoted by film support programmes like MEDIA or Eurimages. Coproduction markets like CineLink are not just entangled in regional networks or neighbourhoods like the one I described in the last chapter. They also generate those same networks. For example, in his work exploring a definition of the Black Sea region, Charles King (2008) argued that any region emerges as a political work-­in-­progress due to specific power relations. This project is shaped by three interconnected factors. The first factor is the interrelations among communities that cultivate bridges, for example through migrations, cross-­cultural and transnational exchanges. Mobilities across borders and regions (to or from south-­east Europe, or within Europe more widely) are significant for the market. The second factor is external players and interests that invest in specific geographies in a way that generates homogeneity, based on their view from the outside. It seems that the EU and the assemblage of audiovisual companies, broadcasters, training schools and institutes involved in regional festivals and markets also produce the region, both as an economic market and as a symbolic geography. Finally, as King underlined, there are local interests and elite groups who craft the agenda and vision of a community and belonging. Festivals, local authorities and national policies all participate in the production of such visions, as mediators that interlace with the formation of regions. But how do experts work within film markets and trace what is suitable for global audiences?

The European Documentary Network Workshop In 2014, I had my first experience of a workshop at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. The workshop was launched by the European Documentary Network (EDN). I was accepted as a participant without a project. To my surprise, there were seven other individuals, mostly aspiring film-­makers, who like me had joined the workshop to ‘get a feeling’, as they told me, and to ‘develop contacts’. The workshop took place at Electra Palace, a central, historical hotel in Thessaloniki on Aristotelous Square, opposite the Olympion, the central venue for the TIFF’s screenings. The workshop participants were more diverse than those attending the CineLink Drama workshop due to this workshop’s less regional orientation. They had come from the United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, the USA, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. Projects from the European

Matchmaking • 129

south were also numerous, coming from Greece, Turkey, Serbia, Italy, Spain and Israel. As in Sarajevo, the tutors were mostly from Northern Europe, for instance the United Kingdom, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany and Lithuania. They had backgrounds in production, film sales and consulting for European broadcasting. The structure of the workshop was like that of Sarajevo. A few days before the workshop, we received the catalogue of information on the projects, including the bios of the creative teams, synopses of the projects, the creators’ notes and financial plans. The timetable offered a list of presentations from experts as in Sarajevo, and sessions in small groups of five to six projects for tutoring. Participants like me had the opportunity to participate in one of these groups. The last two days were devoted to pitching, and projects could be presented to future investors, broadcasters and sales agents. I was struck by a small, but significant, linguistic change that occurred over the course of the workshop. During the presentations, the creators were asked about their ‘projects’. By the end of the workshop, the tutors substituted that term with ‘stories’. I was curious to understand whether this was a trivial linguistic choice or if it meant something. Thessaloniki, 21 March 2014 In the group that I participated in, there were projects from Serbia, Hungary, Denmark, Italy, Greece and Sweden. The tutors were a female, US-­based producer of Greek origin and a male specialist in programme development from Belgian National Broadcasting. The Greek project was of particular interest to me, as its topic was related to Greek political exiles and migration to Eastern and Western Europe. The creator was beginning his independent career, although he had worked for many years as a film editor. He took part in the workshop with his producer, well-­known in the field of Greek documentaries. The creator had done some shooting with the documentary’s main narrator, whose life inspired the story. The only problem was that the creator did not speak English or was not confident enough to do so. Both tutors tried to persuade the creator to speak even in broken English: ‘It doesn’t matter if your English is not good enough. None of us here has English as our mother tongue. We all make mistakes. But it’s important to hear your voice [his emphasis]’, the tutor from Belgium stressed. Encouraged by his producer, the Greek creator spoke for a couple of minutes about his motivation and relation to the film’s central narrator. Then, the producer screened the five-­minute video-­trailer for the project.

The trailer opened with a close-­up on the wrinkles on the face and hands of an old man who worked with wood. We followed him doing everyday activities. Next, the film cut to archival footage from the Second World War, as a voice-­over explained what happened to the man during the end of that war and the Greek Civil War. At that time, his migration started,

130 • Coproducing Europe

first to Germany and after that to Sweden. The trailer cut back to the old man standing on the edge of a rock, staring at the other side of a mountain where his birthplace had been. The village was destroyed during the Civil War. Although the other side of the mountain was not far away, the man never had the courage to visit his birthplace. Due to my research interests, through which I had become familiar with similar stories during my years of fieldwork in the post-­Soviet context, I found the trailer moving. The man’s wrinkles made him look as if all the migratory routes he had followed during his exile were carved on his face. After the end of the trailer, the producer started to describe the budget information, but the tutor interrupted her. He believed that the trailer was uneven. It was the first time he did something of this sort. The atmosphere became heavy. The other tutor tried to break the ice by inviting other members of the group to share their views on the project. I expressed my opinion, saying that the main journey of the old man’s life was the distance between the place where he was living now and the other side of the mountain. The tutor nodded in agreement, but I felt awkward. The awkwardness I felt made me rethink the entire incident. What seemed to have caused the tension was the creator’s decision not to speak in English. At least one of the two tutors interpreted this choice as a lack of voice. The tension was exacerbated by the attitude of the project’s producer, who made the presentation in a very professional, but rather procedural manner, lacking emotion. This lack of emotion translated as a weakness of the project. At the same time, the creator’s attitude was full of emotion as he tried, throughout the tutorial, to defend his project and himself by avoiding language mistakes. On the contrary, both tutors interpreted my emotional attachment to the story of the film project as the ‘right’ voice. Who decides what the right emotion is? Who decides when a certain emotional overtone or voice, or for that matter a silence, is appropriate or not? As I will discuss in the next chapter, for years, anthropologists have pointed to the fact that different societies have different ways of communicating emotions, different understandings of which circumstances are appropriate for revealing emotions and different forms of social and linguistic emotional exposure. In the coproduction market, emotional exposure or reservation could have an impact on the success of a project. In the markets’ matchmaking sessions, the paucity of time, the structured nature of the sessions and the standard information package for each project did not prepare the participants for emotional outpourings. However, experts or investors looked for emotions in the film projects and the creators, and attempted to glimpse what was not there yet, the unfinished project or even the idea. As Kirin Narayan stated (2012: 85), voice ‘doesn’t just refer to spoken words; it also implies the sense of a communicating presence behind written words’. Furthermore, the voice is of value in terms of rhythm, melody and intonation, which could all add

Matchmaking • 131

to the unique voice of the creator and, by extension, of the film project. In the workshop that I attended, voice seemed to become a bridge between the unsaid and the invisible. This bridge shared the workshop’s agenda: to capture what audiences or the market want. As I have discussed, seeking authenticity, uniqueness and innovation is the pillar of the neoliberal creative economy: whatever project can claim these aspects can hope for opportunities and funding. During the process of matchmaking, film markets tried to explore exactly that. On one hand, they try to discern whether the creators and their team have the skills to become involved in a coproduction agreement, including their understanding of EU language and prerequisites such as intercultural communication, marketing, transnational networks and so on. On the other hand, they sought to establish each project’s singularity, which could make it excel in the fiercely competitive film market. In this process, emotions are transformed into capital, the distinctive added value attached to each creator’s voice. Translating emotions from the creator’s side to the side of the market is a complex operation involving a variety of ­individuals – f­estival officials, producers, c­reators – ­and languages. For example, projects are presented using different communicative codes, like words, photographs or videos. Nevertheless, there is one dominant language of communication: English. In the last few decades, in which identity has been considered beyond bounded and territorialized definitions and understandings, the use of English in the EU has served two functions, according to Seidlhofer, Breiteneder and Pitzi (2006). The first is the communication of professionals and specialists in international communities, for example, communities of scientists. The second is communication in everyday life among people who circulate, for example, tourists. As a result, despite the emphasis on multilingualism, English has become dominant in various EU contexts, exactly because of the diversity of these contexts, like the film workshops discussed. What seems interesting, though, is how English itself changes (in terms of structure and vocabulary) through the emergence of this new Euro-­English (what English turns into through its contact with other European languages) (Modiano 2017). In the workshop I attended, it was interesting that the use of English, as the common language among the participants, was translated as a sign of openness and willingness to share. The Euro-­English (with emphasis on the expression of the creators’ vision and not on correct linguistic form) that the tutors asked the Greek creator to use had this symbolic meaning, of being part of European diversity. Teaming up for a workshop, like the one in which I participated, creates the impression of togetherness. Nevertheless, the ‘micro-­physics of power’ (De Certeau 2010: 59–60) are there. For example, the togetherness that the organizers try to generate is defined by acts that

132 • Coproducing Europe

feature asymmetries of power, including who is presenting to whom, who is giving comments, who decides upon the order of presentations and who has the last word in wrapping up the discussions. These ambiguities of power also exist within creative teams. During the workshop, I had the opportunity to observe the ways that producers complemented creators in their presentations. Those who were more successful tried to rationalize their project’s strengths, like its interest for audiences, unique perspective or story, and the quality of the cinematography. They left the more emotional aspects of the presentation, such as the motivation behind the project, personal story and vision, to the creators. In the case of the Greek project discussed above, this had an impact on how the two expert-­consultants perceived the project. Furthermore, I believe that this attitude intensified the quest for the creator’s voice. In the last chapter, I pointed out the extent to which linguistic connections could pave the way for coproductions and the distribution and circulation of films, a key step for Europeanization in the film sector and the production of a common film market. Avoiding using the international lingua franca seems to be considered a refusal to give access and share one’s work. The Greek creator’s persistence in not speaking English was taken by the tutors as a refusal to be exposed and thus demonstrated a lack of emotional engagement with the project. A translator would have contextualized this untranslatability. But in this context, the producer did not seem to take up this role and, as a result, the project in question never became a story for the experts. In 1921, Walter Benjamin (Rendall 1997) argued that the task of the translator was not just the compatibility between two linguistic structures. Instead, he stressed that translation is the process of revealing ‘the intention toward the language into which the work is translated’ (ibid.: 159). In other words, a translator should not bother so much with linguistic equivalences, but rather dig into the history and structures of power that produced our understanding of these equivalences. These tasks consist of investigating and detecting the forms, vocabulary and articulations that generate specific interpretations and expectations of meaning chained within the hermeneutics of power. In a text published in the seminal 1986 volume Writing Culture, which investigated ethnography as a field and as a mode of writing, Talal Asad (1986) continued Benjamin’s line of thought. He pointed out the role of social anthropologists as cultural translators and the way that this mediation was often influenced by colonial underpinnings. Placing the above episode from my fieldwork within this context, I think that it captured the linguistic reverberations of the European project. Creators are tasked with learning this language to be understood. Festivals and markets play the role of mediating spaces in which this language can be learned and practised.

Matchmaking • 133

But as Deltsou (2017) underlined in her examination of the Salonica Otherwise project, imagining another future cannot be considered unrelated to the ways that future is hegemonically envisioned in the EU. My participation in these workshops made me wonder if there is a similar hegemony of emotion in which creators and their projects must be inscribed if they want their films to be funded and to circulate. Expressing these emotions needs to take place in the right language (English) and tone, although what the latter is is not clear and only the expert tutor could sense it. Preparing and funding film projects for European distribution and circulation is a complex process of imagining what the ‘European markets and audiences want’, which filters the knowledge, stereotypes and experiences of the people involved. This is why producing a space for meeting and networking is so important for the EU film programmes (without underestimating their economic importance), especially MEDIA. At the same time, generating such spaces at the periphery seems to work at multiple levels as a way to boost weaker film industries, but also to train creators and officials for this imagined European home. As I argued in the last chapter, the production of cinematic neighbourhood in the film markets should be seen as instances and not as bounded territories, but these instances emerge within a historical moment and draw on cultural memories that shape emotional affinities and families of resemblances. This is why matchmaking in the film markets is central to their success and reputation. However, matchmaking also entails performative aspects.

Matchmaking as Performance Matchmaking is a central process for coproduction markets and for creators. It is the heart of the market, the space where economy and creativity try to become fused together into the production of a film project. Comparing the matchmaking processes in Thessaloniki and Sarajevo revealed an almost standardized format, drawn from social psychology and marketing. As a social performance, matchmaking aims to achieve a degree of understanding and engagement towards a certain goal: making a film. It takes place in a highly formalized setting, with a specific location, time, order of appointments and prior exchange of bios, despite the more relaxed atmosphere cultivated by the market officials who organize parties, lectures with guest speakers and other events to bring the two parties together. But in no way are the two parties involved equal. Nonetheless, as McFarland, Jurafksy and Rawlings (2013) argued in their study of courtship, bonding can be produced in different contexts, even from ‘reciprocal asymmetrical performances’ (ibid.: 1604). In film coproduction markets, matchmaking is based on asymmetry and the negotiation of hierarchy between investors and creators. Festival officials play

134 • Coproducing Europe

a pivotal role, selecting the applications and forming a roster of partners that might lead to the right couplings. As most officials admitted, professionalization and experience are of the utmost importance here. Women officials seem to be the heart of the markets. As in the process of social matchmaking, female mediation is crucial for producing alliances and biological as well as symbolic reproduction. Moreover, the emotional engagement and care that are associated with women in Western societies can be assets for the tough choices that are needed, such as when a project is selected or rejected. At the same time, Marica told me that she chose to become a producer and work at CineLink in Sarajevo because she needed to be based in the city due to family engagements. She could not be absent for long periods of time as some artists and film-­makers are, especially during shooting. The global festival and market circuits have increased the scale and networks that these women try to work with. As they expand, they increase the symbolic value of the market and attract more talents and investors. This shift does not change women’s role as cross-­cultural bridges, but transforms it. Female bodies play an increasingly complex role as mediators between market and artistic production, local and global, regional or peripheral and central film industries, political alliances and creative agencies, capital investment and creative intimacy. Navigating these complex relationships calls for more nuanced methodological and theoretical approaches that may disentangle the power asymmetries and dynamics involved. If matchmaking is the central ritual in the festivals, do film markets act as a secular communitas? According to Victor Turner, communitas is a modality that represents social relations and not yet a structure (Letkemann 2002). It is a node in time at which everything is possible. During the few days of the markets, participants seemed to live in a liminal time between present and future, but mostly in the latter. They were focused on their desire to make their visions and ideas come true. Their dreams and desires, the voice and emotions that the Belgian broadcaster wanted to hear in the Greek creator’s presentation, were exposed, and became the main material with which to ‘seal the deal’. Paul Letkemann (ibid.), who studied communities in the highly structured workplace that is US public administration, argued that communitas can be useful in such a context as it brings out social connections and ties shaped in a competitive, hierarchical environment. Drawing on his sense of communitas as social belonging within a hierarchical structure, film coproduction markets are shaped as family-­like structures. This intimacy allows the other practices of freedom that Letkemann observed, for example a more relaxed atmosphere, togetherness and teaming up, to create the ideal atmosphere for matchmaking. Modern marketing encourages more flexible and relaxed work relations, not to challenge hierarchy, but to make it tolerable and unnoticed. Similarly, in the film markets, the metaphor of the

Matchmaking • 135

family, the language of kinship and the familial roles (female officials as mothers, films as reproduction, creators as children or apprentices) produced intimacy, but often hid wider political and economic hierarchies and the isolation of regional markets and creators. As Strathern’s examination of the notion of relation at the dawn of European modernity reminds us, it is connected both to the genre of reporting and to the distinctly colonial stance of observing at a distance. That stance produces taxonomies and generalizations in order to create transferable knowledge, but also generates emotional intimacy and a feeling of looking alike that can be important for the building of trust in a film coproduction. Film coproduction markets straddle the divide between capitalist knowledge-­production and creative intimacy. The language of kinship is utilized to produce familiarity, but it is deeply embedded, as it always has been, within the competition for economic, political and social resources. For creators, participating in the market is an initiation. First, they undergo a status change, something that Turner (1979) often identified with secular rites found in societies with complex divisions of labour. Their participation opens the door to the festival and market circuits. It also brings them closer to the people, networks and mechanisms necessary for the formation of coproductions. Third, they are trained in the language and grammar of the EU creative economy, and they learn how to communicate their vision to wider audiences across the continent and the world. Learning this language is difficult. Not knowing this language or the skills involved could impede the realization of their film projects. Regional markets produce or reproduce regional intimacies and hierarchies within the fiercely competitive and precarious EU cinematic landscape. This chapter started with the premise that the film coproduction networks examined in Chapter 5 are often conceptualized using a more familiar ­vocabulary – ­that of family and ­kinship – ­that turns spatial relation and proximity into political, economic and emotional geographies. This transformation is motivated and supported by the ritual of matchmaking, the central event of film markets, during which film projects and creators look for investors and access to the European cinema halls and audiences. In the best-­case scenario, the two parties involved become a communitas. They leave behind ego and personal agendas and come together to produce films guided by a common aesthetic vision and economic agreement. As Edith Turner argued in Communitas (2012), the latter comes in different forms and can unexpectedly generate togetherness. However, this is not always the case. Hierarchies, which are deeply embedded in the film market space, often prevent two parties from approaching each other and establishing an understanding. In the following, final chapter, I will examine how creators address these economic and emotional challenges and consider

136 • Coproducing Europe

what kind of knowledge they engage with in order to reach a coproduction agreement.

Notes 1. The term derives from the eighteenth-­century French ‘se rendre’, to go somewhere at a specified time. The specific use in the Greek dating system must be a later introduction. In the Greek tradition, matchmaking, ‘proksenia’ until the 1950s and later ‘proksenio’, was an activity managed by a specific broker within the community (personal communication with the head of the Folklore Library at Auth, 18 March 2021). 2. As Perkin (1989) underlines, the energy spent on this marriage design was connected to the fact that the marriages of daughters contributed to the expansion of networks for the family after the marriage of the first-­born, which guaranteed the continuity of the estate. 3. In the Balkans, numerous works on kinship have been written. Debates regarding the organization of joint families (zadruga) and communitarianism (koinotismos) came to represent specific regional and cultural families, the Slavs in the former case (zadruga) and Greece in the latter (communitarianism). This representation postulated a connection between folklore and nationalism. In the last few decades, more comparative works have challenged this overly deterministic representation, revealing highly diverse social organization and residential patterns, particularly influenced by the political and economic transformations of the regions and their relations to the formation of statehoods (see Alexakis 2014).

Chapter 7

Coproducing Emotions

h Thessaloniki, 20 January 2018 Doing research with databases can be a very lonely job that includes reading many lines and lists of information. A name drew my attention. Tonia Marketaki, Les Nuits de Cristal (1991), EUR 228,674, Eurimages coproduction grant, coproduction of Greece, France and Switzerland. At that point the list became a story, Tonia’s story and mine. Tonia was one of my teenage heroes. She studied in Paris at IDHEC in the 1960s, pretending to be ‘unimpressed as if she belonged there’(Panagiotopoulos, quoted in Alexandraki 1994).1 She was registered to become a camera operator, as the school did not accept women in the directing sector. But she became a director. Tonia refused to be a ‘female director’, a label her male colleagues frequently used. She wanted to be, work and be assessed on equal terms with her male colleagues (Mylonaki 2016). When they realized her talent, they stopped patronising her and started to place obstacles in her way. However, making films in Greece was almost impossible. As she admitted, ‘In Greece, we make films in three ways, investing personal money, finding a producer or with the help of our friends’. When all these three ways failed, she turned to coproductions. She was one of the first Greek directors and the first female director to win the Eurimages grant. She described that choice in an interview (Marketaki 1983): In the framework of creating a European Union, [we are creating] more a unified European economy because corporations can be American, European or Japanese. . . . There is the game of lies. The game is played, and we close our eyes to that. We say, ‘We celebrate European culture’. Which culture [is there], when you bury national language, when to

138 • Coproducing Europe

make a film, one needs to form a coproduction that should be tripartite? What’s the meaning of a tripartite coproduction? In which language [do you form it]?

Tonia’s case is characteristic of the changes and emotions that the cinema and creators from Greece and from other EU countries went through in the 1980s. From a context where cinema was embedded in national cultural policies and protection, films became transnational products to circulate and strengthen European ties as part of an emerging creative economy. Studying the entanglements of power with emotions through the notion of state, Mateusz Laszczkowski and Madeleine Reeves (2015: 2) argued that ‘the affective’ is ‘the substance of politics’. They considered this ‘affective’ to be ‘a complex, dynamic, and resilient reality that structures both opportunities and challenges for political actors and is constitutive of the acting subjects themselves’ (ibid.). States, either nation states or more transnational or supranational formations of statehood, are tied to emotions through their various technologies and biopolitics. The two scholars postulated several emotional responses by states in the Central Asian context, such as fear, hatred and terror, but also care, protection, hope and expectations for the future. As a result, they concluded that the emotional life of states is the ‘epiphenomena of the political’, which can produce ‘political fields, imaginaries, subjects, and objects’ (ibid.: 3) through social agencies and actors. In this chapter, I will explore the formation of these agencies and actors in the coproduction markets. What kind of emotions do creators express when they try to find coproducers? As discussed in the first chapter, the formation of eastern peripheries during the first years of the post-­Cold War period was an economic, political and emotional project. Bilić and Radoman (2019: 33), discussing lesbian and queer activism in the former Yugoslavia, argued that the European orientation of the former Yugoslav societies during that period was full of cultural and political hegemonic binaries and dichotomies, such as perceptions of Western societies as ‘progressive’, ‘the countries with proper human rights’ and ‘the moral countries’, which set an example for postsocialist societies during transition. These perceptions drew on the idealization of the EU’s dominant discourses of enlargement and Europeanization towards the east. Similar arguments were expressed by other scholars from the region, who reflectively examined the processes of Europeanization since the 1990s. Many of these works noted the relationships of dependency and semi-­peripherality2 that were produced by the hierarchies cultivated by the policies of integration into the EU (Blagojević 2009, Kušić, Manolova and Lottholz 2019). As Blagojević argued, the dependency and peripherality of south-­eastern Europe was often expressed and continued through the application of a series

Coproducing Emotions • 139

of adjustments. These adjustments first concerned the economic and political elites and their gradual adaptation to and adoption of the EU agenda. Nevertheless, this agenda was often challenged by wider society due to its economic impact (the gradual impoverishment of the lower classes) and the social conservatism (xenophobia, the rise of the extreme right) it created (Blagojević 2009: 97). The accentuation of class differences shaped by this agenda was often recognized as a sign of successful integration into capitalism, but the social and economic inequalities produced generated severe discontent and anxiety about the future. Coproduction markets were made a part of the EU’s (cultural) policies to bridge the gap between film industries in the north and south of Europe, and to train less experienced creators in the prerequisites of the European film markets. In the following pages, I will try to trace the emotions generated by these processes in the film markets. ‘Not Friends but Chemistry’ I knew Grbavica from Jasmila Žbanić’s film of the same name. It is an ethnically mixed residential area with high-­rise apartments developed during socialism. During the war, the neighbourhood was surrendered to various ethnic Serbian militia groups.3 Today, Grbavica stretches along one bank of the Miljacka River. The office of the production company I was visiting was located in one of these new buildings. Antun, the creator I was meeting, had a long history in the Yugoslav and post-­Yugoslav cinematic space. Antun’s world changed abruptly with the start of the war and he tried to capture these changes through films. Even during the siege Antun continued to make films about men, monsters and man-­monsters, but this was ‘what he does’. As he admitted, creators cannot do anything else. ‘Despite economic or other kinds of crises, if you find a theme that you feel passionate about, you have to find a way to tell the story.’ Antun explained that coproducers should ‘not be afraid of the new’. The way to approach a coproduction is by being open to the new and unknown.4 Opening oneself to the unknown was fundamental to modernity. This newness has become a constant prerequisite of the late phase of capitalism through notions such as entrepreneurship and innovation. Market officials also expected this openness from creators during the process of matchmaking. Finding the Miss or Mr Right in coproductions could also be the first step. Love is not an emotion, but rather a ‘generated code of communication’, according to Luhmann (1986: 18). In Luhmann’s theory, the transition to modern societies dissociated love from strict social hierarchy and control. We should be careful here not to reiterate the binary between capitalist societies where the free expression of emotions is allegedly allowed and traditional or

140 • Coproducing Europe

pre-­industrialist societies where the subjugation of emotions to social rules and customs is the norm. Industrial societies and modernity invented romantic love as a symbol of the emerging urban capitalist societies. Romantic love was the ultimate expression of individuality. This emerging individuality was supposed to defy destiny and kinship exigencies. In this way, love became unpredictable, fluid, frivolous and risky, like the rest of the lives of the former peasants who left their communities for the quest for a new, better life. Lindholm (2006: 1–10) argued that since the 1950s, debates in social anthropology concerning personality and culture have challenged these perceptions and showed that romantic love is only one human expression, as is humans’ yearning to ‘exceed their concrete lives and be more than rational maximizers of cultural goals’ (ibid.: 17). In the socialist societies where Antun grew up, love was also embedded in a politico-­ideological agenda. Alexandra Kollontai (2014), drawing on the Engelsian interpretation of the origin of family, criticized capitalism as a system of ownership of all economic means, people and emotions. Emotions, especially love, were structured, for Kollontai, within a class system, which regulated the exchange or appropriation of women and ownership. In contrast, Kollontai believed, socialism could liberate human emotions and would strengthen all the different emotional nuances of love, such as comradeship, solidarity and care. According to Kollontai, love is ‘an emotion that unites and is consequently of an organizing character’ (ibid.: 285). This ‘organizing character’ stemmed from socialist social engineering, and especially its moralizing project of creating a working-­class ethos involving social support, solidarity and understanding (see Kürti 1991). The internationalization of the socialist project and the formation of a ‘socialist bloc’ expanded this emotional training beyond the Soviet Union. As discussed, in the context of the Cold War, coproductions were also considered ideological alliances contributing to the expansion of these ties. Artists, creators, film-­makers and other professionals in the film industry circulated in the socialist world, even more so within the federal context of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, at festivals and in film studios. The ideological process of constructing a socialist love produced a context of socialist alliances in which film-­makers could travel, work and find film partners. That Cold War context generated an important legacy for the film-­makers who had to make films after the 1990s. Antun’s first coproduction in the early 1990s was done with the help of ‘a friend’ from Hungary, in the context of the ideological alliance based on socialism. The two shared a socialist cultural intimacy. In the context of transition, which discredited many of the socialist structures and beliefs, Antun turned to a person and a work environment he knew well when everything else collapsed. Antun confirmed that the Yugoslav tradition of coproductions in studios such as Avala or Jadran turned the culture of coproducing into

Coproducing Emotions • 141

something familiar for directors of his generation. The former Yugoslav film policies created an outward-­looking culture and connection within ideological borders. The gradual but difficult transition led many creators from the former socialist countries to look for coproducers beyond their newly shaped borders. Antun’s film was coproduced with France and the Netherlands. The former socialist allies, which during enlargement became ‘neighbours’, were categorized in the same regional slots as potentially benefiting from specific EU mechanisms and funding. As a result, chemistry for Antun was not only an instinctive, almost visceral affective response, but also a historically shaped emotional attachment that grew out of political, economic and artistic alliances. Antun’s personal friendship with his Hungarian coproducer grew within the wider ideological friendships of the former socialist brotherhood (an ideological kinship). The first, most successful fiction film that was coproduced, according to Bosnia–Herzegovina’s Film Commission, was No Man’s Land by Dani Tanovic (2001). The film was a coproduction between France, Belgium, Italy, Great Britain and Slovenia, but Tanovic himself was from Bosnia– Herzegovina. It was also the first local film that won at the Sarajevo Film Festival. This may explain why the film was included in the country’s coproduction list issued by the association of directors from Bosnia–Herzegovina, but it was not included as a Bosnian coproductions in the Lumiere database that I studied, challenging the notion of belonging and its production within different categories that oscillate between ideologies, politics and emotions. The last decade of the twentieth century was fatal not only for the film industry but for the societies of the former Yugoslavia. One of the first coproductions in post-­Yugoslav Bosnia–Herzegovina was the film Savrseni Krug (The Perfect Circle) (see European Film Awards 1997), directed by Ademir Kenovic and cowritten by Kenovic himself and the Bosnian poet and scriptwriter Abdulah Sidran, former film partner of Emir Kusturica in his early films (Do You Remember Dolly Bell? and When Father Was Away for Business). The Perfect Circle related the story of two orphaned brothers who found refuge in Sarajevo. The boys were found and ‘adopted’ by an alcoholic Bosnian poet who had sent his family abroad to save them and was left alone in the city during the siege. Coproductions were the only way for Antun to make films. The choice of partners, he admitted, was motivated by the script: ‘It’s the story that moves everything, and through coproduction, it can improve itself if it’s good’. The element that could motivate a coproduction does not have to be regional. It might be a problem that exists in different countries. The tragedy of wars in the former Yugoslavia motivated many scripts in that era. For Antun there was a need to understand what had happened, but there was also a European audience who were ‘curious’ to learn what had occurred. For example, Antun

142 • Coproducing Europe

formed ‘a Yugoslav coproduction’ for his second film. As he said, the topic of his film was the absurdity of war in the former Yugoslavia, and thus, almost all the countries from the former Yugoslavia participated (Bosnia–Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia). He concluded that ‘it’s not all Euro-­pudding, but coproductions have substance’. According to Antun, coproductions can be successful: if you don’t fear the new. Coproducers are not friends, but chemistry [my emphasis] should exist among them. However, many things depend on what the story needs. Repeating the partnership is a usual thing because getting to know the people you work with is important. So, in the initial phase of each coproduction, profiling the people and doing research about them are two of the main things I do.

Such coproductions are emotionally rather than financially motivated. This is why they need ‘chemistry’. Coproductions are the result of capital investment and know-­how, but also of passion and desire. Who are the ‘right people’ to work with? How does a creator make this choice? In what ways does the EU space of experts, professionals, schools, markets and festivals involved in coproductions contribute to this decision? In what ways is this decision a product of emotional labour and how are emotions involved in the formation of coproductions? Ann Stoler (2001) examined how emotions emerged in the dry and professional language of colonial documents in Dutch Indonesia, arguing that in Western political thought, the logic of state public space, science and men is placed in opposition to that of emotions, private space, and the space of intimacy, arts and women. However, it seems that the emergence of cultural politics and creative economy in the 1990s challenged this dominant dualism, at least in rhetoric. Economic neoliberalism and especially the creative economy are not impermeable to the circulation of emotions. On the contrary, they utilize emotions, especially positive emotions, as discussed (hope, love, sympathy etc.), in a drive for economic and social transformation. Film markets try to generate a ‘safer’ space where the two parties can develop bonds of trust in a more controlled environment, but even there, chemistry as a first affective response is crucial for the dis/connection of the two parties involved in the ­matchmaking – ­and also, as I will show, for the wider Project Europe. Discussing the sociocultural nature of emotions, Sara Ahmed (2001: 15–17; 2004: 221–22) stated that emotions should be studied in circulation. They are not static, but are contagious in the sense that they emerge in contact with other people, things and ideas. Drawing on Durkheim, Ahmed stressed the fact that emotions do not separate the individual and the collective, and they are not something that I or We feel. Nor do they start from

Coproducing Emotions • 143

the ‘outside’, to take root in the ‘inside’, something that the Durkheimian idea of solidarity suggested. Instead, Ahmed postulated that the circulation of emotions through encounters and contacts shapes both I and We mutually and interdependently. These contacts are not only between subjects (creators, coproducers, festival practitioners, policymakers or audiences) or between subjects and objects (creators and films), but also between subjects, film projects and histories. They form assemblages of individual agencies, cultural histories and political hierarchies. Ahmed (2004) considered how emotions as a form of capital develop a significance, a value, not in themselves but in circulation, which adds to their surplus value. This also reminds us of how the meaning of European Added Value (EAV) is constructed. EAV itself does not contain meaning, but the transnational circulation of films produces surplus European value. Similarly, the circulation of creators in film markets contributes to the accumulation of their (and the festivals’) reputation through networking, and thus facilitates the formation of coproductions. The news or rumours of someone’s success also increase the hopes and desires of others; however, these feelings are not just positive for creators. Many creators I met described coproductions as ‘the necessary evil’ of making films. ‘Why would you want to share your dream, your baby, in a phase when you are not sure of the result yourself? It’s crazy, but if you don’t do it, you are at risk of not giving birth’, said Vlado, a very young documentary director, speaking to me in the market in Sarajevo. This is why Antun spoke of ‘special friends’. Although they do not share the original inspiration, they all benefit, to different degrees, from the success of the film, financially as well as artistically. If not, the relationship will not be repeated. Neoliberalism privileges risky ventures, such as investment in films, as a money-­generating source. But how do artists such as Antun and Vlado deal with this risk of communicating their ideas to unknown people? Access to knowledge and networks of knowledge can be important in navigating a fragile economic (and creative) landscape, but how can an artist who participates in these networks be differentiated? As Antun’s case suggested, his first reaction to the new conditions for film production in the 1990s was to look for proximity, either cultural (the former socialist legacy) or geographic (by taking part in regional film markets). Proximity can be an asset with which to address and minimize the risk of trusting new people in a more calculated way. However, this proximity hides ambivalent feelings. Antun’s friend was not an everyday friend with whom he shared space, time and habits on a daily basis. He was rather the resonance of an ideologically produced affect. Ahmed (2004) noted that the circulation of affect materializes specific bodies. The socialist coproductions produced a (transnational) space of socialist affect evoking Kollontai’s idea of

144 • Coproducing Europe

socialist love. When Antun turned to his friend from Hungary, the socialist space was collapsing. Regional film markets, such as those of Sarajevo or Thessaloniki, tried to reinstate a space of trust but under different terms (the development of market knowledge and skills). In this context, Antun trusted his intuition, chemistry, to help him select partners. Tamta Khalvashi (2015) examined affect in the urban space of the city of Batumi in south-­western Georgia, in the region of Achara, which borders Turkey. This proximity to the Ottoman world, first, and then to Turkey, historically shaped Achara as the land of a large ethnically Georgian Muslim community. The religious ‘exception’ of Achara, dating from the inception of Georgian ethnogenesis in the nineteenth century as a Christian nation state, generated a feeling of shame, according to Khalvashi. This feeling challenged (but was still interwoven with) the feelings of pride and the alleged tolerance that the Batumians believed they historically demonstrated. This ambivalence was dominant in Khalvashi’s interviews. As Khalvashi (2015: 181) noted, ‘[w]hen it came to real encounters, friendly sympathies sometimes had less to do with unequivocal affection than with ambivalence and doubt’. Discussing this ambivalence, Khalvashi pointed to Soviet modernization, which, despite the ideology of social equality, produced (inner) cultural hierarchies, for example between the Orthodox Christian nationalities in the more economically and culturally advanced western regions and the less advanced Muslim societies of the north Caucasus and Central Asia or the Indigenous people of Siberia. Later, in the post-­ Soviet years, the new political project of Georgianization ­excluded – ­or at least ­marginalized – M ­ uslim identities from the dominant public narrative and imagination. I believe that similarly, Antun’s statement regarding ‘special friends’ hid the same ambivalence that Khalvashi described. The need for investment for a new film forced Antun to be mobile and flexible, travelling to festivals and film markets. This was new ground for him, and much more precarious ground than he had to navigate during the socialist period. First, he had to learn how to make his scripts appealing to global audiences. Then, he had to learn how to persuade investors or distributors to support his film. Coproducers could be allies in this long process of developing a film idea for the screen; however, finding the right partner for a coproduction is the result of a constant balancing and calculation of risk and trust. In this context, chemistry, the creator’s inner gut feeling and their affective response to the unknown can be valid tools for decision-­making. The EU tried to produce a space of proximity through a network of schools, training workshops and festivals in which networks can grow. Proximity itself is a feeling of affect generated by circulation and the constant assessment of risk: who can be trusted, and what festivals and film markets feel

Coproducing Emotions • 145

geographically, symbolically and affectively closer or more distant? Peripheral festivals play a significant role in producing this feeling of proximity, utilizing the existing closeness drawn from cultural histories.

Mistrust In the above section, I discussed the ways that creators perceive decision-­ making regarding coproducers, in their own words. Here, I will discuss the issue of mistrust. In the classic work by Edward Banfield and Laura Fasano Banfield (1958), poverty and backwardness in an Italian village were explained as derivatives of the villagers’ inability to work together for the common good, beyond the needs of their immediate families. This inability was called amoral familism (ibid.: 83). Anything and anyone beyond kinship in the village was considered with indifference and innate suspicion and mistrust. This functionalist take generated a dualism between the intimacy of the familial space and that of the public or social space. This duality ultimately addressed the lack of a strong state through mechanisms of economic and social inclusion (see Herzfeld 1987). Amoral familism was often considered an innate feature of the Mediterranean context. This approach perpetuated stereotypes about the ‘backward European south’. Trust, in the Durkheimian tradition (although it did not form part of his main work), seemed to be associated with the intellectual tradition of social solidarity. In that tradition, mistrust stood out as odd, as if it concerned social exclusion and strangeness. Conversely, trust in more complicated societies was built beyond the comfort zone of intimacy, kinship and family. Institutions such as banking or legal systems could guarantee trust and make various forms of exchange possible. In this dualistic reality, mistrust seems to have emerged as antisocial, a feeling of disassociation from connection; however, Carey (2017: 6), who studied mistrust in a Moroccan village, suggested that it was not only a social function, but ‘also a way of seeing the world’. His interpretation drew on the work of Niklas Luhmann (2018). Luhmann argued that trust and mistrust were tied together, in other words that there was no dualism (trust/mistrust) but an ‘increasing diversification and particularization of familiarities and unfamiliarities’ (Luhmann 1988: 105). In Luhmann’s perception, the production of trust and mistrust is tied to specific conditions and possibilities. Trust is achieved in a micro-­context of interpersonal communication and relationships that do not necessarily have a long-­term effect. In this sense, there are no societies of trust or mistrust, but interdependent courses of actions tied to specific conditions that generate feelings of trust or mistrust in different situations.

146 • Coproducing Europe

A more nuanced take on mistrust has also been supported by ethnographic research in different parts of the world since the 1970s. For example, Keith Hart (1990), exploring trade in circles of migrants in Ghana, argued that because they lived on the margins of the socio-­economic structure and in conditions of precarity, these immigrants had to rely on forming relationships with people with whom they were not blood relations, usually the traditional guarantee for economic exchange. Similarly, these immigrants had no access to modern trust systems (such as banking). In this limbo state between traditional ‘ideology and practice’ and ‘modern state and civil society’, the migrants had to form friendships, attachments among free individuals based on ‘affection and shared experience rather ­than . . . l­egal sanctions or the ties of blood’ (ibid.: 178). These friendships stemmed from a daily assessment of situations. In this context, the shift from trust to mistrust was a continuum that required constant alertness. Antun’s evocation of special friends seemed to emerge in the space of economic and social volatility, where older forms of trust, such as ideological alliances, had to be summoned to face the scarcity of state funding and the lack of other financial mechanisms. This course of action, to use Luhmann’s terms, opened a door for Antun in terms of this specific film project, and filled him with hope for similar success in another one through the same method, that of forming a coproduction. The introduction of film policies that invested in training and networking in a transnational, European context founded a new ethos for forming partnerships in film production. This context eventually gave rise to new skills concerning the ways that strangers can become ‘special friends’ and one can move from mistrust to trust. Building trust involves a long process with many setbacks and twists. Launching film markets was a way to boost trust by creating a ‘safe place’ in which film-­makers could meet business partners under the auspices (economic, political and cultural) of festivals. Regional film markets increased the chances of producing intimacy and the necessary trust due to past histories and cultural memories. This is one reason that Antun frequented local festivals, and it is why young creators preferred to start at regional festivals before going to central mega-­events such as the festivals of Cannes or the Berlinale. My meeting with Tamuna in Tbilisi helped me understand that film-­makers developed their own tactics (in De Certeau’s sense, see 2010) as a constant re-­evaluation of and response to context, allowing them to manoeuvre. These tactics helped them gain time and reconsider their options to protect their work and artistic integrity before agreeing on a coproduction. Tamuna developed these valuable skills throughout her life, as she grew up in a shifting environment. She grew up in Tbilisi during the period of transition. Our acquaintance preceded this research; I met her for the first time

Coproducing Emotions • 147

when I contacted her to ask permission to screen her first film at a Georgian documentary festival I organized on my campus. Tbilisi, 19 June 2018 Despite the uphill walk, which can be challenging in the humidity of the summer, I enjoyed arriving at Barnovi’s Street, one of the central upper streets in Vera. I was looking for a cafe with the intriguing name of O Moda Moda (‘moda’ meaning ‘fashion’ in Italian), where I was meeting the documentary film-­maker Tamuna. It was not an easy task to find the place, as there was no real signpost on the street. The arrival was rewarding, however, as the old house at the front gave way to an almost secret garden at the back where the owners had installed wooden benches and tables. The cafe also hosted a vintage fashion collection, hence its name. Tamuna was not there yet. I had a couple of minutes to look around on my own. At the next table, two young Georgian women ordered ­lemonade – ­the new hit in the city’s hot ­summer – ­and some khatchapuri (cheese-­bread). The culture of eating out, and the new bistros, cafes and restaurants fusing Georgian and international cuisines, took me by surprise during my visit. I had noticed this trend during an earlier visit in 2010, but now it had become the dominant culture. When Tamuna arrived, I shared my thoughts with her. She agreed in an aphoristic tone: ‘Yes, Tbilisi changed. I don’t like it.’

Tamuna was almost 10 when Georgia became independent. She studied journalism and worked at Rustavi 2, the first private TV channel in Georgia, which opened in 1994. She then studied film studies in London with a grant for students originating from the former socialist countries. After completing her studies, she moved to Berlin. She also spent some time in Austria. She became involved in Ex Oriente, a documentary film training programme for Central and Eastern European creators that was founded in 2001 (Institute of Documentary Film n.d.). She participated in three workshops for script development. Then, she took part in the Leipzig coproduction market and found a distributor, ­Deckert – ­a major distributor for documentaries with ‘a strong interest in social topics, political issues, history, ecology and in films from/about Russia and Eastern Europe’ (Deckert Distribution n.d.) Tamuna’s description of coproductions differed from Antun’s. They belong to different generations. Tamuna went through the formal paths of integration into the EU creative industry. The EU’s affirmative policies for postsocialist citizens allowed Tamuna to study in London, and from there, to become mobile in different EU countries, especially in the German-­speaking space, which is an important market for Georgian creators. It seems that Tamuna gradually became involved in a film ecosystem in which the policies of transition tried to shape Central and Eastern Europe. Central and Eastern Europe were also branded in a traditional, bounded and territorially specific way, as a periphery and a niche market for training centres such as Ex Oriente,

148 • Coproducing Europe

investors and distributors. In her films, Tamuna explored the changes her country had gone through during postsocialism. As Tamuna admitted, she often went to the Leipzig market, because she gradually got to know the people there and felt as though it was the place for her. She found it easier to identify potential producers there with an interest in the post-­Soviet context. Andrei, another very young film-­maker from Tbilisi, had just finished a BA programme in film studies in Tbilisi when I met him. He had already received attention for his work, as a short documentary of his had travelled to several festivals. He had applied to an MA programme in Germany, where there were still grants for students from the Caucasus and other ‘post-­post-­ Soviet countries’. He laughed when he mentioned that notion. I asked him what postsocialism meant to him. He thought for a couple of minutes, and answered that for his generation, postsocialism was a ticket to study and work. For him, Soviet Georgia was history; he was born and grew up in the post-­independence years. However, he seemed able to follow Tamuna’s path to study and work abroad due to the category of postsocialism, which seemed to interest markets and audiences in Europe. The comparison between Antun’s story and those of Tamuna and Andrei offered an interesting picture. Tamuna’s career path in film directing was organized within the EU film landscape. She started her education in the period of EU enlargement and foreign policy that tried to create strong relationships with EU neighbours, such as Georgia and other Black Sea countries. Special programmes (grants, scholarships, research programmes) were developed to offer opportunities to former socialist citizens, and furthermore, to re-­educate them in capitalism. However, as competition grew and the funding became more restricted, new political agendas produced further changes. For example, the MA grant that Andrei applied for did not include all the postsocialist countries, but students from the Caucasus and Central Asia, which seemed to be considered regions still in need of these grants. In this sense, postsocialism as a label was still in force in the EU bureaucracy, but its content (the countries that belong to this category) had changed. The label is also utilized by film-­makers such as Andrei and Tamuna to promote their work at festivals and markets, as it creates a distinctive identity for their work. Going to Leipzig made Tamuna feel more at home, as it was a niche market of postsocialist creators, but when it came to choosing coproducers it did not make her any less cautious. Forming coproductions for Tamuna involved floating between trust and mistrust, not as two opposing poles, but as a process of decision-­making that forced her to continually assess her options in terms of producers and offers. She preferred to ‘look for a coproducer only when she has a fully developed idea. This precaution prevents them from interfering very much.’ She retained her independence. She also considered herself ‘lucky’ as she had

Coproducing Emotions • 149

accepted a professional partnership with a German editor, and thus ‘receives feedback in a creative sense from the German side’. When I asked her why this was considered luck, she told me that there were rumours regarding coproducers who interfered in the creative process to please their local audiences. In this framework, what Tamuna seemed to look for in a coproduction was trust, not only in terms of investment but also in terms of creative freedom. The development of trust was embedded in time and personal relations. Tamuna trusted her German editor, as they have worked together for a long time. They have developed a stable working relationship over these years and a language of understanding. Trust and mistrust are not mutually exclusive for Tamuna. Instead, they are engaged with as a way for her to form a useful personal blueprint for decision-­making in markets, a personal ‘toolbox’ of ‘should’ and ‘should not’ when forming a coproduction. As Carey (2017: 25) pointed out regarding the interconnection of trust and mistrust, Each implies its shadow: where people assume that others can be known and so trusted, they are also aware that sometimes this does not hold; and where they assume that others are largely unknowable, they are also aware that some are less unknowable than others.

Both Antun and Tamuna tried to find their less unknowable coproducers in order to make films that were representative of their own initial inspirations and visions, but could also attract global audiences (and Andrei will probably do the same in a few years’ time). Various tactics helped them in this purpose, for example cultural memory and the instrumentalization of the category of postsocialism, which could open doors to markets. Political and economic volatility in the postsocialist space has increased risk since the 1990s. For Ulrich Beck (1992), the passage to a risk society introduced by the late phase of capitalism signified danger and hazards, and not wealth. In the context of film industries in particular, I have pointed out how far the economic shift to neoliberalism and the gradual exemplification of the ‘artist-­entrepreneur’ (described in the previous chapters) turned risks into something that creators should take, or rather should learn how to take. The EU policies that funded the formation of different spaces (summer schools, webinars, workshops) tried to provide this knowledge and the development of such skills. Coproductions, as economic ventures in an economic environment that reduced the percentage of state funding and subsidies, became risky investments. A series of measures, such as slate funding, loans from EU investment banks and the transnational sharing of risk could in theory reduce risk and motivate producers and creators. In fact, these policies instead naturalized risk as part of the (ad)venture of making a film. Festival

150 • Coproducing Europe

film markets, especially regional ones, could act as more secure spaces. Each creator develops their own preferences regarding markets and the tactics used to choose a coproducer. Nevertheless, all creators seem to share mobility and flexibility.

‘A Good Partner Is a Flexible Partner’ I met Katia on Skype, as she did not have time to see me in person when I went to Athens for other interviews. Although in her thirties, Katia was already a successful producer. With a degree in communication, she learned both to move and collaborate in Europe, first for her work and then independently. In my first job the director of the company, and let’s say the main producer, came from France; she had a coproduction background, and we did the first MEDIA programmes together. When I made my first short film it was the first time we went abroad, at least for me, and I started to get involved with all this environment of festivals and markets. A few years later, I decided to make a European programme that is an essential course for European producers at EAVE [European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs], and there, I met many other producers.

As Katia noted, her formation as a producer took place within EU schools. After completing her degree in Media and Communication, a popular degree for her generation in Greece, she took up a job in which she was connected to the European networks of coproductions. Doing various internships and attending various EU-­funded seminars, but also festivals, she started to become connected and to have her own network of possible partners. Her success at film festivals and the prizes she won testify that this transnational mobility allowed her to develop an aesthetic style and stories that can ‘talk’ to European audiences. Katia’s filmography shows that she chooses stories that relate to the problems of the decentred subjects of neoliberal capitalism (a challenging economic background, feminism, dysfunctional families, identity crises, etc.) in an experimental style and settings that follow the aesthetics of ‘European art-­ house’ films. Her coproductions are mostly with France and Germany, but she has also collaborated with production companies from the Netherlands – ‘a friend from EAVE’, she ­admitted – ­as well as the Balkans. Asked about the criteria for selecting a coproducer, Katia stressed that I am looking for money, good collaborators, and know-­how when a project is less developed. Sometimes I am looking for producers from bigger cinemas,

Coproducing Emotions • 151

sometimes from similar cinemas, and I am also looking for what we call the outside look, the look of associates, producers and crew in a Greek film that wants to travel abroad. A good partner [is] openly flexible to working with people from other countries, from other work environments, from [other] cultural and social backgrounds, so to be ready to meet all these people and views. One who is consistent in bringing a creatively fresh look to the film, to add something and not to impose.

I noticed that Katia’s language was very different from that of Antun and Tamuna as I was listening to the recording. There was no reference to ‘special friends’, ‘chemistry’ or ‘trust’. Her language was much more ‘technocratic’, in a sense. She looked for ‘associates’, ‘flexibility’, ‘an open and fresh look’. She spoke a more technocratic jargon. Less than thirty years after Tonia Marketaki’s first coproduction, Katia seemed very well adjusted to the EU prerequisites. As I discussed at the beginning of the chapter, Marketaki felt that the European vision itself should be questioned, as it seemed market-­driven. Her scepticism characterized many of the creators of that period, who challenged the EU’s dominant discourses and its cultural policies as a form of neocolonialism and neo-­imperialism, whose impact modern Greece suffered from. I remember hearing the term ‘Euro-­pudding’ in reference to coproductions when I was talking to a creator at the festival in Thessaloniki. Alkis was in his early sixties, and although he did not have a film screening at that time, he attended the festival as he considered it his ‘duty’ (kathikon) to ‘be in contact with colleagues and the works from different generations’. He also believed that his generation had to support the festival because it was ‘their creation’. We met through contacts from the Greek Film Centre, where he was quite well known because he was involved in syndicalism. We met in the cafe at the festival, a place that seemed very familiar to him. People came to say hello, and he knew most of them by their first names. When I explained my research project to Alkis, he was very willing to help. He remembered that in his case, coproduction funding was the only way he could complete his second film in the mid-­1990s. I found a company in Germany to help with editing and sound, and we managed to submit a proposal. In that way, we managed to get the funding from Eurimages, but also they wouldn’t have any say in my work. Because with coproductions you start with a specific film in your mind, and you end up with a different one, which is not your vision.

Alkis worked abroad and had travelled the world. He had also made a couple of successful big-­budget films in Greece, and thus he knew how to work in his own way with producers and the Greek Film Centre. Nevertheless, he

152 • Coproducing Europe

believed that coproducers could interfere in the film process in such a way that they could really alter the result. His scepticism was similar to that of Tamuna and Antun, but in his case, he knew ‘how the system worked’, and he seemed proud to admit that he ‘cheated’ it. He formed a coproduction that theoretically followed the rules (with participation of other producers from EU member states), but in practice, it was not a synergy, a collaboration of partners under the same vision. Alkis and Tonia Marketaki seemed to share the same attitude towards coproductions as a ‘necessary evil’ to produce their films. Alkis’s solution was interpreted by the Greek official in the Greek Eurimages team as fake and a form of ‘cheating’. In contrast, the same official told me that the new generation of creators had learned to adapt and communicate their work to wider audiences. For Alkis, however, ‘cheating the system’ was a source of pride, based on the fact that he remained faithful to his vision. This kind of practice was often called ‘corruption’ in the language of transition, where good governance and anti-­corruption were the top priorities for many integration policies and funding for postsocialist societies. Anthropological work since the 1990s in different parts of the world has postulated that firstly, there cannot be a unified definition of corruption, and secondly, practices and understandings that fall under the Western-­centric idea of corruption are embedded in local knowledge regarding solidarity networks, questions of power and gift-­giving cultures, but also the historical legacies of colonialism (see Sissener 2001). What seems to stand out as interesting in Alkis’s narrative is that he collaborated with German colleagues. When I asked if he could explain who they were without giving their names, Alkis described them as young professionals taking their first steps in the film industry. It seemed that this transnationally developed network of film-­makers consisted of people who were marginalized in the industry either because they were in early career phases or because they came from small film industries. I asked Alkis if he had collaborated with them again, but he replied in the negative. ‘Some of them are still in the industry and we meet in festivals, but we didn’t collaborate again.’ As Antun said, coproducers do not necessarily become friends. In Alkis’s case, all the partners were involved in a transnational network of young film-­makers who wanted to make films and take their first steps in the industry. Eurimages was their ticket. In the official language, this could be described as a transnational case of corruption. The difference is not only semantic, but also involves different degrees of understanding of what becoming a partner involves in different cultures, both ethnic and professional. As discussed earlier, EU enlargement in the 1990s was not just a political project. It was a historical and cultural process that sought to redefine the European against strong, historically shaped stereotypes about the former

Coproducing Emotions • 153

socialist countries of Eastern and south-­eastern Europe. Inclusion in the financing of Creative Europe was seen as an incentive and a reward for changes that were considered fundamental to the integration of the Balkans. The EU believed that the gradual adoption of its policy agenda by the candidate members would prevent the construction of new dividing lines in the EU. However, this inclusion incorporated hegemonic and historically constructed stereotypes from earlier periods. Film policies as part of Europeanization aimed to shape creators according to the standards of the creative economy, which combined the entrepreneurial agenda of neoliberalism with arts as a space of imagination, innovation and inspiration. These attributes of the creative economy adopted a vocabulary connected to mobility, skills and flexibility. Comparing different generations of film-­makers in Greece has suggested a change regarding the working ethos. Forming a group of partners in the past meant sharing the same ideas with them. For example, it was a parea that launched the Thessaloniki Film Festival. Since the 1990s, however, there has been change. Alkis and Katia formed ad hoc groups to obtain EU grants. Katia seemed very aware of Tonia Marketaki’s scepticism and Alkis’s practices. Most creators resorted to coproductions to make films. Even Katia spoke of a ‘necessary evil or good’. As she explained, a coproducer should ideally be someone who ‘adds, does not impose’. The language she used emphasized ‘cooperation, flexibility, openness and mobility’. Her jargon was typical ‘EU jargon’. Katia learned to use it through training in a set of institutions and infrastructure developed for this purpose. Katia’s interview also suggested dichotomies that have incorporated stereotypes about the Other stemming from the EU geometry of power. For example, explaining the criteria for choosing a coproducer, she stressed that she chose partners depending on what films she had to hand. So, ‘with smaller budgets’, and ‘smaller’ and ‘first films’, she turned to ‘smaller cinemas often from the Balkan countries, because there, there is a great deal of relevance in the way we work, in the way we communicate, their environment is just as unstable’. Katia was fully aware of the inequalities within the industry, the ‘big’ and ‘small’ industries in her narrative. Her categories perpetuated the distinction between a centre and periphery that emerged in my discussion with the festival officials. But if Creative Europe succeeded at the level of creators’ networking, what about the second goal, that of a European identity? Katia explained: I do not see the films as European or Greek, but as films. I use all these tools to mark the film as Greek or European based on the law [the European Coproduction Convention] but in terms of content or identity I do not define my films it that way at all [her emphasis].

154 • Coproducing Europe

For Katia, Greekness and Europeanness are instrumentalized whenever funding applications need to be successfully completed, while the film’s identity itself exceeds this boundedness. The erasure of identity in terms of national or supranational narrative could be an identity in itself. Europe is deconstructed in Katia’s narrative. She could also not find any content-­oriented definition of Europe that was meaningful for her work. Conversely, the artistic style and aesthetics of her films was much closer to her personal brand as a film producer, and this was what she was looking for in collaboration, to find people who spoke the ‘same [aesthetic] language’. This proximity is tested in every different film project. The apparent difference compared to the older generation of creators is that Katia was much more open to testing the water, sharing her vision with others and finding or building a common language. European Added Value is connected to the pillars of globalization, transnationalism and circulation. When I was discussing the meaning of EAV with officials at Thessaloniki’s festival, one of them, Sophia, claimed that: each year, creators are interested in specific themes. These themes draw from issues and problems often shared by many European societies. For example, this year [2016] many projects tackle the issue of the refugee crisis. This is currently the main topic for Europe, creators will be influenced without even knowing it. This is [her emphasis] the European identity of the projects.

This shared interest in similar problems generated a shared language, but is nevertheless connected to the EU knowledge-­production system regarding film-­making, such as EAVE, the prestigious schools for young European producers that Katia attended, and festivals and their markets. Katia’s generation is expected to form networks of people who circulate in different markets and try to find funding, as well as compatible film partners. This circulation is encouraged by the wider Project Europe within which coproductions are considered a tool for generating transnational collaboration and circulation for both creators and films, and thus a step to strengthen ‘love for Europe’. The meaning of Europe, however, did not seem to be of real significance for (co)producers such as Katia. In a sense, Katia coproduces films, but not Europe, as the European film policies hoped. The meaning of Europe for Katia seems not to be of value here. As a result, the circulation of films or the training of creators in specific schools or workshops funded by the EU do not guarantee a European identity. Katia seemed to reiterate the political and economic hierarchies embedded in the process of Europeanization concerning the Balkans. As Bracewell and Drace-­Francis (1999) noted, the term ‘Balkans’ was coined among geologists in France in the eighteenth century, and then among geographers in Germany in the nineteenth. However, one of its most frequent uses was in

Coproducing Emotions • 155

the political administration of the European empires (British and German), which were attempting to organize their reports from the regional diplomatic missions, according to Pamela Ballinger (1999). She noted (ibid.: 32) that ‘places located within the territorial confines of a Southeastern European space seemed to fall under and to stretch across several well-­established classificatory rubrics: the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean.’ As enlargement proceeded and some of the countries became full member states of the EU, such as Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia and Slovenia, EU officials coined different terms either to specify interests and agendas or to underline continuing ‘problematic’ areas. For example, the Western Balkans was a label used mainly for countries without EU member state status (Montenegro, Serbia, Albania, North Macedonia, Bosnia–Herzegovina and Kosovo, with the exception of Croatia). The European Neighbourhood Policy was conceived in 2003–4 to build a framework of relationships between the EU and the countries on the shores of the Black Sea. Although these policies were perceived as instruments to avoid emerging divisions between the EU and its neighbours and were based on the values of democracy, rule of law and respect of human rights, they added to the (asymmetrical) process of Europeanization. Creating proximity by imagining a neighbourhood emerged in relation to the Yugoslav wars and was embedded in the EU jargon of humanitarianism and development. In this context, the process of generating regions within the framework of Europeanization was constructed in multilayered, interwoven, always-­fragmented ideologies, imaginations, agendas and practices echoing contradictory histories and social realities. This is why the analysis of coproduction networks developed by Greece, Bosnia–Herzegovina and Georgia cannot be undertaken only in relation to past cultural histories or present political agendas. Instead, a combination of memories (history), needs (economy) and desires (agency) is necessary to understand them. Today, as Alex Marlow-­Mann (2017) argued, the regional is shaped more in relation to the ‘global’ than the ‘local’. EU cultural policies contributed to this process of forming the ‘regional’; however, as Blagojević (2009: 36) argued when describing the semi-­periphery, the latter is always ‘under reform’, which assures the persistence of power relations. During enlargement, the reformation of the Balkans to south eastern Europe included many floating signifiers. In social anthropology, Claude Lévi-­Strauss (2012), discussing the work of Mauss, noted the importance of floating signifiers as categories found in different cultures under different names, but always pointing to a void that needs to be filled with meaning in specific contexts. Producing meaning and content for these signifiers engages questions of power. The integration policies of Europeanization, such as the film policies I am discussing, drew from a colonial past postulating European moral superiority

156 • Coproducing Europe

and techno-­capitalist enhancement. Labels like postsocialism or transition implied a lack of properties like democracy, a free market and human rights. These properties were the floating signifiers that had no meaning in themselves, but were bestowed with meaning by their ‘articulation in different projects’ (Laclau 2005: 33). ‘Project Europe’ and the process to become European provided the meaning for these empty signifiers to be understood. But these signifiers are not bestowed only with meaning but also with emotions. Following emotions such as the ‘substance of politics’ (Stoler 2004: 6) challenges the legacy of the Western empiricism that was associated with the hard logic of facts and often connected to state politics and the economy, contrasting with emotions such as in the creative economy (ibid.). The circulation of emotions (through subjects such as creators and officials and objects such as films) seems to produce Europe. However, emotions become critical of Europeanization, expressing anxieties regarding the future, and resonate affectively with the mixed feelings often produced by imagining Europe as home.

Notes 1. Interview with Nikos Panagiotopoulos from the short documentary dedicated to Tonia Marketaki and directed by Eleni Alexandraki (1994). 2. This term refers to societies like those of south-­eastern Europe that internalized the Western hegemonic stereotypes of ‘slow’, ‘unfinished’ modernization. This perceived state needed to be overturned by implementing and adopting the EU agenda (Blagojević 2009: 97). 3. The ‘Monster of Grbavica’ had his headquarters in the area (see Džidić and Dzidic 2013). 4. Being open to the call is the basis for many world myths of adulthood and the formation of heroes.

Conclusion

h Sarajevo, April 2018 Vinoteka is a popular restaurant housed in a two-­storey traditional building on Skenderiya Road. According to urban legend, the material used for the pedestrian bridge was the same as that used in the construction of the Eiffel Tower. Today, the neighbourhood hosts numerous embassies and consulates in Sarajevo. Vinoteka opened during the ninth Sarajevo Film Festival, which is why it was chosen to host the dinner party for the CineLink workshop.   A group of young p ­ eople – m ­ ost of them in their t­ wenties – w ­ ere chatting in Serbo-­Croat as we waited to be served our Adriatic risottos (rice with fish from the Adriatic Sea). The group consisted of the producer and the director of a fiction film from Belgrade, a documentarist from Croatia, a female documentarist from Serbia who lived in Romania and her producer, a young woman from Bucharest who worked at a company that had just produced a very interesting documentary about Abkhazia. I had watched the film at Thessaloniki’s documentary film festival. These young people seemed to know each other ­well – ­and as the young Serbian documentarist informed me, they did. They had met at various festivals and schools organized and funded by the EU. As a result, I saw them as a highly mobile generation of young, skilled artists for whom film festivals are lifelines for producing their work. At the same time, their everyday living was neither easy nor secure. The Serbian documentarist worked as a freelance editor in Romania and the documentarist from Croatia taught some hours at a coastal university near Rijeka. He confessed that he had managed to find some funding from a programme supporting cross-­border collaboration between Croatia, Italy and Slovenia. The young Serbian called

158 • Coproducing Europe

him lucky. Serbia did not have a similar programme nor similar neighbours. They all laughed.

Film coproductions are construed as the application of EU film policies, but they also generate new relationships that are expanded through new network formations. These relationships do not emerge due to serendipity. My research suggested that coproductions are motivated by historical legacies (cultural and geographic proximity, common social engineering, diasporas), know-­how and artistic capital (skills, recognition, efficiency), resources and institutional frameworks (access to funding, flexible and supportive bureaucracy) and shared artistic values (a common pool of creativity initiated by a transnational lifestyle). These factors have a history in the film industries in Europe, but what seemed to change in recent decades is the process of institutionalization of a cultural agenda within the EU. This agenda is contextualized and localized in specific film traditions, and in creative choices and experiences (for example, studying abroad or taking part in training) that contribute to the formation and directionality of these relationships, proliferating the ways in which Europeanization has been both rooted and imagined. According to Lydia Papadimitriou (2018: 229), Europeanization referred to the increased interactions with European partners at the level of funding and production (in other words, ‘extroversion’ towards European partners), while also pointing to the consequent process of creative and cultural cross-­fertilisations.

These cross-­ fertilizations either confirm or challenge the process of Europeanization, offering alternative (often no less hegemonic) or even competing visions of what the idea of Europe should be and comprise. At the same time, the dinner party at Vinoteka indicated another aspect of the film industry in recent decades: precarity. Most of the promising young artists at the party move around, not only to different festivals, but to different productions and countries, to find contracts that can support them financially. The formation of cultural entrepreneurs who are self-­employed workers in the cultural sector has taken place in a period of increased economic and social individualism and gradual depoliticization (see Murzyn-­Kupisz et al. 2019). As a result, emotional anxieties and discontent were developed vis-­àvis hopes and desires for creative production. Emotional ambiguities were recorded in the discussions with creators at various film markets. The constant reconsideration of their film projects under the gaze of the expert, script doctor, producer, investor and festival official; the exploration of new opportunities to work together as equal (but still hierarchical) partners; and the competition for restricted sources of funding, especially for young artists, fuel

Conclusion • 159

emotions such as mis/trust, special friendships and the instrumentalization of cultural identities. These conditions also forced creators to develop their own ‘practices of survival’ within this volatile economic context. Pure instinct and the ability to discern and evaluate risk are highly valued. Learning the skills and creating the networks required can help diminish some of the risk factors in collaborating with new partners, but it does not make the anxiety and doubts disappear. This learning process produces competent officials and creators who are developing the skills required to cope with the competitive global environment and to understand the mechanisms of Creative Europe, but it has not yet generated the emotional engagement, the love for Europe, that the EU imagined. My comparative research started from a need to go beyond the hegemonic binary of the 1990s of socialism and postsocialism. Martin Müller (2019: 536), in an article assessing the impact of the concept of postsocialism and its gradual disappearance as an analytical category, suggested that postsocialism was an ‘agnostic term to describe an ambiguous present and an uncertain future’. Centred around that historical event, the collapse of the socialist regimes, postsocialism privileged a moment and a territory through Euroand Western-­centric, and often orientalist, views that did not try to consider the connections with historical processes like postcolonialism and continued to produce difference, thus fermenting the colonial tradition of the superiority of Europe. A new project, for Müller, would be to examine ‘the plurality of forces that shape ex-­socialist countries’ (ibid.: 545) through unexpected comparisons. My three case studies tried to challenge not only the binary of West and East but also the differences and similarities that have shaped the three film industries beyond the ideological boundary. In other words, my examination explored distinct histories, not only between capitalist Greece and the two film industries from the so-­called socialist world, but also within this world (the former Yugoslavia and the USSR). My study showed how insignificant film coproductions were in Greece during the Cold War period due to the lack of infrastructure and political instability. At the same time, the distinct position of the former Yugoslavia allowed the proliferation of film coproduction in that country. In comparison, the Soviet Union seemed to have a more ideologically driven ­design – ­without ignoring the economic ­benefits – ­for film coproduction, and tried to enforce its position as the leading force of the socialist world, as well as attract new partnerships in the emerging postcolonial world. Examining the development of film coproductions through a periodization and taking the ‘socialist period’ not as a whole also helped me to overcome stereotypical understandings of socialism and the Cold War. My research indicated the ways that culture in post-­war Europe turned gradually into a political and economic tool for forging alliances beyond the

160 • Coproducing Europe

strict boundaries of national borders and the ideological boundaries of the Cold War. The construction of the EU and the engagement of culture in the production of more coherent identity politics from the 1980s was entrenched in the development of a European governmentality in which a centralized policy agenda played a significant role. This agenda was part of the process of Europeanization, both as part of a Foucauldian discourse of what Europe should be and what its future would be, but also as part of political and cultural policies that constituted the repertoire of this agenda applied in different contexts and groups of people. Examining Eurimages and MEDIA as part of this agenda allowed me to explore the ways that both are connected to the production of spaces in which creators learn to become European in a specific, entrepreneurial way. This spirit of entrepreneurship is tied to ideas about the future (innovation, novelty, flexibility and transformation), a temporality deeply embedded in the process of Europeanization. However, the policy design discussed above precludes various understandings and reactions. Focusing on film markets showed how local officials apply EU policies by taking into account regional context (work habits, cultural legacies, infrastructure, audiences and regional competition). Making choices in an attempt to combine EU policies to get funding for festivals, get the industry’s attention amid the competition of other regional festivals and gain creators’ trust, these professionals generate networks that often continue historical legacies or renew them through new partnerships. This was very obvious in the case of Bosnia–Herzegovina, where the similarities in real and symbolic language the reformulation of a cinematic common space, which drew from the former Yugoslav space, due to a cost-­effective film. The emergence of this space was supplemented by the presence of two EU member states, Slovenia and Croatia, which in the last decade have invested in their film industries and also by the proximity to the Central European and German-­speaking world as a potential market. In comparison, the Georgian film industry, due to the political problems aggravated by the wars in Ukraine since 2014 and the political rancour with Russia since the last invasion in South Ossetia in 2008, is not able to benefit from a similar socialist legacy. However, festival officials and creators try to get the attention of producers from Eastern and south-­eastern Europe to compensate for the lack of a more homogenized cinematic neighbourhood around the Black Sea. Finally, Greece, despite its long-­standing presence in Eurimages and MEDIA, seemed only in the last years of austerity to become more active in film coproductions through a new generation of producers trained in the EU spaces I described. Although the traditional large film industries have a permanent presence in the film coproduction networks, in the last few decades, neighbouring Balkan countries like Albania, Slovenia and Croatia seem to have entered these networks. Nevertheless, in all three cases, the presence of

Conclusion • 161

countries like France and Germany was and still is a constant factor for the formation of coproductions in the region, and both countries have strong attachments to the regional festivals and markets. Discussing Europeanization, Danjela Majstorović and Zoran Vučkovac (2016) underlined that it was discursively constructed through different forms and degrees of EU membership, promoting a self-­idealization drawn from values closely related to its colonial past and neoliberal capitalism. Integration according to these values is encouraged as a step to being included in the future European home. I examined this continuous production of difference through Europeanization in the last years with an interwoven comparison between postsocialism and postcolonialism as two interconnected forms of ‘global coloniality’, defined as the process of ‘continuing colonization of time and space’, of ‘lives and futures’ (Tlostanova 2012: 132). In this framework, according to Tlostanova (2017: 7), the collapse of the socialist world in the 1990s legitimized neoliberal modernity as the only modernity that owned the future, condemning the rest of the world as peripheral and lagging behind. Of course, feeling peripheral is not expressed through the same emotions. ‘Project Europe’ is connected to the modalities of capitalist production of financial and emotional capital, but also to the production of the periphery as described above. Feeling peripheral generates an emotional capital that can work in paradoxical ways (for example, creating unexpected matches between producers and creators) that are never envisioned by EU officials. Creative agencies originated from an economic, political and symbolic periphery, according to the official EU design of regions. South-­eastern Europe as a (cinematic) periphery, which was shaped in the 1990s through hierarchies and stereotypes of the past, increased the emotional ambivalence of the film creators. Lagging behind in terms of economic investment, infrastructure and opportunities could be expressed through various emotions (mistrust, anxiety, discontent, ambivalence), but it could also help with the invention of ways to overcome differences, as in the cases of many creators (who trusted their inner instincts more, chose more carefully which markets to attend, branded their films in regional terms that could assure a wider recognition or participated in specific periods of script development at film markets). Festival officials and creators often critically engage with the EU’s language of Project Europe by looking for a vocabulary of affect drawn from kinship or from memories of socialist comradeship, or even by looking sideways to overcome the normative regulations. Their affect often challenged the normative love of Project Europe, and the hierarchies between centre and periphery, by imagining a different project reshaping not only their region, but Europe itself. In these projects, Europe often does not have a central role and meaning, instead forming a part of unexpected and paradoxical

162 • Coproducing Europe

networks. Müller (2019: 546), in his final note on the future of postsocialism, calls us to overcome the geographical understandings of the term and to focus on a ‘conceptual inspiration that fires imaginations’. I believe that these cinematic networks could be indicative of these non-­territorial and decentred imaginations of Europe.

Appendix

Table A.1.  Funding for Greece. Figures in EUR. © Eleni Sideri. Year 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

EUROS (coproduction fund) 1,006,699 686,021 626,242 838,470 1,084,362 1,382,979 1,299,817 580,831 1,259,991 1,039,048 1,083,000 1,540,001 1,230,000 1,695,000 460,000 200,000 580,000 1,460,000 0 190,000 120,000 340,000 750,000 830,000 0 490,000 500,000

MEDIA (The sums concern only production/development) 2009 42,000,00 2010 59,813,00 2011 179,000,00

164 • Appendix

Table A.1 (cont.) Year

EUROS (coproduction fund)

2012 2013 2015 2014 2015 2016

173,050,00 35,157,00 39,800,00 95,000,00 23,500,00 245,000,00

Table A.2.  Funding for Bosnia–Herzegovina. Figures in EUR. © Eleni Sideri. Eurimages (only for coproductions) 2006 2007 2008 2009 2011 2013 2014 2015

340,000 785,000 740,000 730,000 630,000 300,000 377,000 310,000

MEDIA 2010 (i2iaudiovisual) 2012 (development) 2013 (development) 2014 (development) 2016 (development)

50,000 50,000 16,685 60,000 25,000

Table A.3.  Funding for Georgia. Figures in EUR. © Eleni Sideri. Year

Euros

2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

210,000 810,000 600,000 0 360,000 300,000

MEDIA 2008 2012

20,000 15,000

Appendix • 165

Table A.4.  Cash rebates in the Balkans. © Eleni Sideri. Country

Percentage

Slovenia Croatia Serbia North Macedonia Montenegro Bosnia-­Herzegovina  granted on by the Sarajevo Canton Government for filming in Sarajevo Albania Georgia Greece Bulgaria Romania Turkey

25% 25% 25% 20% 25% 30% 30% (announced in 2018) 20–25% 40% 25% 35–45% 30%

References

‘Action Programme to Promote the Development of the European Audiovisual Industry (Media) (1991–1995)’. Official Journal of the European Communities L 380(7). Retrieved 3  March 2017 from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/action-progra​ mme-to-promote-the-development-of-the-european-audiovisual-industry-media-1991-19​ 95.html. Adorno, Theodor, W., and Max Horkheimer. 1998 [1947]. ‘Kulturindustrie: Aufklärung als Massenbetrug Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (1947), Dialektik der Aufklärung’, Gesammelten Schriften 3(1): 141–91. Agelopoulos, Georgios. 2000. ‘Political Practices and Multiculturalism: The Case of Salonica’, in Jane Cowan (ed.), Macedonia: The Politics of Identity and Difference. London: Pluto Press, pp. 140–55. Ahmed, Sara. 2001. ‘Communities That Feel: Intensity, Difference and Attachment’, in Anu Kuoivunen and Susanna Paasonen (eds), Affective Encounters. Turku: School of Arts, Literature and Music Publications, University of Turku, pp. 10–25. ———. 2004. ‘Affective Economies’, Social Text 22(2): 117–39. ———. 2014. Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Aivaliotis, Konstantinos. 2014. ‘Politismos, Dokimanter, Kinimatografiko Festival: Mia Ethnografiki Prossegisi’ [Culture, documentary, film festivals: An ethnographic approach], PhD dissertation. Athens: Panteion University. ‘Alberto Latuada Interview’. 1975. Sineast Filmiski Kasopis (29): 80–83. Alexakis, Eleftherios, P. 2014. Ikogeneia, Sygenia ke Gamos sti Neoteri Ellada [Family, kinship and marriage in modern Greece]. Athens: Herodotos. Alexandraki, Eleni. 1994. ‘I ERT2 Parousiazei Ena Afieroma stin Tonia Marketaki’ [ERT2 presents a tribute to Tonia Marketaki], Flix, 1  December. Retrieved 5  May 2020 from https://flix.gr/articles/tonia-marketaki-tribute-2014.html. Allen, John, Doreen Massey and Allen Cochrane, et al. 1998. Rethinking the Region: Spaces of Neo-Liberalism. London: Routledge. Andrew, Martin. 2005. ‘Agents in Inter-Action: Bruno Latour and Agency’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 12(4): 283–311. Angelidou, Aliki. 2011. ‘Kanontas Epitopia Erevna stous “Gitones”: I Politiki tis Ebistosynis stin Ethnografia tis Metasosialistikis Voulgarias’ [Doing fieldwork among ‘neighbours’: Trust in the ethnography of postsocialist Bulgaria], in Demetra Gefou-Madianou (ed.), Opsis Anthropologikis Erevnas, Politismos, Istoria, Anaparastasis [Aspects of anthropological research, culture, history, representations]. Athens: Patakis, pp. 315–41. Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Theory, Culture and Society 7(2–3): 295–310.

References • 167

———. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Asad, Talal. 1986. ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’, in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Oakland: University of California Press, pp. 141–64. Athanassatou, Athena. n.d. ‘Fylo ke Kinimatografos’ [Gender and cinema], Fylopedia E-Leksiko [Fylopedi E-Dictionary]. Retrieved 24 February 2022 from http://www.fylopedia.uoa.gr​ /index.php/%CE%A6%CF%8D%CE%BB%CE%BF_%CE%BA%CE%B1%CE%B9​ _%CE%BA%CE%B9%CE%BD%CE%B7%CE%BC%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%BF​ %CE%B3%CF%81%CE%AC%CF%86%CE%BF%CF%82. Ballinger, Pamela. 1999. ‘Definitional Dilemmas: Southeastern Europe as “Culture Area”?’, Balkanologie: Revue d’Etudes Pluridisciplinaires 3(2). Retrieved 12  September 2020 from https://journals.openedition.org/balkanologie/745. Banfield, Edward Christie, and Laura Fasano Banfield. 1958. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. A Study of a Village in Southern Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago. Barber, Stephen. 2002. Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space. London: Reaktion. Beck, Ulrich, and Brian Wynne. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Thousand Oaks: CA: Sage. Beers, van Cees, Elina Berghall and Tom Poot. 2007. ‘Appropriability, Proximity, Routines, and Innovation’, DRUID Summer Conference 18–20  June 2007. Copenhagen: CBS Denmark. Retrieved 19  January 2020 from https://silo.tips/download/appropriabilitypr​oximity-routines-and-innovation. Benjamin, Walter. 2006. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bergman, Ingmar. 2010. O Magikos Fanos [The Magic Lantern]. Athens: Potamos. Betz, Mark. 2001. ‘The Name Above the (Sub)Title: Internationalism, Coproduction, and Polyglot European Art Cinema’, Camera Obscura 16(1): 1–45. Bilić, Bojan, and Marija Radoman. 2019. Lesbian Activism in the (Post-)Yugoslav Space: Sisterhood and Unity. London: Palgrave. Bitusikova, Alexandra. 2009. ‘New Challenges in Doctoral Education in Europe’, in David Boud and Alison Lee (eds), Changing Practices of Doctoral Education. London: Routledge, pp. 200–10. Bjelić, Dušan I. 2016. Normalizing the Balkans: Geopolitics of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry. Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2018. ‘Introduction’, Interventions 20(6): 751–58. Blagojević, Marina. 2009. Knowledge Production at the Semiperiphery: A Gender Perspective. Belgrade: Institut za Kriminološka i Sociološka Istraživanja. Blauvelt, Timothy. 2009. ‘Status Shift and Ethnic Mobilisation in the March 1956 Events in Georgia’, Europe-Asia Studies 61(4): 651–68. Bollywood Art Georgia. n.d. ‘Raj Kapoor, Nargis and Dev Anand in Tbilisi – 1952’. YouTube. Retrieved 27 July 2018 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLO7_S0kKOs. Bondebjerg, Ib. 2018. ‘Forward’, in Julia Hammett-Jamart, Petar Mitric and Eva Novrup Redvall (eds), European Film and Television Coproduction: Policy and Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. v–x. Borneman, John, and Nick Fowler. 1997. ‘Europeanization’, Annual Review of Anthropology 26(1): 487–514. ‘Bosnian Cinema: The Traumas on Screen’. 2006. The Independent 1  December 2012. Retrieved 22  July 2020 from https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/ fe​atures/bosnian-cinema-the-traumas-on-screen-426446.html.

168 • References

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Božić-Vrbančić, Senka. 2009. ‘Waiting to be Loved: The European Union’s Hope to be the Loved Object’, in Ghassan Hage (ed.), Waiting. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, pp. 184–95. Bracewell, Wendy, and Alex Drace-Francis. 1999. ‘South-Eastern Europe: History, Concepts, Boundaries’, Balkanologie: Revue d’Etudes Pluridisciplinaires 3(2). Retrieved 20 June 2021 from https://journals.openedition.org/balkanologie/741. Bridger, Sue, and Pine Frances. 1998. ‘Introduction; Transition to Post-socialism and Cultures of Survival’, in S. Bridger and F. Pine, eds, Surviving Post-Socialism Local Strategies and Regional Responses in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. London: Routledge, pp. 1–15.Bu, Liping. 1999. ‘Educational Exchange and Cultural Diplomacy in the Cold War’, Journal of American Studies 33(3): 393–415. Buchowski, Michal. 1996. ‘The Shifting Meanings of Civil and Civic Society in Poland’, in Elizabeth Dunn and Chris Hann (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models. New York: Psychology Press, pp. 79–98. Bumbak, Silvija. 2014. ‘The Dynamics of Socialist Realism in Early Yugoslav Film (1945– 1956) in View of Literary and Political Influences’, MA thesis. Budapest: Central European University. Carey, Matthew. 2017. Mistrust: An Ethnographic Theory. Chicago: Hau Books. Carsten, Janet (ed.). 2000. Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘CineLink Industry Days’. n.d. Sarajevo Film Festival website. Retrieved 4 September 2020 from https://www.sff.ba/en/page/industry. CINETALKS. 2018. ‘The Impact of Film Festivals on Economy, Society and Culture’, Roundtable at CINETALKS-SARAJEVO CINELINK 11–16 August 2018. Sarajevo. Chalkou, Maria. 2021. ‘Eastern European Cinemas, Greek Film Culture and Cross-Border Exchange in the 1950s and 1960s: Movies, Festivals, Co-Productions and State Censorship’, in Eleni Sideri (ed.), Cultural Neighbourhoods and Coproductions in South East Europe and Beyond – 4th Conference on Contemporary Greek Film Cultures [e-book]. Thessaloniki: University of Macedonia Press, pp. 31–57. Retrieved 4 June 2021 from http://cbg-lab.uom​ .gr/en/2021/04/26/international-conference-cultural-neighborhoods-and-co-productions​ -in-south-east-europe-and-beyond-4th-conference-on-contemporary-greek-film-cultures/. Chatelin, Bruno. 2004. ‘Film Festivals: Too Many of Them?’ FilmFestivals.com, 10 February. Retrieved 21  January 2017 from https://www.filmfestivals.com/blog/editor/film_festiva​ ls_too_many_of_them. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ‘Coproduction Funding History’. 2021. Council of Europe – Eurimages website. Retrieved 29  December 2021 from https://www.coe.int/en/web/eurimages/co-production-funding​ -history. ‘Co-productions. The Post War Era’. n.d. Film Reference. Retrieved 11 November 2022 from http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Academy-Awards-Crime-Films/Co-producti​ ons-THE-POSTWAR-ERA.html. Cornell, Svante E. 2002. ‘Autonomy and Conflict: Ethnoterritoriality and Separatism in the South Caucasus; Cases in Georgia’, unpublished manuscript. Uppsala: Uppsala University. Council of Europe – Eurimages. 2014. ‘Presentation of Eurimages’. YouTube, 6  August. Retrieved 5 July 2016 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-UDHQWIjXk.

References • 169

‘Council Decision of 21 December 1990’. 1990. Official Journal of the European Communities L 380/37. Retrieved 19  August 2017 from http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN​ /TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:31990D0685&from=EN. Creative Europe. 2013. ‘Regulation (EU) No 1295/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11  December 2013 Establishing the Creative Europe Programme (2014 to 2020) and Repealing Decisions No 1718/2006/EC, No 1855/2006/EC and No 1041/2009/EC’. Retrieved 8  July 2016 from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN​ /TXT/?uri=celex%3A32013R1295. ‘Creative Europe 2014–2020’. n.d. European Commission website. Retrieved 12 July 2016 from https://culture.ec.europa.eu/fr/resources/creative-europe-previous-programmes/creat​ ive-europe-2014-2020. ‘Creative – Media Sub-programme Guide for Experts on Assessment of Development of Audiovisual Content – Single Project Applications’. 2014–2020. Retrieved 17  August 2017 from https://www.oficinamediaespana.eu/images/anexos/single-project/10Singlepro​ ject_guia_experto.pdf. Crofts, Stephen. 1998. ‘Concepts of National Cinema’, in Alan Williams (ed.), Film and Nationalism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 25–51. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 2004. ‘The Secret to Happiness’. TED. Retrieved 19 October 2020 from https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi (eds). 1988. Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dalakoglou, Dimitris. 2020. ‘Building and Ordering Transnationalism: The “Greek House” in Albania as a Material Process’, in Daniel Miller (ed.), Anthropology and the Individual: A Material Cultural Perspective. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 51–68. Dangerfield, Marti. 2011. ‘Visegrad Group Cooperation and “Europeanization” of New EU Member States’. Retrieved 3  May 2021 from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mart​ in_Dangerfield/publication/282870119_Visegrad_Group_cooperation_and_Europeaniza​ tion_of_new_EU_member_states/links/5620ebaf08ae93a5c92605fd.pdf. De Certeau, Michel. 2010 [1984]. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Pina-Cabral, João, and Carolin Leutloff-Grandits. 2012. ‘The Importance of Kinship in Contemporary Anthropological Research’, Ethnologie Française 42(2): 384–90. Retrieved 19  April 2021 from https://www.academia.edu/35461576/The_Importance_of_Kinsh​ ip_in_Contemporary_Anthropological_Research_together_with_Joao_de_Pina_Cabral_. De Valck, Marijke. 2007. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. De Valck, Marijke, and Skadi Loist. 2009. ‘Film Festival Studies: An Overview of a Burgeoning Field’, in Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne (eds), Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit. St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, pp. 179–215. De Vinck, Sophie. 2011. ‘Revolutionary Road? Looking Back at the Position of the European’, unpublished manuscript. Brussels: Vrije Universiteit Brussel. ‘Decision No 1718/2006/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 November 2006 concerning the Implementation of a Programme of Support for the European Audiovisual Sector (MEDIA 2007) Official Journal of the European Union 24/11/2006’. 2006. Official Journal of the European Union L 327/12, 24 November. Retrieved 5 April 2017 from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32006​ D1718&from=EN. ‘Decision No 163/2001/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 January 2001 on the Implementation of a Training Programme for Professionals in the European

170 • References

Audiovisual Programme Industry (MEDIA-Training) (2001–2005)’. 2001. Official Journal L 026, 27 January: 1–9. Retrieved 9 February 2017 from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal​ -content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32001D0163&from=EN. Deckert Distribution. n.d. ‘About Us’. Deckert Distribution website. Retrieved 2 July 2021 from https://deckert-distribution.com/about-us-contact/. Deltsou, Eleftheria. 2014. ‘Evropaika Programmata gia ton “Politismo” ke Politikes Tekhnologies tis Evropaikis Enossis’ [European programmes for ‘culture’ and political technologies of the EU], in Efi Plexoussaki (ed.), Metamorfossis tou Ethnikismou: Epiteleseis tis Syllogikis Taftotitas stin Ellada [Transformations of nationalism: Performances of collective identity in Greece]. Athens: Alexandria, pp. 297–317. ———. 2017. ‘Urban Activism and Cosmopolitan Aesthetics in Times of Crisis: “Thessaloniki Otherwise” Meets Stuttgart’, The Greek Review of Social Research 149(2): 137–51. Retrieved 31  October 2022 from https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/ekke/article/view​ /15819. Dermentzopoulos, Christos. 2015. I Epinoisi tou Topou: Nostalgia kai Mneme stin Politiki Kouzina [The invention of place: Nostalgia and memory in the film Politiki Kouzina]. Athens: Opportuna. Djagalov, Rossen. 2020. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press. Dudley, Andrew. 2009. ‘Times Zones and Jetlag: The Flows and the Phases of World Cinema’, in Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen Newman (eds), World Cinema and Transnational Perspectives. New York: Routledge, pp. 59–90. Džidić, Denic, and Denis Dzidic. 2013. ‘The Bloody Career of Bosnia’s “Monster of Grbavica”’, Balkan Insight, 1 April. Retrieved 31 March 2019 from http://www.balkaninsi​ ght.com/en/Article/the-bloody-career-of-bosnia-s-monster-of-grbavica. Follows, Stephen. 2013. ‘How Many Festivals Are There in the World?’, Stephen Follows Film Data and Education. Retrieved 11 November 2022 from https://stephenfollows.com/many​ -film-festivals-are-in-the-world/. Eleftheriotis, Dimitris. 2001. Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks. New York: Continuum. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2005. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Escobar, Arturo. 1999. ‘After Nature: Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecology’, Current Anthropology 40(1): 1–30 ‘Eurimages Support for Coproductions’. 2018. Strasbourg: Council of Europe/Eurimages. Retrieved 4 January 2018 from https://rm.coe.int/EURIMAGES-support-for-coproducti​ on-feature-length-fiction-animation-a/168076e918. European Commission. 2018. Commission Staff Working Document: Bosnia–Herzegovina 2018 Report. Retrieved 12 March 2017 from https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement​ /document/download/728e8a41-b47e-4758-8f70-b617a941a69e_en. European Commission (Directorate General for Education and Culture). 2006. The Economy of Culture in Europe. Retrieved 3 September 2017 from https://ec.europa.eu/assets/eac/cul​ ture/library/studies/cultural-economy_en.pdf. ‘Executive Summary’. 2019. European Commission website. Retrieved 2 January 2019 from http://ec.europa.eu/assets/eac/culture/library/studies/summary-cultural-economy_en.pdf. Feyen, Benjamin, and Ewa Krzaklewska (eds). 2013. The ERASMUS Phenomenon: Symbol of a New European Generation? Berlin: Peter Lang. FNE Staff. 2010. ‘FNE Focus: Interview with GNEC Director Tamta Tatishvili’, Film New Europe, 29 September 2010. Retrieved 3 March 2019 from https://www.filmneweurope​ .com/news/georgia-news/item/6215.

References • 171

Foray, Dominique. 2010. Ikinomia tis Gnossis [The Economy of Knowledge]. Athens: Savalas. Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les Mots et les Choses. Paris: Gallimard. ‘French Decree No. 93-1072 of 7  September 1993 on Film Co-Production Agreement between the Government of the French Republic and the Government of the Republic of Georgia Signed in Cannes on 19 May 1993’. 1993. Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée website. Retrieved 6 May 2019 from https://www.cnc.fr/web/en/publicat​ ions/georgia_207725. ‘From the Beginnings until the Second World War’. n.d. La Biennale di Venezia website. Retrieved 8  February 2018 from http://www.labiennale.org/en/history/beginnings-until​ -second-world-war. Frost, Nicola. 2016. ‘Anthropology and Festivals: Festival Ecologies’, Ethnos 81(4): 569– 83. Fuchs, Christian. 2007. ‘The Transnational Space and the “Networked Society”’, Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences 2(1): 49–78. Garnham, Nicholas. 1990. Capitalism and Communication: Global Culture and the Economics of Information. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Muslim Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘Georgia Urban Strategy: Priority Area III. Housing’. 2015. The World Bank. Retrieved 8 July 2019 from http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/fr/422631533128729643/pdf/129​ 128-31-7-2018-13-49-20-GeorgiaHousingFinalFINALComponent.pdf. Ghodsee, Kristen. 2017. Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism. Durham NC: Duke University Press. ‘Glossary of Summaries: Qualified Majority’. 2017. EUR-Lex. Retrieved 19 August 2017 from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/summary/glossary/qualified_majority.html. Gökçe, Günel, Saiba Varma and Chika Watanabe. 2020. ‘A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography’, Fieldsights, 9  June. Retrieved 9  June 2021 from https://culanth.org/field sigh​ts/a-manifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography. Gospodini, Aspa. 2001. ‘Urban Waterfront Redevelopment in Greek Cities: A Framework for Redesigning Space’, Cities 18(5): 285–95. ———. 2007. ‘Cultural Clusters in the Post-Industrial City: The Greek Experience’, WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment 102. Retrieved 2  September 2021 from https://www.witpress.com/Secure/elibrary/papers/SDP07/SDP07073FU2.pdf. Goulding, Daniel J. 2002. Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, 1945–2001. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Green, Sarah F. 2005. Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek–Albanian Border. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ‘Green Paper – Unlocking the Potential of Cultural and Creative Industries’. 2010. EUR-Lex, 27  April. Retrieved 5  May 2020 from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/​ ?uri=celex%3A52010DC0183. ‘Green Paper-Building a Capital Markets Union’. 2015. European Commission . Retrieved 6 March 2020 from https://ec.europa.eu/finance/consultations/2015/capital-markets-uni​ on/docs/green-paper_en.pdf. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. On Society and Politics: A Reader. Boston: Beacon Press. Hadjimichalis, Costis. 2019. ‘“New” Questions of Peripherality in Europe or How Neoliberal Austerity Contradicts Socio-Spatial Cohesion’, in Thilo Lang and Franziska Görmar (eds), Regional and Local Development in Times of Polarisation. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 61–78. Hage, Ghassan. 2019. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Abingdon: Routledge.

172 • References

Hallam, Elizabeth, and Tim Ingold (eds). 2007. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation. Abingdon: Routledge. Hann, Chris M., Caroline Humphrey and Katherine Verdery. 2002. ‘Introduction: Postsocialism as a Topic of Anthropological Investigation’, in Chris M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge, pp. 1–28. Hart, Keith. 1990. ‘Kinship, Contract and Trust: The Economic Organization of Migrants in an African City Slum’, in Diego Gambetta (ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations. New York: Blackwell, pp. 176–93. Harvey, David. 2005. Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Hastrup, Kirsten. 2021. ‘Performing the World: Agency, Anticipation and Creativity’, in Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold (eds), Creativity and Cultural Improvisation. Oxford: Berg, pp. 193–207. Hatziprokopiou, Panos. 2012. ‘Haunted by the Past: Immigration and Thessaloniki’s Questionable Path to a New Cosmopolitanism’, in Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja (eds), Post-Cosmopolitan Cities: Explorations of Urban Coexistence. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 194–216. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2007. ‘Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 122(5): 1603–8. Heap, Shaun Hargreaves, and Angus Ross. 1992. Understanding the Enterprise Culture: Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Herzfeld, Michael. 1987. Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1991. A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2005. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Psychology Press. Hesmondhalgh, David. 2008. ‘Cultural and Creative Industry’, in Tony Bennett and John Frow (eds), The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 553–69. Hirsch, Eric, and Sharon Macdonald. 2007. ‘Introduction: Creativity or Temporality?’, in Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold (eds), Creativity and Cultural Improvisation. Oxford: Berg, pp. 185–93. Hirt, Sonia, Slavomíra Ferenčuhová and Tauri Tuvikene. 2017. ‘Conceptual Forum: The “Postsocialist” City’, Eurasian Geography and Economics 57(4–5): 497–520. Institute of Documentary Film. n.d. ‘About Us’. IDF website. Retrieved 14 November 2020 from https://dokweb.net/about-us/about-us. IOBE [Foundation of Economic and Industrial Research]. 2014. Paragogi Kinimatografikos Tainion stin Ellada: Epidraseis stin Ikonomia [Production of films in Greece: Impact on economy]. Athens: IOBE. Retrieved 2  January 2016 from http://iobe.gr/docs/research​ /RES_05_F_02122014_REP_GR.pdf. Iordanova, Dina. 2008. ‘Intercultural Cinema and Balkan Hushed Histories’. New Review of Film and Television Studies 6(1): 5–18. ———. 2020. ‘Forward: Cinema of the Balkans; An Endless Journey’, in Lydia Papadimitriou and Ana Grgic (eds), Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational Exchanges and Global Circuits. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. xxi–xxviii. Jäckel, Anne. 2019. European Film Industries. London: Bloomsbury. Jelenković, Dunja. 2020. ‘The Film Festival as a Vehicle for Memory Officialization: The Afterlife of WWII in the Yugoslav Documentary and Short Film Festival, 1954–2004’,

References • 173

in Aida Vallejo and Era Winton (eds), Documentary Film Festivals. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 101–22. Jones, Alice. 2006. ‘Bosnian Cinemas: The Traumas on Screen’, Independent, 1  December. Retrieved 12  November 2017 from https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ fil​ms/features/bosnian-cinema-the-traumas-on-screen-426446.html. Jovanović, Nebojša. 2012. ‘Bosnian Cinema in the Socialist Yugoslavia and Anti-Yugoslav Backlash’, Kinokultura. Retrieved 12  May 2019 from http://www.kinokultura.com/ specia​ls/14/jovanovic.shtml. ———. 2014. ‘Gender and Sexuality in the Classical Yugoslav Cinema, 1947–1962’, PhD dissertation. Budapest: Central European University. Jovanovic, Zlatko. 2017. ‘The 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics and Identity-Formation in Late Socialist Sarajevo’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 34(9): 767–82. Juncker, Jean-Claude. 2014. ‘Opening Statement in the European Parliament Plenary Session Strasbourg, 15 July 2014’. European Commission website. Retrieved 2 January 2019 from https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/SPEECH_14_567. Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. London: Penguin. Jukic, Elvira M. 2015. ‘Sarajevo Film Festival Expects 100,000 Visitors’, Balkan Insight, 29 July. Retrieved 24 July 2020 from https://balkaninsight.com/2015/07/29/preparations​ -start-for-sarajevo-s-renowned-film-festival/. Kaiser, Wolfram, Stefan Krankenhagen and Kerstin Poehls. 2014. Exhibiting Europe in Museums: Transnational Networks, Collections, Narratives, and Representations. Oxford: Berghahn. Kalantzis, Konstantinos. 2019. Tradition in the Frame: Photography, Power, and Imagination in Sfakia, Crete. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Karalis, Vrasidas. 2012. A History of Greek Cinema. London: Bloomsbury. ‘Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 30 January 1868’. n.d. Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 19 May 2016 from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_01_30​ .htm. Kenez, Peter. 2001. Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin. London: IB Tauris. Kerkinos, Dimitris. 2013. Maties sta Valkania 1994–2013 [Balkan survey 1994–2013]. Thessaloniki: Thessaloniki Film Festival. Khalvashi, Tamta. 2015. ‘Peripheral Affects: Shame Publics and Performance at the Margins of the Republic of Georgia’, PhD dissertation. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. King, Charles. 2008. ‘The Wider Black Sea Region in the Twenty-First Century’, in Daniel S. Hamilton and Gerhard Mangott (eds), The Wider Black Sea Region in the 21st Century: Strategic, Economic and Energy Perspectives. Washington, DC: Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University, pp. 1–19. Knight, Daniel M. 2015. ‘Wit and Greece’s Economic Crisis: Ironic Slogans, Food, and Antiausterity Sentiments’, American Ethnologist 42(2): 230–46. Kockel, Ullrich, Cristina Clopot, Baiba Tjarve, et al. (eds). 2019. Heritage and Festivals in Europe: Performing Identities. Abingdon: Routledge. Kollontai, Alexandra. 2014 [1977]. Love of Worker Bees, trans. Cathy Porter. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Kolozova, Katerina. 2019. ‘How the EU Balkanised the Balkans’, Al Jazeera, 2  November. Retrieved 5  June 2020 from https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/eu-balkanisedba​lkans-191029092720597.html. Kosanović, Dejan. 1981–1982. ‘Istraživanje’, Sineast Filmski Casopis 53/54, pp. 154–56. ———. n.d. ‘Serbian Film and Cinematography (1896–1993)’. History of Serb Culture

174 • References

website. Retrieved 9  May 2019 from https://www.rastko.rs/isk/dkosanovic-cinemato grap​hy.html. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1995. The Mass Ornament: The Weimar Essays, trans. T. Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kranakis, Manolis. 2016. ‘O Alexis Grivas Milaei sto FLIX meta tin Antikatastasi tou os Ethnikos Ekprosopos sto Tameio Eurimages’ [Alexis Grivas talks to FLIX after his replacement in Eurimages], FLIX, 25 November. Retrieved 30 November 2016 from https://flix​ .gr/news/alexis-grivas-eurimages-interview.html. Kukic, Leonard. 2019. The Last Yugoslavs: Ethnic Diversity, National Identity and Civil War. Economic History Working Papers 300. London: London School of Economics and Political Science. Retrieved 12 March 2018 from http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/102323/. Kürti, László. 1991. ‘The Wingless Eros of Socialism: Nationalism and Sexuality in Hungary’, Anthropological Quarterly 64(2): 55–67. Kušić, Katarina, Polina Manolova and Philipp Lottholz. 2019. ‘Introduction: From Dialogue to Practice; Pathways towards Decoloniality in Southeast Europe’, in Polina Manolova, Katarina Kušić and Philipp Lottholz (eds), Decolonial Theory and Practice in Southeast Europe 3(19): 8–34 [special issue]. Retrieved 19  May 2021 from https://www.academia​ .edu/38666848/Decolonial_Theory_and_Practice_in_Southeast_Europe. Lachaussée, Sébastien, and Elisa Martin-Winkel. 2017. ‘French Incentives for Foreign Filmmakers Projects’, Avocat, 13 January 2017. Retrieved 9 July 2020 from https://avocatl​ .com/news/french-incentives-for-foreign-filmmakers-projects/. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. ‘Populism: What’s in a Name?’, in Francisco Panizza (ed.), Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. London: Verso, pp. 32–50. Laszczkowski, Mateusz, and Madeleine Reeves. 2015. ‘Introduction: Affective States – Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions’, Social Analysis 59(4): 1–14. Leach, James. 2007. ‘A Critique of Alfred Gell’s Theory of the Abduction of Creativity’, in Amiria J. M. Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell (eds), Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge, pp. 167–87. Lee, Toby. 2013. ‘Public Culture and Cultural Citizenship at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival’, PhD dissertation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. ———. 2020. The Public Life of Cinema: Conflict and Collectivity in Austerity Greece. Oakland: University California Press. Léonet, Clara. 2013–2014. ‘Modèle Rêvé d’un Distributeur de Films Pan-européen. Entre contraintes économiques et culturelles’, Ph.D. dissertation. Brussels: Université Libre des Bruxelles. Retrieved 3 October 2019 from https://www.csa.be/wp-content/uploads/docu m​ents-csa/C_LEONET_memoire_prix_recherche_2015.pdf. Leontidou, Lila. 2004. ‘The Boundaries of Europe: Deconstructing Three Regional Narratives’, Identities 11(4): 593–617. Letkemann, Paul G. 2002. ‘The Office Workplace: Communitas and Hierarchical Social Structures’, Anthropologica XLIV: 257–69. Leutloff-Grandits, Carolin. 2021. ‘When Men Migrate for Marriage: Negotiating Partnerships and Gender Roles in Cross-Border Marriages between Rural Kosovo and the EU’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47(2): 397–412. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La Pensée Sauvage. Paris: Plon. ———. 2012. ‘Claude Lévi-Strauss: Mana; or, the Floating Signifier’, in Boris Groys (ed.), Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 106–15. Lindholm, Charles. 2006. ‘Romantic Love and Anthropology’, Etnofoor XIX(1): 5–21. Retrieved 3 August 2020 from https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/3841. Liz, Mariana. 2009. ‘Film Policies within the EU: Building a Common European Identity’, University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) 39th Annual Conference

References • 175

Angers, 3–5 September 2009. Angers, France. Retrieved 5 August 2020 from https://study l​ib.net/doc/8806344/full-paper. Locke, John. n.d. Two Treatises of Government: In the Former, The False Principles and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer, and His Followers, Are Detected and Overthrown; The Latter, Is an Essay Concerning the Original, Extent, and End, of Civil Government. The McMaster University Archive of the History of Economic Thought. Retrieved 3 February 2021 from https://www.yorku.ca/comninel/courses/3025pdf/Locke.pdf. Lodderhose, Diana. 2021. ‘Festival in Focus: How the Sarajevo Film Festival’s Dramatic Origins Have Shaped It into a Dynamic Launching Pad for Regional Talent’, Deadline, 5  August. Retrieved 14  October 2021 from https://deadline.com/2021/08/festival-info​cus-sarajevo-film-festival-dramatic-origins-shaped-it-into-dynamic-launching-pad-localta​lent-1234808909/. Lorenzen, Mark. 2007. ‘Internationalization vs. Globalization of the Film Industry’, Industry and Innovation 14(4): 349–57. Luhmann, Niklas. 1986. Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. J. Gaines and D. L. Jones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1988. ‘Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives’, in ‘Diego Gambetta, (ed.), Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives. New York: Blackwell, pp. 94–107. ———. 2018 [1979]. Trust and Power. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Lutz, Catherine A., and Alma Abu-Lughod. 1990 [1987]. Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lutz, Catherine, and Geoffrey M. White. 1986. ‘The Anthropology of Emotions’, Annual Review of Anthropology 15(1): 405–36. Macia, Maria-Pierre. 2010. ‘Salutation to the 51st Agora Manual’, in Dimitris Eipidis and Maria-Pierre Macia (eds), Agora Market Manual 51st Thessaloniki Film Festival. Retrieved 8  March 201 from https://docplayer.net/57721944-4-festival-venues-8-agora-market-res​ ults-10-agora-market-juries-12-balkan-fund-projects-34-crossroads-projects-66-works-in​ -progress.html. Majstorović, Danijela, and Zoran Vučkovac. 2016. ‘Rethinking Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Postcoloniality: Challenges of Europeanization Discourse’, Journal of Language and Politics 15(2): 147–72. Malkki, Lisa H. 1992. ‘Context and Consciousness: Local Conditions for the Production of Historical and National Thought among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania’, Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 24–44. Manning, Paul. 2010. ‘The Semiotics of Brand’, Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 33–49. Manovich, Lev. 2000. ‘Database as a Genre of New Media’, AI and Society 14: 176–83. Retrieved 12 December 2018 from http://time.arts.ucla.edu/AI_Society/manovich.html. Marchand, Trevor. 2008. ‘Negotiating Tradition in Practice: Mud Masons and Meaning Making in Contemporary Djenné’, in Leslie Rainer, Angelyn Bass Rivera and David Gandreau (eds), Terra 2008: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Study and Conservation of Earthen Architectural Heritage. Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, pp. 23–28. Marcus, George E. 2009 [1998]. ‘Multi-Sited Ethnography: Notes and Queries’, in MarkAnthony Falzon (ed.), Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 181–96. ———. 2013. ‘The Traffic in Montage, Then and Now’, in Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev (eds), Transcultural Montage. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 1–15. Marketaki, Tonia. 1983. ‘I Fysikotita os Dimiourgiko Phenomeno: Synentefxi tis Tonias Marketaki stin Ina Argyriou’ [Naturalness as a creative phenomenon: Interview with Tonia

176 • References

Marketaki by Ina Argyriou]. Retrieved 5 July 2021 from http://www.myfestival.gr/default​ .aspx?lang=el-GR&page=19&id=76008. Marlow-Mann, Alex. 2017. ‘Regional Mapping: Micro-Mapping and Glocalisation’, in Rob Stone, Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison, et al. (eds), The Routledge Companion to World Cinema. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 323–37. Marshall, David J., and Lynn Staeheli. 2015. ‘Mapping Civil Society with Social Network Analysis: Methodological Possibilities and Limitations’, Geoforum 61: 56–66. Martín-Díaz, Jordi. 2014. ‘Urban Restructuring in Post-War Contexts: The Case of Sarajevo’, Hungarian Geographical Bulletin 63(3): 303–17. Marx, Karl. 2005 [1867]. ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof ’, in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Retrieved 14 October 2017 from https://web.stanford.edu/​ ~davies/Symbsys100-Spring0708/Marx-Commodity-Fetishism.pdf. Marx, Karl. 1999 [1867]. Capital . A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Retrieved 3  April 2019 from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ wo​rks/1867-c1/. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1975. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Collected Works, trans. Richard Dixon et al. New York: International Publishers. Massey, Doreen B. 2005. For Space. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mattelar, Armand, and Jean-Marie Piemme. 1982. ‘Cultural Industries: The Origin of an Idea’, in UNESCO (ed.), Cultural Industries: A Challenge for the Future. Paris: UNESCO, pp. 51–63. Retrieved 22 May 2019 from https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000​ 049974. McCarthy, Daniel R. 2015. ‘Objects in Motion: Marx, Latour, and the Power of the Dead’, EPCR General Conference Montreal, 26–29 August 2015. Montreal: European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR). Retrieved 24 June 2016 from https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event​ /PaperDetails/25492. McFarland, Daniel A., Dan Jurafsky and Craig Rawlings. 2013. ‘Making the Connection: Social Bonding in Courtship Situations’, American Journal of Sociology 118(6): 1596–1649. ‘Media Mundus Audiovisual Cooperation Programme with Professionals from Third Countries 2011–2013’. 2009. EUR-Lex. Retrieved 5 December 2017 from https://eur-lex​ .europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32009D1041. ‘MEDIA Plus-Council Decision 20 December 2000’. 2000. Official Journal of the European Communities L 336(82). Retrieved 12 March 2017 from http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT​/PDF/?ur i=CELEX:32000D0821&from=EN. ‘Media II (1996–2000): Programme Encouraging the Development and Distribution of European Audiovisual Works’. 1995. EUR-Lex. Retrieved 2 April 2016 from https://eur​ -lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A31995D0563. Medici. n.d. ‘Fifth Workshop – 29 September to 1 October 2015 in Santpoort, Netherlands’. Retrieved 6  April 2017 from https://focal.ch/medici-training-2012-2019/reports/5-mod u​le1.html. Melnikova, Irina. 2002. ‘Representation of Soviet–Japanese Encounters in Co-Production Feature Films Part 1: The Musical Harmony’, Doshisha Studies in Language and Culture 5(1): 51–74. Micucci, Matt. 2014. ‘Gaga Chkeidze: Director of Tbilisi International Film Festival’, FRED, 27 June. Retrieved 31 October 2022 from http://www.fred.fm/uk/gaga-chkheidze-director​ -of-tbilisi-international-film-festival-eiff/. Mitric, Petar, and Katharine Sarikakis. 2016. ‘Spectator- or Spect-actor-Driven Policies’, in Yiannis Tzioumakis and Claire Molloy (eds), The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics. London: Routledge, pp. 435–53.

References • 177

Modiano, Marko. 2017. ‘English in a Post-Brexit European Union’, World Englishes 36(3): 313–27. Moran, Emilio F. 1990. The Ecosystem Approach in Anthropology: From Concept to Practice. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Morawetz, Norbert. 2008. ‘The Rise of Coproductions in the Film Industry’, PhD dissertation. Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire. Morawetz, Norbert, et al. 2007. ‘Finance, Policy and Industrial Dynamics—the Rise of Co-productions in the Film Industry’, Industry and Innovation 14(4): 421–43. Moulaert, Frank, and Oana Ailenei. 2005. ‘Social Economy, Third Sector and Solidarity Relations: A Conceptual Synthesis from History to Present’, Urban Studies 42(11): 2037–53. Müller, Martin. 2019. ‘Goodbye, Postsocialism!’ Europe-Asia Studies 71(4): 533–50. Murphy-Lejeune, Elizabeth. 2003. Student Mobility and Narrative in Europe: The New Strangers. New York: Routledge. Murzyn-Kupisz, Monika, Dominika Holuj, Jaroslaw Dzialek, et al. 2019. ‘Museums and Local Governments in Poland: Partners in Local Development?’ Museum International 71(3–4): 28–45. Mylonaki, Lina. 2016. ‘I Marketaki tis Kinimatografikis Agapis [Marketaki of Cinematic Love]’, Parallaxi, 10  December 2016. Retrieved 4  August 2019 from https://parallax​ imag.gr/agenda-parallaxi/kinimatografos-agenda/marketaki-tis-kinimatografikis-agapis 12/11/2016. Narayan, Kirin. 2012. Alive in the Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Narotzky, Susana. 1997. New Directions in Economic Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. O’Connor, Justin. 2010. The Cultural and Creative Industries: A Literature Review, Creativity, Culture and Education Series. Creativity, Culture and Education. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, Retrieved 11 June 2016 from https://www.creativitycultureeduc​ ation.org/publication/the-cultural-and-creative-industries-a-literature-review/. Ohanyan, Anna. 2018. ‘The Global Political Economy of Fractured Regions’, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations 24(3): 371–390. ‘O Kanonas tou Paihnidiou (1939) Ebnei to 62o Festival Thessalonikis’ [La Regle du Jeu (1939) Inspires 62nd Thessaloniki Film Festival]. 2021. Thessaloniki Film Festival website. Retrieved 6  March 2021 from https://www.filmfestival.gr/el/news/27688-o-kanonas-tou​ -paixnidioy-1939-to-aristoyrgima-tou-zan-renouar-empneei-to-62o-festival. Ostrowska, Dorota. 2020. ‘Introduction’, Studies in European Cinema 17(2), special issue, ‘Film Festivals and History’: 79–80. Papadimitriou, Lydia. 2011. ‘The National and the Transnational in Contemporary Greek Cinema’, New Review of Film and Television Studies 9(4): 493–512. ———. 2014. ‘Locating Contemporary Greek Film Cultures: Past: Present, Future and the Crisis’, Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies 2(4): 1–19. ———. 2016. ‘The Hindered Drive toward Internationalization: Thessaloniki (International) Film Festival’, New Review of Film and Television Studies 14: 93–111. ———. 2018. ‘Greek Cinema as European Cinema: Coproductions, Eurimages and the Europeanization of Greek Cinema’, Studies in European Cinema 15(2–3): 215–34. Papadimitriou, Lydia, and Ana Grgić. 2020. ‘Introduction’, in Lydia Papadimitriou and Ana Grgić (eds), Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational Exchanges and Global Circuits. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1–17. Papagaroufali, Eleni. 2013. Ipia Diplomatia: Diethnikes Adelfopoiiseis kai Irinistikes Praktikes sti Syghroni Ellada [Soft diplomacy: Transnational twinning and peace practices in modern Greece]. Athens: Alexandreia.

178 • References

Passerini, Luisa. 2012. Women and Men in Love (formerly: Love and the Idea of Europe): European Identities in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Berghahn. Patikas, Christos. 2015. ‘Participatory Destination Management and Creative Tourism’. International Hellenic University Repository. Retrieved 13 June 2021 from https://reposit​ ory.ihu.edu.gr/xmlui/handle/11544/467. Pedersen, Jesper, Strandgaard, and Mazza Carmelo. 2011. ‘International Film Festivals: For the Benefit of Whom?’, Culture Unbound 3(2): 139–65. Perkin, Joan. 1989. Women and Marriage in Victorian England. Chicago: Lyceum. Petkovic, Vladan. 2018. ‘Sarajevo Film Festival Reports a Strong Impact on the Local Economy’, Cineeuropa, 8 August. Retrieved 7 September 2019 from https://cineuropa.org​ /en/newsdetail/358301/. Petridou, Elia. 2012. ‘What’s in a Place Name? Branding and Labeling Cheese in Greece’, Food Culture & Society 15(1): 29–34. Pham, Annika. n.d. ‘EURIMAGES M.D.: Coproductions Are More Project-Driven Than People-Driven’, NordicFilm and TV Fond. Retrieved 11 November 2022 from https://nor​ diskfilmogtvfond.com/news/interview/eurimages-md-co-productions-are-more-projectdr​iven-than-people-driven . ———. 2008. ‘Roberto Olla: Executive Secretary of Eurimages; Changes for Eurimages Fund for 2009’, Cineuropa, 8 December. Retrieved 16 August 2017 from https://cineuropa.org​ /en/interview/88348/. Pilz, Madlen. 2018. ‘Speaking, Building, Shopping: A Social-Anthropological Approach to the Postsocialist Condition of Tbilisi’, in Gvantsa Salukvadze and Temur Gugushvili (eds), Cities of the South Caucasus: A View from Georgia. Fiesole: Torrossa, pp. 59–72. Pine, Frances. 2013. ‘Introduction: Transitions to Postsocialism and Cultures of Survival’, in Sue Bridger and Frances Pine (eds), Surviving Postsocialism: Local Strategies and Regional Responses. London: Routledge, pp. 17–31. Powdermaker, Hortense. 1951. Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books. ———. 1968 [1939]. After Freedom a Cultural Study of Deep South. New York: Atheneum. Powell, Kathy. 2009. ‘Neoliberalization: Uneven Geographies of Class Power: An Essay on David Harvey’s – a Brief History of Neoliberalism’, Journal of Power 2(2): 326–37. Price, David H. 2016. Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Primorac, Jaka. 2007. ‘The Position of Cultural Workers in Creative Industries: The SouthEastern European Perspective’. Retrieved 12  January 2019 from https://www.researchga​ te.net/publication/299517882_The_Position_of_Cultural_Workers_in_Creative_Indust ri​es_The_south-eastern_European_Perspective. Radunović, Dušan. 2014. ‘Incommensurable Distance: Georgian Cinema as a (Trans)national Cinema’, in Sanja Bahun and John Haynes (eds), Cinema, State Socialism and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917–1989: Re-visions. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 49–73. Retrieved 5 May 2017 from https://dro.dur.ac.uk/19504/1/19504.pdf. Rajagopalan, Sudha. 2006. ‘Emblematic of the Thaw: Early Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas’, South Asian Popular Culture 4(2): 83–100. Razlogova, Elena. 2020. ‘World Cinema at Soviet Festivals: Cultural Diplomacy and Personal Ties’, Studies in European Cinema 17(2): 140–54. Rendall, Steven. 1997. ‘The Translator’s Task, Walter Benjamin’, TTR 10(2), 151–65. Riles, Annelise. 2000. The Network Inside Out. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rivi, Luisa. 2007. European Cinema after 1989: Cultural Identity and Transnational Production. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Roaf, James, Ruben Atoyan, Bikas Joshi, et al. 2014. 25 Years of Transition: Post-Communist

References • 179

Europe and IMF. Washington, DC: IMF. Retrieved 2 September 2019 from https://www​ .imf.org/~/media/Websites/IMF/imported-flagship-issues/external/pubs/ft/reo/2014/eur​ /eng/pdf/erei_sr_102414.ashx. Roche, Maurice. 2011. ‘Festivalisation, Cosmopolitanism and European Culture’, in Gerard Delanty, Liana Giorgi and Monica Sassatelli (eds), Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 124–39. Rolf, Malte. 2013. Soviet Mass Festivals, 1917–1991. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Rosaldo, Renato, Smadar Lavie, and Kirin Narayan (eds). 2018. Creativity Anthropology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rose, Nikolas. 1992. ‘Governing the Enterprising Self ’, in Paul Heelas and Paul Morris (eds), The Values of the Enterprise Culture: The Moral Debate. London: Routledge, pp.  141– 64. Rüling, Charles-Clemens, and Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen. 2010. ‘Film Festival Research from an Organizational Studies Perspective’, Scandinavian Journal of Management 26(3): 318–23. Sabean, David Warren, and Simon Teuscher. 2007. ‘Kinship in Europe: A New Approach to Long Term Development’, in David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher and Jon Mathieu (eds), Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Developments (1300–1900). Oxford: Berghahn, pp.1–33. Sadoul, Georges. 1950. ‘The Postwar French Cinema’, Hollywood Quarterly 4(3): 233–44. Salazar, Noel B., Alice Elliot and Roger Norum. 2017. ‘Introduction in Studying Mobilities: Theoretical and Methodological Queries’, in Alice Elliot, Roger Norum and Noel B. Salazar (eds), Methodologies of Mobility: Ethnography and Experiment. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 1–24. Salazkina, Masha. 2010. ‘Soviet-Indian Coproductions: Alibaba as Political Allegory’, Cinema Journal 48(4): 71–89. Salukvadze, Joseph, and Oleg Golubchikov. 2016. ‘City as a Geopolitics: Tbilisi, Georgia— A Globalizing Metropolis in a Turbulent Region’, Cities 52: 39–54. Sampson, Steven. 1996. ‘The Social Life of Projects: Importing Civil Society to Albania’, Civil Society: Challenging Western Models 122(16): 97–99. Sassen, Saskia. 2005. ‘The Repositioning of Citizenship and Alienage: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics’, Globalizations 2(1): 13–33. Sapir, Edward. 1924. ‘Culture, Genuine and Spurious’, American Journal of Sociology 29(4): 401–29. ‘Sarajevo Film Festival Film 1993’. 2017. YouTube. Retrieved 2 June 2017 from https://www​ .youtube.com/watch?v=n7gRlE77ndE. ‘Sarajevo Designated as a UNESCO City of Film’. 2019. Sarajevo City of Film. Retrieved 11  November 2022. https://sarajevocityoffilm.ba/sarajevo-designated-as-a-unesco-city-of​ -film/. Schofield, John (ed.). 2014. Who Needs Experts? Counter-Mapping Cultural Heritage. London: Routledge. Seidlhofer, Barbara, Angelika Breiteneder and Marie-Luise Pitzl. 2006. ‘English as a Lingua Franca in Europe: Challenges for Applied Linguistics’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 26: 3–34. Retrieved 19  June 2022 from https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annu​ al-review-of-applied-linguistics/article/english-as-a-lingua-franca-in-europe-challenges-for​ -applied-linguistics/526EEA5A63799B5C023AFD896655E2B0. Senjanovic, Natasha. 2015. ‘Sales Agents, Film Funds Speak at Sarajevo’s CINELINK’, Screen Daily, 21  August. Retrieved 18  April 2021 from https://www.screendaily.com/sarajevo/ sal​es-agents-film-funds-speak-at-sarajevos-CINELINK-/5091912.article.

180 • References

Shami, Seteney Khalid. 2000. ‘Prehistories of Globalization: Circassian Identity in Motion’, Public Culture 12(1): 177–204. Sherouse, Perry. 2017. ‘The Politics of Russian-Language Film Showings in Post-Soviet Georgia’, PoLAR. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 40(1): 137–57. Shiel, Mark. 2006. Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City. New York: Columbia University Press. Shore, Cris. 2006. ‘“In Uno Plures”(?) EU Cultural Policy and the Governance of Europe’, Cultural Analysis 5: 7–26. Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright. 2015. ‘Audit Culture Revisited’, Current Anthropology 56(3): 421–44. Shostak, Marjorie. 1998. ‘The Creative Individual in the World of the !Kung San’, in Renato, Rosaldo, Smadar Lavie and Kirin Narayan (eds), Creativity Anthropology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 54–69. Sideri, Eleni. 2016. ‘Prisoner (Once Again) of the Caucasus: An Ethnography of Film’, Punctum International Journal of Semiotics. Retrieved 19 September 2019 from https://ruo​ mo.lib.uom.gr/handle/7000/433. ———. 2021. ‘Multimodality in Ethnographic Research and Representation: Conducting Anthropology of Cinema in Greece’, in Angela Treiber (ed.), Jahrbuch für Europäische Ethnologie. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, pp. 57–74. Siefert, Marsha. 2012a. ‘East European Cold War Culture(s)’, in Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M. Payk and Thomas Lindenberger (eds), Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 23–54. ———. 2012b. ‘Co-producing Cold War Culture-East-West Film-Making and Cultural Diplomacy’, in Peter Romijin, Giles Scott-Smith and Joes Segal (eds), Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 73–97. ———. 2016. ‘Soviet Cinematic Internationalism and Socialist Film Making, 1955–1972’, in Patryk Babiracki and Austin Jersild (eds), Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 161–93. Širca, Majda . 2014. Piran v filmu: koprodukcijski časi Slovenije [Piran in Film: The Time of Coproductions in Slovenia]. Piran: Obalne galerije Piran. Scott, Erik, R. 2016. Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott-Smith, Giles, and Joes Segal. 2012. ‘Introduction: Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West’, in Peter Romijin, Giles Scott-Smith and Joes Segal (eds), Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 73–94. Sintès, Pierre, and Olivier Givre. 2015. ‘Iannis Boutaris et les Fantômes de Salonique’, Écrire l’histoire: Histoire, Littérature, Esthétique 15: 215–22. Skopal, Pavel. 2015. ‘Risk and Trust in State-Socialist Coproduction Practice’, Iluminace 27(3): 23–35. ———. 2015. ‘Barrandov’s Co-productions: The Clumsy Way to Ideological Control, Ideological Competitiveness and Technological Improvement’, in Lars Karl and Pavel Skopal (eds), Cinema in Service of State. Perspectives on Film Culture in the GDR and Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 89–107. Smith, Laurajane. 2012. ‘Discourses of Heritage: Implications for Archaeological Community Practice’, Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [online]. Retrieved 4  September 2019 from https://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/64148#quotation Sissener, Tone Kristin. 2001. Anthropological Perspectives on Corruption. Bergen: Chr.

References • 181

Michelsen Institute. Retrieved 10  November 2021 from https://open.cmi.no/cmi-xmlui​ /bitstream/handle/11250/2435980/WP2001-05.PDF?sequence=2. Steward, Julian Haynes. 1972. Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Stewart, Pamela J., and Andrew J. Strathern (eds). 2019. Sustainability, Conservation, and Creativity: Ethnographic Learning from Small-Scale Practices. London: Routledge. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2001. ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, The Journal of American History 88(3): 829–65. ———. 2004. ‘Affective States’, in David Nugent and Joan Vincent (eds), A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 4–20. Strathern, Marilyn. 2014. ‘Reading Relations Backwards’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(1): 3–19. ———. 2020. Relations: An Anthropological Account. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stroux, Salinia. 2015. ‘Contesting Nodes of Migration and Trade in Public Space: Thessaloniki’s Bazaar Economy’, in Waltraud Kokot, Mijal Gandelsman-Trier, Kathrin Wildner et al. (eds), Port Cities as Areas of Transition. Munster: Transcript Verlag, pp. 145–68. Sudar, Vlastimir. 2013. A Portrait of the Artist as a Political Dissident: The Life and Work of Aleksandar Petrovic. Bristol: Intellect. Sue, Bridger, and Pine Frances. 1998. ‘Introduction: Transition to Post-socialism and Cultures of Survival’, in Sue Bridger and Frances Pine (eds), Surviving Post-Socialism Local Strategies and Regional Responses in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. London: Routledge, pp. 1–15. Svašek, Maruska (ed.). 2012. Moving Subjects, Moving Objects: Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions. Oxford: Berghahn. ‘Statute of the Council of Europe (ETS No1)’. 1949. London. Retrieved 2 January 2019 from http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/euro/ets1.html. ‘Support of the Film Industry and Film Culture’. 2016. UNESCO. Retrieved 3  September 2020 from https://en.unesco.org/creativity/policy-monitoring-platform/support-film-ind​ ustry-film. ‘Symfonia Sybaragogon metaxi Gallias kai Elladas’ [Agreement on coproductions between France and Greece]. 2018. French Embassy in Greece website. Retrieved 15 April 2018 from https://gr.ambafrance.org/%CE%A3%CF%85%CE%BC%CF%86%CF%89%CE​ %BD%CE%AF%CE%B1-%CE%BA%CE%B9%CE%BD%CE%B7%CE%BC%CE​ %B1%CF%84%CE%BF%CE%B3%CF%81%CE%B1%CF%86%CE%B9%CE%BA​ %CF%8E%CE%BD-%CF%83%CF%85%CE%BC%CF%80%CE%B1%CF%81​ %CE%B1%CE%B3%CF%89%CE%B3%CF%8E%CE%BD. Taussig, Michael. 1977. ‘The Genesis of Capitalism amongst a South American Peasantry: Devil’s Labor and the Baptism of Money’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 19(2): 130–55. ‘The Perfect Circle’. n.d. European Film Awards website. Retrieved 10  March 2019 from https://www.europeanfilmawards.eu/en_EN/film/the-perfect-circle.5440. ‘The Single European Act’. 1987. EUR-Lex. Retrieved 5 January 2017 from https://eur-lex.eu​ ropa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/the-single-european-act.html. ‘The Story of Cinema. An Odyssey’ 2011, Episode 2. Directed by Mark Cousins. Hellenic Broadcasting 2 (ERT2) 1 and 2 October 2016. ‘To Kentro Syhronis Tehnis Thessalonikis sto 59o Diethnes Festival Thessalonikis’ [Modern art centre in Thessaloniki to the 59th Thessaloniki Film Festival]. 2019. MOMUS website.

182 • References

Retrieved 20 January 2019 from https://www.greekstatemuseum.com/kmst/exhibitions/ar​ ticle/1364.html. Tlostanova, Madina. 2012. ‘Postsocialist ≠ Postcolonial? On Post-Soviet Imaginary and Global Coloniality’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48(2): 130–42. ———. 2017. Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art: Resistance and Re-existence. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ‘Treaty of Amsterdam Amending the Treaty on European Union, the Treaties Establishing the European Communities and Certain Related Acts’. 1997. Retrieved 20 January 2017 from https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/treaty/pdf/amst-en.pdf. ‘Treaty of Lisbon’. n.d. Portuguese Parliament website. Retrieved 28  January 2017 from https://www.parlamento.pt/sites/EN/ForeignAffairs/Paginas/TreatyofLisbon-2.aspx. ‘Treaty of Nice’. n.d. European Parliament website. Retrieved 27 January 2017 from https://​ www.europarl.europa.eu/about-parliament/en/in-the-past/the-parliament-and-the-treaties​ /treaty-of-nice. ‘Treaty of Rome (EEC)’. n.d. EUR-Lex. Retrieved 9 June 2016 from https://eur-lex.europa.eu​ /EN/legal-content/summary/treaty-of-rome-eec.html. ‘Treaty on European Union’. 1992. Official Journal of the European Communities C 191(35), 7  July. Retrieved 6  March 2016 from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT​ /PDF/?uri=OJ:C:1992:191:FULL&from=NL. Trifonova, Temenuga. 2007. ‘Code Unknown: European Identity in Cinema’, Scope 8. Retrieved 31 October 2022 from https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope/documents/2007​ /may-2007/trifonova.pdf. Tsibiridou, Fotini. 2003. ‘Anagnoseis tou “Koinonikou” apo tin Anthropologia stin Ellada tis Metapolitefsis’[Readings of ‘the Social’ from Social Anthropology in Greece since the Post Junta Period], Mnemon 25: 185–202. Turan, Kenneth. 2002. Sundance to Sarajevo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Turner, Edith. 2012. Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, Victor. 1979. ‘Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6(4): 465–99. ———. 1969. The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure.Ithaca, New York: Cornell Press University. UNESCO. 2015. ‘Basic Texts of the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions’. Paris. Retrieved 15 July 2017 from https://en.unesco​ .org/creativity/sites/creativity/files/convention2005_basictext_en.pdf#page=15. ———. n.d. ‘Support of the Film Industry and Film Culture’. Retrieved 16 July 2018 from https://en.unesco.org/creativity/policy-monitoring-platform/support-film-industry-film. Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2008. ‘Skills and Selves in the New Workplace’, American Ethnologist 35(2): 211–28. Venaki, Electra and Afroditi Nikolaidou. 2019. ‘Kinimatografkies Symbaragoges me ta Valkania ke Anaparastaseis tis Ellinikotitas’ [Film coproduction with the Balkans and representations of Greekness], in Manolis G. Varvounis and Thanasis V. Kougkoulos (eds), Hellenism and the Balkans: Two-Way Relationships; Language, History, Literature, Culture (1453–2019). 4th Balkan Congress of Modern Greek Studies (Komotini, 22–24  November 2019), vol. 2. Komotini tis Thrakis: Paratiritis, pp. 351–61. Wachtel, Andrew. 1998. Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Walden, Rea. 2018. ‘O Kinimatografos stin Ellada ti Dekaetia tou 1980: Apo tin Anatreptikotita sti Thesmopoiisi tou Ellinikou Kinimatografou’ [Cinema in Greece in the

References • 183

1980s: From subversion to the institutionalization of Greek cinema], Chronos (vol. 56–57). Retrieved 19 June 2020 from https://chronos.fairead.net/walden-kinimatografos80. Wallin, Mark, Billy Collins and John Hull. 2012. ‘It’s Not Just About the Film: Festivals, Sustainability & Small Cities’, in Michael Lück and Tomas Pernecky (eds), Events, Society and Sustainability: Critical and Contemporary Perspectives. London, New York: Routledge, pp. 230–43. Williams, Raymond. 1985. ‘Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism’, in Iain Borden, Tim Hall and Malcom Miles (eds), The City Cultures Reader. Hove: Psychology Press, pp. 58–65. Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2002. ‘Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences’, Global Networks 2(4): 301–34. Wood, Jessica. 2017. ‘How Finland’s Golden Age of Cinema Helped Lead the Country to Independence’, Culture Trip, 16 November. Retrieved 18 June 2019 from https://thecul tu​retrip.com/europe/finland/articles/how-finlands-golden-age-of-cinema-helped-lead-theco​untry-to-independence/. Yeoh, Brenda Saw Ai, Heng Leng Chee and Baey Grace. 2017. ‘Managing Risk, Making a Match: Brokers and the Management of Mobility in International Marriage’, Mobilities 12(2): 227–42. Yiakoumaki, Vassiliki. 2011. ‘On Bureaucratic Essentialism: Constructing the Mediterranean in European-Union Institutions’, in Maria Kousis, Tom Selwyn and David Clark (eds), Contested Mediterranean Spaces: Ethnographic Essays in Honour of Charles Tilly. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 17–34. Yilmazok, Levent. 2010. ‘Turkish Films Co-Produced within Europe: The Story after Twenty Years’ Experience in Eurimages’, SINECINE: Sinema Araştırmaları Dergisi 1(2): 87–108. Zajec, Špela. 2013. ‘Film Production between “Global” and “Local”: Insights from Bosnia and Herzegovina Images’, The International Journal of European Film: Performing Arts and Audiovisual Communication 13(22): 161–73. Zejnilovic, Emina, and Erna Husukic. 2018. ‘Culture and Architecture in Distress – Sarajevo Experiment’, ArchNet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research 12(1): 11–35. Zorba, Myrsini. 2009. ‘Conceptualizing Greek Cultural Policy: The Non-Democratization of Public Culture’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 15(3): 245–59.

Index

2008 Financial Crisis, 68, 91, 115 9/11, 30n16 Adorno, Theodor, 19 Agora (film market), 80, 84, 96–98, 100, 102–3, 117–18, 120 Ahmed, Sara, 27–28, 30n15, 30n17, 142–43 Aivaliotis, Konstantinos, 76 Amnesty International, 92 Appadurai, Arjun, 6, 64, 78 concept of ‘neighbourhood’, 115 Armenia, 92, 108, 113 artist-entrepreneur, 149 Australia, 54, 81, 111 Austria, 39, 44, 105, 113, 147 auteurs, 36–38, 41, 62, 94, 109–10 Azerbaijan, 92, 107–8, 114 Balkan Script Fund, 97 Belarus, 108 Belgium, 68, 71n9, 113, 129, 141 Benjamin, Walter, 17, 132 Bergman, Ingmar, 36 Berlin Wall, 48 Bjelić, Dušan, 94 Bolshakov, Ivan G., 39, 50n10 Bolsheviks. See Soviet Union Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2, 5, 7, 9–11, 28, 31–32, 43, 51n15, 67, 88, 95n9, 100–2, 104–7, 111–13, 116n2, 116n5, 141–42, 155, 160, 164–65 Association of Filmmakers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 100 Republic of Srpska, 100

Sarajevo Canton, 88, 101, 165 Sarajevo (see under festivals) Bourdieu, Pierre, 17, 19, 81 bourgeoisie, 17–18, 94, 120 Božić-Vrbančić, Senka, 25, 54–55 Brazil, 111 Bridger, Sue, 64 Buchowski, Michal, 93 Bulgaria, 39–41, 50n4, 50n13, 80, 88, 104, 155, 165 bureaucracies, 2, 18, 20, 22, 26, 44, 47, 49, 52–53, 58, 69, 78, 93, 98, 116n3, 122, 148, 158 Capitalism, 14, 19, 33, 43, 55, 60–61, 64, 70, 78, 86, 89, 93, 120, 139–40, 148–50, 161 Late capitalism, 55, 61, 70, 93, 149 Caucasus, 3, 38, 41, 107–8, 144, 148 Christianity, 2, 144 Catholic, 27 Orthodox, 144 Protestant, 27, 36 CineLink, 7, 80, 100–5, 119, 123, 125, 127–28, 134, 157 Cinema d’auteur, 43 CineMart, 96–97 civil society, 91–94, 105, 146 Cold War, 4, 6, 25, 35, 37–38, 41, 44, 49, 53, 77, 82, 93, 115, 138, 159–60 coproductions, 9, 32–34, 39, 140, 159 cultural policies and diplomacy, 2, 10, 34 colonialism, 15, 120–21, 152 communitarianism, 136n3 communitas, 134–35

Index • 185

coproductions, 2, 6, 8–11, 23, 32, 36, 44, 46, 49, 49n1, 53, 60, 63, 71n5, 76–77, 90, 127, 132, 135–36, 138, 143 Balkan and Georgian, 3, 4, 7, 11, 27, 36–37, 50n13, 67, 96–114, 116, 165, 116n4, 116n5, 116n7, 116n9, 141–42, 152, 155, 159–60, 163–64 as creative opportunities, 46, 119, 125 as cultural history, memory and legacy, 2, 36, 48, 61, 70, 143 as economic opportunities, 24, 45–46, 58, 99, 149 finding coproducers, 11, 20, 55, 60, 126, 139, 142, 144, 148, 150, 153 funding grants, 9, 61–62, 68–69, 72n17, 72n18, 97–99, 105, 107, 137, 151, 154 (see also MEDIA, European Union: Eurimages, Creative Europe) geographical and cultural proximity required, 68, 112, 158 Hollywood, 37, 44 interference from coproducers, 152 markets, 9, 14, 27, 96–97, 107, 118, 121–22, 125, 128, 130, 133–35, 138–39 (see also CineLink, CineMart, film festivals: networks and markets) trust and mistrust, 144–46, 148–49, 151, 159–61 USSR, 1, 10, 32–33, 39–42, 44, 50n13, 50n14, 159 (see also Cold War: coproductions) Western European, 35, 37, 42, 44, 68, 92, 100, 106–7, 113, 141, 150, 152, 161 within EU framework, 10, 32, 36–37, 49, 56, 65–66, 68, 70, 127, 131, 147, 150–51, 158, 160 Yugoslavian (Pre 1991), 35, 40, 42–44, 51n17, 86, 112–13, 140 COVID-19, 5–6 creative economies, 4, 13–15, 19, 23–25, 27, 29n13, 53, 78–79, 84–85, 93, 126, 131, 135, 138, 142, 153, 156 Creative Europe, 5, 7, 16, 28, 58–63, 88, 92, 95n9, 95n10, 98, 101, 105, 106, 153, 159 Creative Industries Task Force (UK), 29n13

creativity (concept), 13–16, 19–21, 23, 25, 28–29, 69, 84–85, 97, 133, 158 Croatia, 44, 80, 107–8, 110, 112, 116n3, 142, 155, 157, 160, 165 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 20 Cultural and Creative Industries in Employment in Southeast Europe report (2005), 80 cultural essentialism, 25 cultural heritage, 23, 53–54, 83 cultural industry, 21–23, 25, 35, 83 Czech Republic, 45, 102–3, 105, 108, 111, 113, 124, 127 Czechoslovakia, 39–41, 86 De Valck, Marijke, 74–75 De Vinck, Sophie, 35, 46–47, 56, 63, 65, 68, 71n10, 71n12, 109, 111 Deckert Distribution, 147 Delors, Jacques, 47 democratization, 71n3, 92–93 Denmark, 71n9, 106, 128–29 de-Stalinization, 78, 93 Directors Across Borders (DAB), 108 Durkheimian, 75, 142–43, 145 economies of scale, 46, 51n18, 59 Engelsian, 140 enterprise, 15–17 of the self, 20 society, 15 entrepreneurship, 10, 17, 21–22, 24, 48, 56–57, 62, 85, 125, 139, 149, 153, 158, 160 Erasmus programme, 71n3 Estonia, 107, 113 Eurimages, 5, 9–10, 28, 45, 49, 62–63, 65–70, 71n12, 72n15, 72n16, 72n17, 88, 95n9, 97, 99, 101, 105–6, 111, 127–28, 137, 151, 152, 160, 164 eurocentrism, 3 European Added Value (EAV), 48, 54, 59–62, 143, 154 European Audiovisual Observatory, 8, 32, 48 European Capital of Culture, 83 European Convention on Cinematographic Coproduction, 65

186 • Index

European Coproduction Convention (2002), 98, 153 European Documentary Network (EDN), 7, 128 European Film Awards, 141 European Union, 4, 6–7, 10, 25–28, 30n16, 32, 37, 46–49, 57–58, 60, 63, 65–66, 70, 71n2, 71n5, 71n7, 79, 82, 85, 88–89, 94, 95n6, 98, 108–111, 113, 115, 123, 131, 138, 142, 144, 148, 150, 152, 155, 159–61 agenda (with film), 2, 45, 48, 52, 59, 61, 64, 110, 111, 119, 128, 137, 139, 150–51, 153, 156n2, 158, 161 Babel programme, 56, 71n5 cultural policies, 2, 6, 8, 11, 21–24, 28, 46–49, 52–70, 71n2, 77, 83, 135, 139, 147, 149–51, 155, 158, 160 Commission Communication Memorandum on Culture (1972), 46 Communication on Community Action in the Cultural Sector (1977), 46 coproductions (see under coproductions) Council of Europe (1949), 64–65, 67, 70 enlargement, 3, 4, 10, 24–26, 30n16, 32, 49, 56–57, 78–79, 83, 94, 138, 141, 148, 152, 155 Europa Cinemas, 95n10 European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs (EAVE), 56, 101, 150, 154 European Broadcasting Union (EBU), 71n5 European engineering, 47 European Film Distribution Office, 56 European Free Trade Association (EFTA), 57, 71n7 European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), 30n16, 105 European Script Fund, 56 funding programmes. 5, 71n13, 88, 92, 98, 109, 116nn8–9, 118, 124, 141, 149–50, 153–54, 157, 160 (see also Eurimages, Creative Europe, Project Europe) identity, 3, 8, 16, 26–27, 78, 83, 131 Maastricht Treaty (1992), 53, 79 MEDIA (see MEDIA) Single European Act (1987), 47



Treaty of Amsterdam (1997), 71n2 Treaty of Lisbon (2007), 23, 71n2 Treaty of Nice (2001), 71n2 Treaty of Rome (1957), 46–47 Treaty of the Functioning of the EU (TFEU), 71n2 Treaty on European Union (TEU), 53, 55, 71n2 values, 28, 64, 78, 133 Europeanization, 2–3, 20–21, 25–27, 34, 49, 70, 77, 79, 83, 85, 89, 94 97, 109–10, 115, 118, 127, 132, 138, 153–56, 158, 160 film databases, 6, 8, 97 Eurimages Archive 9 IMDb, 9 Lumiere, 8, 116n5, 141 MEDIA Films, 9 film festivals, 4, 24, 49n4, 50n21, 58, 66, 73–98, 100–5, 107–9, 111, 116n9, 118–19, 122–28, 140–54, 157–58, 160–61 AFI Festival (Los Angeles), 103 Alternative Film Video Festival (1982–90), 87 ANIMAFEST (1972), 87 Belgrade International Film Festival (FEST), 87 Berlin (Berlinale), 79–80, 91, 97, 102–3, 124–25, 127, 146–47 Cannes, 40, 79–80, 86, 97, 103, 106–7, 116n1, 147 CineDoc-Tblisi, 92, 107–8 coproduction markets (see under coproductions) ecosystem, 63, 75, 94 as European identity, 60–61, 67, 69–70, 77, 92, 118, 125, 131, 160 Festival of Film from Bosnia-Herzegovina, 100 for regenerating cities, 10–11, 24, 74, 79, 83–84, 89, 91 for tourism, 84 Genre Experimental Film Festival (GEFF), 87 Golden Apricot Festival (Yerevan), 108 Greek Film Festival (1966), 81 in the USSR, 39–40, 78, 91

Index • 187

networks and markets, 61, 74, 77, 80, 111, 119, 122, 132–35, 144, 146, 148–50, 154 political agenda, 86–8 Pula Film Festival, 86–87 as ritual, 76, 78 Rotterdam, 97, 103 Sarajevo Film Festival, 5, 9, 85–89, 95n13, 100, 105, 141, 157 Tbilisi International Film Festival, 5, 9, 90–94, 105, 107–8 Thessaloniki International Film Festival (TIFF), 5, 7, 9, 73–76, 80–85, 89, 95n1, 96–98, 101–2, 117, 121, 128, 151, 153–54 Torino, 127 Toronto, 103, 127 Venice, 74, 79–80, 86, 97 Yugoslav Documentary and Short Film Festival (1954), 86 Finland, 41, 128 flow (concept), 19–21, 23, 98 Foucault, Michel, 16 Foucauldian, 48, 76, 160 Framework Programme5 (FP5), 57 France, 15, 19, 34–35, 37, 45, 66, 68, 71n12, 71n13, 100, 102–4, 106–7, 110–11, 113, 123, 127, 137, 141, 150, 154, 161 Frost, Nicola, 76 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 21 gentrification, 83–84, 91 Georgia, 1–2, 5, 7–11, 28, 30n16, 32, 38–41, 45, 50n5, 50nn7–8, 50n12, 67, 90–93, 105–8, 111, 113–14, 116n2, 116n7, 125, 144, 147–48, 155, 160, 164–65 Ex Oriente (Institute of Documentary Film), 124, 147 Georgian National Film Centre, 5, 9, 45, 91–92, 105 Prometheus Cinema Art Centre, 91, 95nn11–12, 105 Rose Revolution, 90–91 Rustaveli Cinema, 90–91 South Ossetia, 90–91, 160 Tbilisi (see under festivals)

Germany, 10, 34, 39–40, 44–45, 66, 68, 71n12, 81, 86, 92, 102–4, 106–8, 110–13, 123–24, 127–30, 147–52, 154–55, 160–61 East, 40 global coloniality, 161 globalization, 8, 33, 46, 53, 84–85, 87, 108–9, 154 Goethe Institute, 92 GOSKINO, 39 Greece, 2–4, 10–11, 32, 36–37, 49n4, 63, 66–68, 72n15–16, 73, 76, 80–85, 94, 95n5, 98–99, 104–5, 107, 109–112, 116, 116nn2–4, 120, 123, 127, 129, 131–32, 134, 136n1, 136n3, 137–38, 150–55, 159–60, 163, 165 Aristotle University, 5, 73, 96 austerity, 76 Greek Film Centre, 7, 9, 52, 151 Greek Financial Crisis (2007–08), 4–5, 52, 73, 84, 87, 98, 116 Military Junta, 37, 95n4 Thessaloniki (see under festivals) Hage, Ghassan, 54 Harvey, David, 79, 84 HBO Europe, 46, 101, 127 Hirsch, Eric and Sharon Macdonald, 15–16, 21, 28, 85 Horkheimer, Max, 19 Hungary, 40, 108, 129, 140, 144 I Kinimatoghrafistes stin Omikhli (Filmmakers in the Fog), 84 i2i Audiovisual Initiative, 57, 164 Iceland, 71n6, 71n7 India, 1, 40–42, 50n13, 102, 127 Industrial Revolution, 61 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 65, 88, 90 internationalization, 1–2, 46, 60, 68, 82–83, 85, 88–89, 94, 110, 122, 140 Israel, 95n7, 102, 123, 127, 129 Italian Neorealism, 35 Italy, 34–35, 41, 51n17, 68, 71n12, 100, 107, 111, 129, 141, 157 Jäckel, Anne, 35, 57 Jordan, 111

188 • Index

Khalvashi, Tamta, 144 kinship, 32, 34, 97, 118–21, 135, 136n3, 140–41, 145, 161 Kollontai, Alexandra, 140, 143 Kolozova, Katerina, 25–27, 49 Kusturica, Emir, 44, 141 Latvia, 113 Lee, Toby, 76, 84, 95n2 Letkemann, Paul, 134 Leutloff-Grandits, Carolin, 118–19, 126 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 13–14, 29n1, 29n3, 155 LGBT, 95n7, 119 Liechtenstein, 71n6, 71n7 liminality, 14–15, 18, 76, 89 Luxembourg, 68, 71n9, 106, 108 magic, 13, 77 Malkki, Lisa, 54 Manchester School, 14 Marcus, George, 4, 7 Marketaki, Tonia, 137, 151–53, 156n1 Marshal Tito, 31, 42–43, 86–87 Marshall Plan, 33 Marx, Karl, 16, 18, 61 Marxism, 19, 49n2, 61 matchmaking, 7, 11, 118–26, 130–31, 133–35, 136n1, 139, 142 chemistry, 120, 141–42, 144, 151 MEDIA (organization), 5, 7–10, 23, 28, 45, 47, 49, 52, 55–60, 62–63, 65–67, 69–70, 92, 95n9, 95n10, 97–99, 101, 106, 111, 118, 127–28, 133, 150, 160, 163–64 MEDIA 2007, 57 MEDIA Mundus (2009), 58 MEDIA Plus, 57 Mexico, 128 migration, 43, 75, 77, 91, 128–30 Moldavia, 108 Monnet, Jean, 46, 48 Morawetz, Norbert, 32, 46 multiculturalism, 21–22, 83, 95n6 Narayan, Kirin, 14–15, 130 Narotzky, Susana, 18–19, 93 nationalism, 26, 136n3 neocolonialism, 151

neoliberalism, 15, 19–21, 25–26, 34, 59–61, 76, 79, 84, 110, 131, 142–43, 149–50, 153, 161 neoliberal state, 77 Netherlands, 71n9, 92, 108, 128, 141, 150 networking, 56–58, 60, 63, 66, 68, 70, 133, 143, 146, 153 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), 85, 88, 92, 94, 101, 105, 114–15 Noosfera, 92, 105 North Macedonia, 25, 49, 95n7, 98, 102, 105, 111–13, 142, 155, 165 Norway, 42, 71n6, 71n7, 71n9 Nouvelle Vague, 43, 81 Olla, Roberto, 68 Oscars, 45, 100 Palestine, 102 Papadimitriou, Lydia, 83, 98, 110, 127, 1 58 Papagaroufali, Eleni, 34 Pašović, Haris, 86–87 Passerini, Luisa, 27 Perkin, Joan, 121, 136n2 Pine, Frances, 64 pitching, 55, 107–8, 117, 129 Poland, 93, 107–8, 111, 113 postcolonialism, 3, 32, 41, 109, 159, 161 Post-Fordism, 10, 45, 55, 64 Postsocialism, 3–4, 26, 32, 64, 79, 90, 93–94, 98, 109, 138, 147–49, 152, 156, 159, 161–62 Powdermaker, Hortense, 12–14, 60 prehistory, 6, 10, 33, 49 Project Europe, 2, 4, 6, 27–28, 49, 54, 61, 78, 94, 115, 142, 154, 156, 161 Qatar, 81 Regional Coproduction Forum (Yerevan, 2007), 108 Riles, Annelise, 6, 114–15, 118 Romania, 39, 41, 80, 88, 92, 102, 107, 111, 113–14, 155, 157, 165 romanticism, 16, 18 Russian avant-garde, 38 Russian Civil War (1917–23), 38, 50n6

Index • 189

Salonica Otherwise, 85, 133 Sapir, Edward, 12–13 Sarajevo. See under festivals Scott, Eric, 38–39 Serbia, 100, 105, 108, 111–13, 129, 139, 142, 155, 157–58, 165 Slovakia, 107, 113 Slovenia, 5, 7, 107–8, 111–12, 141–42, 155, 157, 160, 165 socialism, 4, 33, 39, 43, 51n16, 64, 86, 93, 139–40, 159 Socialist Bloc, 4, 25, 32, 41, 44, 65, 90, 124, 140 Soviet Union (USSR), 1, 3, 9, 32–34, 37–44, 49nn4–8, 50n14, 78, 82, 90–93, 106–9, 116n7, 130, 140, 144, 148, 159 Bolshevik Revolutionary films, 29n8, 38 October Revolution, 86 Soviet Ministry of the Film Industry, 39–40 Stalin, Josef, 39, 40, 42, 93 Stoler, Ann, 142, 156 Strathern, Marilyn, 6, 21, 75, 120–21, 135 subjunctivity, 20 Svašek, Maruska, 26 Sweden, 37, 42, 71n9, 128–30 Switzerland, 68, 71n6, 129, 137 Syria, 111 Taussig, Michael, 61 Tbilisi. See under festivals television, 23, 43, 47, 51n17, 56, 60, 81, 100, 102, 123, 127 Television without Frontiers (TwF), 51n20 Thessaloniki. See under festivals transnational, 24, 28, 30n15, 45, 47, 61, 74, 85, 88, 91, 101, 119, 122, 126, 138, 143, 149, 152, 154, 158

cooperation, 22–24, 48, 50n11, 58–60, 109–10, 128, 131, 154 mobility, 46, 60, 76, 150 policies, 32–33, 63, 69, 131, 146 transnationalism, 33, 59–60, 89, 154 Trifonova, Temenuga, 48 Turan, Kenneth, 86 Turkey, 57, 67, 88, 95n7, 103–4, 107–8, 111, 113–14, 129, 144, 165 Turner, Victor, 14, 18, 20, 29n11, 75, 134–35 Ukraine, 5, 7, 92, 106–8, 113–14, 160 UNESCO, 21–23, 88, 98 United Kingdom (UK), 6, 22, 26–27, 29n13, 34–35, 42, 68, 71n9, 71n13, 100, 113, 127–29 United States of America (USA), 1, 19, 32–37, 39, 42, 44, 75, 78, 90, 102, 104, 109, 128–29, 134 Urciuoli, Bonnie, 60–61 Uzbekistan, 41 wars First World War, 19, 95n5 Greek Civil War (1946–49), 49–50n4, 82, 95n3, 129 Second World War, 18, 34, 38, 40–41, 51n17, 64, 86–87, 95n3, 129 Yugoslav wars, 5, 155 Williams, Raymond, 15, 18 Winter Olympics of 1984, 87 World Bank, 65, 88 Yiakoumaki, Vassiliki, 25, 27 Yilmazok, Levent, 67–68 Yugoslavia (pre 1991), 2, 32, 35, 37, 39–44, 51n16, 81, 86–88, 103, 108, 138, 140–42, 159