Europe is present every year at the Cannes Film Festival. And in 2023, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, was in charge of visiting the Palais des Festivals to present the results of the Commission’s work and reveal its intentions for the coming years.
“I presented the ‘Media Outlook’, which is actually a very in-depth study done by our services to look at the big trends and draw conclusions”, Bratton explains. “It is clearly about the emergence of platforms and how we position ourselves against them, it is about the protection of intellectual property rights, which is very important to us in Europe – and believe me, we are very important in Europe. Looking into it. That’s about it. Funding, how to further increase funding, and obviously we intend to continue that.”
14 films supported by the program are present at Cannes, and four are competing for the Palme d’Or. Among them, ‘Rapito’, written by Italian maestro Marco Bellocchio, is the true story of a Jewish boy who was forcibly baptized by the Pope. 18th century XIX.
“We are a state of law,” Braton recalls. “We have values, we share them, it is our common good in Europe and in this context it is true that the audiovisual industry, in the broadest sense of the word, plays an essential role in Europe. We are reminded of the essential role we play in protecting our heritage, even at a time when war affects our continent in Ukraine”.
The other three films in competition are directed by women: ‘Daughters of Olfa’, by Kouthar Ben Haniya, ‘Club Zero’, by Jessica Hausner and ‘La Chimera’, by Alice Rohrwacher.
The European Commission takes into account that cinema is an art and an industry. By co-producing and financing many of the world’s biggest festivals with European films, Europe responds to an extremely competitive and constantly evolving market by affirming its cultural and artistic values as well as its industrial and technological know-how.
