Yahoo Finance French Budget Cuts Spare Film Subsidies, Tax Rebates for International Productions
The French film sector will be spared from an incoming round of public cuts, with the country’s National Film Board (CNC) and its tax rebate kept in place at current levels of funding.
Under the new budget submitted by Prime Minister Michel Barnier, the film board will continue to draw from diverse revenue streams lifted from taxes on theatrical admissions alongside linear broadcasters, streaming services and telecom providers, all of which are re-injected into the film sector. Under the Barnier plan, the CNC will instead pay a one-time levy of €450 million, taken from CNC savings and thus unlikely to affect ongoing operations.
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The levy arrives as part of the incoming prime minister’s wider, austerity budget designed to slash €60 billion ($65.5 billion) in annual expenditures. Now submitted, the overall budget is likely to evolve once put before France’s National Assembly and Senate, ahead of a final promulgation in December.
“Our main mission was to avoid getting our tax levies capped and our tax rebate plans cut because both our vital to our industry,” CNC interim president Olivier Henrard tells Variety. “If we degrade the tax rebates, the shoots will desert France and we’ll end up with empty facilities that we’d have financed with the France 2030 plan.”
“We were able to convey to the prime minister, and to the finance minister who prepared the budget, that we should preserve our system that is both pertinent and efficient since our budget doesn’t cost a penny to the government, as it’s fully self-financed,” Henrard says.
Indeed, the brunt of the levy will stem from a pandemic-era grant, leaving the film board’s day-to-day funds untouched.
“Our contribution to the state budget will have no operational effect,” says Henrard. “Morally and politically, we are simply returning a sum the state had made available to us, exceptionally, to deal with the crisis.”
Many in the French industry feared more drastic cuts. At the opening of the TSF Paris Backlot last week, filmmaker Cédric Klapisch and “Emily in Paris” line-producer Raphaël Benoliel joined Henrard to lobby Minister of Culture Rachida Dati for greater protections – with particular emphasis on France’s tax rebate scheme.
The minister was receptive, per sources privy to the conversation, while echoing a sentiment shared by her boss, French President Emmanuel Macron.
Indeed, in an exclusive interview with Variety earlier this week, President Macron gave the CNC a vote of confidence, praising the film board’s “extraordinary job” while adding, “I’m attached to this model.”
“We have a cinema that has always resisted major crises, which is not true everywhere in Europe,” Macron said. “This creative biodiversity is very important because there shouldn’t be just one model, because there isn’t just one audience, and because the way of explaining the world, of looking at it, varies.”
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