French filmmakers denounce EC’s lack of support

French filmmakers have denounced the refusal of the European Commission to accept the principle of taxing telecom service providers to support content creation.

The filmmakers, gathered at the Rencontres cinématographiques event in Dijon at the end of last week, denounced what they saw as the purely economic view of culture taken by the EC in rejecting the latest version of the tax, which sees distributors of TV services contribute to audiovisual content creation through the Cosip fund.

A number of well-known filmmakers signed a manifesto deploring the absence of a cultural policy at European level and the EC’s apparent view that rules should be dictated entirely by the market.