3 days ago
1
Untitled ‘Reality/Resistance’, the 12th Nostradamus report and industry forecasts to be introduced June 11 at Madrid’s ECAM Forum Co-Production Market, after a first bow in Cannes, is not a “call to despair but a call to engage,” according to media analyst and author Johanna Koljonen.
The report, published by Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival and based on thorough research and interviews with power-players in the screen industries, offers practical tips on how to move forward as an industry and brace ourselves for tougher times, amid world crisis and structural upheaval in the sector.
Key suggestions include:
*using storytelling as a direct or indirect political tool to defend democracy and editorial independence;
*rethinking development with “more adaptive, cross-disciplinary approaches,” such as iterative testing, to better respond to real-world constraints and creative potential;
*rethinking distribution, promotion and marketing via “collective experiments in visibility, audience building and release strategy,”
*embracing innovative storytelling at a time when “Hollywood may be losing significance as a cultural idea,” suggests the author, as local content continues to expand;
*and strengthening cross border collaboration and engaging in proactive conversations about specific risk scenarios with institutions and industry partners.
Power-players interviewed for the report include TV executives’ Morad Koufane (France Télévisions), Marianne Furevold-Boland (NRK), agent Ted Miller (Triangle Management Partners), producers Roman Paul (Razor Films) and Katarina Tomkova (Punkchart Films), Rotterdam-Hubert Bals Fund’s Tamara Tatishvili, and screenwriter/audience designer Samya Hafsaoui.
Commenting on their collaboration with ECAM Forum, the new go-to co-production market in Spain, the Göteborg Film Festival’s head of industry Josef Kullengård said: “We’ve been presenting the Nostradamus report across Europe for many years now. As the project has grown in reach and recognition over the past decade, it has become a central part of our work, and we’re very happy taking it to the ECAM Forum.
Right now, with the industry facing so many shifts, technological, economic, and structural, the need for collaboration and long-term thinking is greater than ever. Events like this give us a chance to connect with key players across the value chain and across borders, which is exactly what the Nostradamus project aims to inspire.”
The full report is available here.
On the eve of her Nostradamus presentation at Madrid’s Cineteca Matadero, Koljonen talks methodology and key points drawn from her report.
How was the process of identifying the main theme ‘Reality/Resistance’ and sections for this report, with the support from core industry interviewees?
The interviews always start exploratory, just aiming to understand what people are concerned or excited about, and themes emerge organically in the material. Identifying them feels like alchemy when it’s happening but then quite obvious in hindsight – once you’ve identified something’s in the zeitgeist, you start to see it everywhere.
This year we also kicked off the process with an intimate, off-the-record fishbowl with 30 executives during the Göteborg Festival, just to get a temperature check on the industry. Democratic backsliding was a major theme there. Another one was the leadership challenges involved with trying to evolve industry practices while maintaining enough strategic perspective to build capacity and resilience for the long term. And the difficulty of doing any of that when the industry, our organisations, and individual projects are constantly in short-term crisis too.
All our interviewees approached the same thing in different ways – that often we know what needs to change but we keep hoping some other part of the industry will move first, or that the audience will start to behave in ways that serves us. That’s no kind of theory of change. We have to start the transformations ourselves, where we have power individually, and get serious about serving the audience instead of waiting for them to come to us.
You mention in your introduction that the Nostradamus report has always been political. But would you say that this year’s report is more political than ever, at a time of democratic backsliding? Also, you do mention Donald Trump extensively throughout the report…
In the European context it has never made sense to analyse the sector in purely market terms, as such a huge percentage of our funding is public money. That makes politics inevitably present, and just as important as audience success or production volume for understanding the landscape. And it means that cultural value and artistic impact connect directly to the stability of the funding too. Globally speaking, our industry became much more aware during the pandemic of our presence in the real world, that we’re relying on stability in international supply chains and global markets, and how vulnerable we are to force majeure events like extreme weather or epidemic disease.
The difference this year is that the more autocratic or erratic leaders there are in power, the harder normal forecasting becomes, because macroeconomic dynamics get out of whack – like how Putin’s war, which was horrible in itself, also came with this secondary scourge of inflation. Trump’s tariff free-styling risks tanking the world economy, and of course I hope it won’t, but the uncertainty affects investments, ad markets, and Wall Street regardless. For better and for worse, our European content markets are dominated by publicly-traded U.S. companies, which is why Trump gets mentioned a great deal in the report.
In this volatile context, do you feel European institutions have a guiding and stabilising role to play?
That would be great, but my concern is that especially national institutes and funds have so many roles and responsibilities already. It makes them slow to adapt to new market realities, new production pipelines and so on – sometimes with good reason, if local production relies on them to survive at all. And at the same time most of them are very vulnerable to funding cuts in this moment where populists are a political force everywhere.
Sometimes I ask public funding leaders, what would your organisation be doing or investing in, if you knew for a fact that in ten years, it won’t be around anymore? Of course we should fight to protect our institutions – funds, public service broadcasters, festivals, film schools, archives – but at the same time, I think that right now they and the wider industry need to prioritise building capacity and financial resilience for the day not all of those institutions can function the way they do today.
A bold idea is the suggestion to rethink development and introduce testing to validate concepts. Could you expand on this particular point?
It sure shouldn’t be a particularly bold idea! It’s just that our industry narratives about the correct way of doing development are from another era. At the same time, everyone I talk to pretty much agree on what isn’t working today, while people and companies that are doing well or even thriving right now tend to already be doing the things the report recommends. That applies to the chapter on distribution and marketing too; these are largely solved problems, we just aren’t doing the right things.
The suggestion is to reconceptualize both business and creative development as testing, not in the interest of forcing commercial compromises, but as in testing the validity of our own assumptions. That’s a mindset more commonly associated with design, but it’s a natural fit with film and TV since testing is already so central to our practices in the pre-production and production phases.
Most professionals would be happy to try tools and methods others have found successful, if their counterparts and company cultures allowed it – and if they had the financial margins to learn new things or to develop differently. That is one area where I think public funding could have a huge impact.
As you are presenting this report at ECAM Forum in Madrid, is this the type of cross-border collaboration/co-production and training initiative which is needed for the European industry to show greater resilience?
It’s a great event! But whether it builds resilience is really up to the participants. There’s a great quote in the report from Tamara Tatishvili, who basically says that people in this industry are very wise on panels, but we shouldn’t confuse talking on stage with actually going back and changing our own professional practices. I would add that finding a sustainable path for your career or company in this landscape probably requires listening more than talking! Because the good news is that most of our big and small problems already have tried and tested solutions. The bad news is that innovation often comes from small or unconventional places, that don’t get the time of day. What we need to do now is to listen less to legacy deciding-makers discussing challenges, and more to people who are already doing the unconventional things, so we can scale those innovations rapidly.
What are your views of the Spanish audiovisual industry and the future of non-English language content?
I haven’t delved deep for some years, so I’m out to learn more myself! In general though, there is a cultural moment right now for non-U.S. mainstream content to somewhat grow its international share and also for niche content and specific voices to continue widening their appeal. That sets up very well Spain, as a mature industry with great capacity and a great talent pool. Having a globally spoken language doesn’t hurt either, even though that is a bit less important now with localization technologies developing so rapidly.
English (US) ·