Eurimages - Irish round up

Mention of La Mula in my Jan 14 post caused me to reflect on Irish film making and Eurimages, the Council of Europe's co-production fund.

La Mula began as a project developed in the UK with the support of the UK Film Council (£104,673) by British director Michael Radford. But the UK is not a member of Eurimages and under the terms of the scheme a UK angle is of no use to a co-production applying to the fund. The rules lay down that "all projects submitted must have at least two co-producers from different member states of the Fund."

Because of this the presumption has always been that Ireland's membership of Eurimages brings European co-producers to Ireland when they are looking for an English language co-production partner.

As we can see with La Mula that was not the case at the time. The Irish involvement only came after the Eurimages decision was made. There were Spanish and German co-producers attached to the project when it was approved, as well as Radford's own company in the UK.

The other projects with an Irish interest funded by Eurimages in 2008 were:

Circus Fantasticus
By Janez Burger (Slovenia)
Feature Film
Awarded: €300,000
Co-producers:
STARA GARA / PROPELER FILM d.o.o. / CINE WORKS (SI)
KELCOM Ltd / FASTNET FILMS (IE)

Neka Drige Price
By Hanna A Slak (Slovenia), Marija Dzidzeva ("The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia"), Ana Rossi (Serbia), Ivona Juka (Croatia), Ines Tanovic (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Feature Film
Awarded: €190,000
Co-producers: SEE FILM PRO (RS); STUDIO MAJ PRODUCTION d.o.o. (SI); 4 FILM (HR); DOKUMENT (BA); SKOPJE FILM STUDIO (MK); DIG PRODUCTIONS Ltd (IE)

Triage
By Danis Tanovic (Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Feature Film
Awarded: €650,000
Co-producers:
STRADBROOK PRODUCTIONS Ltd/PARALLEL FILMS (IE)
ASAP FILMS Sarl (FR)
FREEFORM SPAIN (ES)

In 2009 the following projects with an Irish angle were funded:

As if I am not there
By Juanita Wilson (Ireland)
Feature Film
Awarded: €220,000
Co-producers:
WIDE EYE FILMS Ltd (IE)
STELLA NOVA FILM (SE)
SEKTOR FILM DOOEL (MK)

The Essence of Killing
By Jerzy Skolimowski (Poland)
Feature film
Awarded: €400,000
Co-producers:
SKOPIA FILM (PL)
CYLINDER PRODUCTIONS AS (NO)
ILIADE ET FILMS (FR)
ELEMENT PICTURES LIMITED (IE)

The Last Furlong
By Agnès Merlet (France)
Feature Film
Awarded: €600,000
Co-producers:
FIDELITE FILMS S.A (FR)
OCTAGON FILMS LIMITED (IE)

All Good Children
By Alicia Duffy (United Kingdom)
Feature Film
Awarded: €300,000
Co-producers:
ELEMENT PICTURES LIMITED (IE)
CINEMA DEFACTO (FR)
ARTEMIS PRODUCTIONS SA (BE)

Thor - The Edda Chronicles
By Gunnar Karlsson (Iceland), Toby Genkel (Germany)
Feature Film - Animation
Awarded: €480,000
Co-producers:
CAOZ STUDIO Ltd (IS)
ULYSSES GMBH FILM – UND FERNSEHPRODUKTION (DE)
MAGMA PRODUCTIONS (IE)

All Good Children is an adaptation of the novel The Republic of Trees and was initially developed by (the now defunct) Little Bird. The IFB made a provisional offer of funding to Little Bird for the project in August 2008. Subsequently the project was with Jonathan Cavendish at Caveman Films in London. The film was shot in France in August and September of last year.

All Good Children, Circus Fantasticus and La Mula were all offered production funding by the Irish Film Board on 18 December 2008. The amounts offered were €600,000, €250,000 and €500,000 respectively. As far as I am aware none of these projects has had a significant Irish budget spend. That said, story changes resulted in significant Irish casting in All Good Children.

This preliminary look at Eurimages decisions over the last two years suggests that the basic idea that our Eurimages membership contributes to an inflow of production (and production spend) into Ireland is in fact a good deal more complex.

All Good Children and La Mula between them have an outflow of up to €1.1m in IFB funding, whereas Triage (partly Irish location, casting, and post-production) would have brought an inflow of budget spend (presumably) greater than the IFB's €750,000 contribution to its budget.

Another question arises in respect of the benefit of Eurimages to Irish talent. Only one Irish director, Juanita Wilson, has been supported by Eurimages over the last two years and the majority of projects have not been developed or written in Ireland.

One could deduce from this that Eurimages offers little support to Irish talent and indigenous production, for all that it may contibute positively to production levels in Ireland. However, on the principle that money follows money, might a corollary of this be that the Eurimages scheme has the effect of drawing Irish funding away from Irish directing and writing talent?