Coproducing Europe: An Ethnography of Film Markets, Creativity and Identity

By Eleni Sideri

Up until the 1990s, when the EU launched film policies intended to encourage political and cultural collaboration among its member states, film coproductions were limited to specific industries and mostly based on the cultural and national values of individual nations. Coproducing Europe explores the impact of these EU policies on the coproduction networks that now serve as a driving force in contemporary creative economies. By focusing on regional film markets in Thessaloniki, Sarajevo and Tbilisi, this comparative ethnography looks beyond the economic nature of film coproductions to their role in Europeanization, memories of the Cold War and preconstructed political agendas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: May 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781800739864

Eleni Sideri

Eleni Sideri is Assistant Professor at the Department of Balkan, Slavic, and Oriental Studies at the University of Macedonia. She is coeditor, with Lydia Efthymia Roupakia, of Religions and Migrations in the Black Sea Region (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017).

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Coproducing Europe

COPRODUCING EUROPE

An Ethnography of Film Markets, Creativity and Identity

Eleni Sideri

First published in 2023 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2023 Eleni Sideri

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sideri, Eleni, author.

Title: Coproducing Europe : an ethnography of film markets, creativity and identity / Eleni Sideri.

Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022054574 (print) | LCCN 2022054575 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800739857 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800739864 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: European Union--Influence. | CYAC: Motion picture industry--Political aspects--Balkan Peninsula--History. | Motion picture industry--Social aspects--Balkan Peninsula--History. | Motion picture industry--Political aspects--Greece--History. | Motion picture industry--Social aspects--Greece--History. | Motion picture industry--Political aspects--Georgia (Republic)--History. | Motion picture industry--Social aspects--Georgia (Republic)--History.

Classification: LCC PN1993.5.B35 C67 2023 (print) | LCC PN1993.5.B35 (ebook) | DDC 791.4309496--dc23/eng/20230207

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054574

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054575

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-985-7 hardback

ISBN 978-1-80073-986-4 ebook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800739857

CONTENTS

List of Figures, Maps and Tables

Acknowledgements

Introduction. Methodology

Chapter 1. Between Art and Industry

Chapter 2. Coproduction History in Post-War Prehistory

Chapter 3. EU Media Policies

Chapter 4. Film Festivals in EU South-Eastern Peripheries

Chapter 5. From National Cinemas to European Coproductions

Chapter 6. Matchmaking

Chapter 7. Coproducing Emotions

Conclusion

Appendix

References

Index

FIGURES, MAPS AND TABLES

Figures

Figure 5.1. Timeline – Greece.

Figure 5.2. Timeline – Bosnia–Herzegovina.

Figure 5.3. Participation in Crossroads – Thessaloniki Film Festival.

Figure 5.4. Participations in CineLink – Sarajevo.

Figure 5.5. Timeline – Georgia.

Maps

Map 5.1. Coproduction networks – Greece.

Map 5.2. Coproduction networks – Bosnia–Herzegovina.

Map 5.3. Coproduction networks – Georgia.

Tables

Table 3.1. Selection criteria.

Table A.1. Funding for Greece.

Table A.2. Funding for Bosnia–Herzegovina.

Table A.3. Funding for Georgia.

Table A.4. Cash rebates in the Balkans.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Fotini Tsibiridou, for the opportunity to start this research as a postdoc at the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia. I am grateful and indebted to my colleague and friend Dr Elina Kapetanaki, independent researcher in social anthropology, who read an earlier draft and gave insightful comments, as well as to the emeritus professor of the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies Eftihia Voutira.

My gratitude goes to Katherine Baker, Periklis Choursoglou and Dimtris Kerkinos, the latter of whom shared his thoughts and contacts at the beginning of this research.

I would like to express my gratitude to the people of the Agora at Thessaloniki Film Festival, especially to Ageliki Vergou and Yanna Sarri, to the Greek Film Centre, and especially to Anna Kassimati. I would like to thank Aida Kalender, Danijela Majstorovic and Nebojša Jovanović in Sarajevo, and Salome Jashi, Artchil Khetagouri and Alexander Baev in Tbilisi. I am indebted to the Creative Europe and Eurimages offices and delegations in all three countries, as well as to all the people working at the film festivals in Sarajevo, Thessaloniki and Tbilisi.

My eternal gratitude goes to mum, dad and my mentor, the late professor of anthropological linguistics Lukas Tsitsipis.

INTRODUCTION

Methodology

Tbilisi, 3 July 2003

During my first period of fieldwork in Georgia in 2003, Nick Nolte visited Tbilisi. The news circulated fast, causing great excitement. The star’s visit was interpreted as part of the changes in Tbilisi. A masterclass was hosted at the Amirani Cine Club. My friend Lia¹ invited me to the event. One of the leading actors in the film being shown, The Good Thief (dir. Neil Jordan, 2003), was the ethnic Georgian Nutsa Kukhianidze. The entire artistic scene of the city attended the event. Town Hall officials and people from the US embassy came as well. Nick Nolte seemed genuinely surprised by the crowd. Many of the questions concerned Nutsa and her success in the US. Her journey, literal and symbolic, was envied by many young Georgians back then.

When we returned to Lia’s home, with the old, handmade wooden furniture and the black and white photographs on the antique sideboard, her grandmother wanted to hear all the details. She used to make costumes for the National Ballet Theatre of Soviet Georgia. ‘This is nothing’, Natela said, ‘I remember when Nargis and Raj Kapoor visited Tbilisi [in 1954]! What a reception! What a beauty!’ She directed an austere look at my friend, who was bored with her granny’s stories. ‘Elene, you should know that Tbilisi was always a mezhdunarodnyĭ [‘international’ in Russian] kalaki [‘city’ in Georgian].’

The visit of the two megastars from India to Tbilisi demonstrated the Soviet Union’s involvement in international coproductions. Natela’s narration highlighted the circuits of films and film stars, but she also stressed the connection of these circuits to cities and their internationalization. Natela’s memory underlined the cultural policies and diplomacy of the Cold War period. These aspects of internationalization, mobilities and circuits, the cultural and political histories of post-war Europe, and their traces in the present cinematic landscape of the continent are part of the history of film coproductions, and as this work will argue, they are important for an understanding of coproduction networks today.

Europeanization and Margins

According to Wolfram Kaiser, Stefan Krankenhagen and Kerstin Poehls (2014), who have studied Europeanization in the context of museum collections and exhibitions, this process was not only a political project of institution-building and the formation of policies and integration mechanisms. Instead, they argued that Europeanization can be studied in full only by referring to cultural and historical processes of political transformation. They also underlined that Europeanization comprised both the ‘idea of Europe’, as an idealization of ‘what Europe is’, and the ‘cultural-political’ (ibid.: 3) project that the authors called Project Europe, a political design of policies resulting in the idea of Europe. The idea of Europe, as John Borneman and Nick Fowler (1997) postulated in their account of different policies for Europeanization, involved a long and turbulent historical process. It started with the formation of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, which contrasted Europe with the archetypical Others (the Jews and the Muslims). It continued with the gradual formation of the modern nation states. During that phase, as Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller (2002: 302–8) persuasively argued, cultural policies, including film policies, were utilized in the production of a homogenous cultural (national) memory, overshadowing histories of national violence (social inequalities, colonial legacies and ethnic conflicts). This legacy seems to have inspired the EU policies of the 1990s. As Lila Leontidou (2004: 605) has argued, the idea of Europe, often identified with a democratic legacy and cultural superiority, was filtered ‘in the context of deborderings and relevant declarations, the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the partition of former Yugoslavia, questions of European federalism, and the expansions of the EU’, through a ‘bureaucratic institutional narrative’.

My research examines film industries and the role of coproductions in their development by looking at EU film policies, regional histories and politics as they interact with the process of Europeanization, the shaping of Project Europe, and the way that Europe is perceived at different scales. My comparative angle takes into account three different regional film industries, those of Greece, Bosnia–Herzegovina and Georgia. These three countries are on the geographic and political margins of the EU. This perspective gives a clearer insight into the, often invisible, power inequalities that construct the regional. As Sarah Green (2005: 1) has noted, marginality ‘evokes a sense of unequal location as well as unequal relations’. The EU project contributed to the formation of south-east Europe as a region by delineating not only borders, but also peoples and cultures through economic, political and cultural policies from the 1990s. EU enlargement towards the eastern and south-eastern peripheries was a highly hegemonic and hierarchical political project whereby the people of south-east Europe felt ‘one boundary shift from . . . European citizenship’ (Leontidou 2004: 609), This boundary, however, often seemed insurmountable. In recent years, a new approach combining both postsocialism and postcolonialism has argued that the very position of the Balkans as peripheral preserved colonial Eurocentrism during Europeanization (Bjelić 2018).

The shaping of the region itself opened a discussion of what Europe was and where its borders could or should be drawn from the 1990s. In this way, the margins became part of the centre’s political project, reminding us of the shifting geographies of power that produce the sense of belonging often connected to a privileged narrative (see Massey 2005). The margins of Europe during Europeanization turned into peripheries and Western and Northern Europe turned into the centre within the same grand narrative of becoming European. Nevertheless, these changes resulted in ambivalent comparisons, critique and discontent among the people living in these shifting geographies that were often considered marginal, like the Balkans. These political and emotional ambiguities seemed to be part of film policies in which film coproductions played a significant role.

Methodology and Methods

Marginality and peripherality have emerged in my work in various ways. I started my anthropological studies in the 1990s, in a period that Fotini Tsibiridou (2003: 185–202) has characterized as transformative for the reading of the social in Greece. During those years, social anthropology in Greece challenged ‘Helleno-centric’ (ibid.: 188) perceptions and became more outward-looking. This happened in connection with the emergence of the neighbouring Balkan countries and the former Soviet Union, where Greek-speaking diasporas lived. Both these regions emerged as prominent fields of interest for anthropologists from Greece. This was also true for me. I undertook my first fieldwork in the Caucasus. Approaching the anthropology of Greece from the margins challenged ethnocentric perceptions and shed light on the hegemonic visions that Greece had started to have with regard to its former socialist neighbours. The discussion regarding the Western-centric stereotypes of the transition from socialism to postsocialism, which followed the first years of ethnographic research in the former socialist bloc, made me aware of the value of comparative study and historical contextualization (see Angelidou 2011). Comparing Greece’s film industry to two other film industries from behind the Iron Curtain enabled me to challenge dominant perceptions regarding before and after, but also suggested differences within what was often understood as the homogenous socialist bloc.

Turning my attention to the cinema as a field of interest was not an obvious choice. Although social anthropology introduced photography and film as part of its ethnographic methods very early (see Sideri 2016, 2021), this engagement did not really involve fictional films and the film industry. Anthropological visual representations of Greece did not escape exoticization and Orientalism, following the colonial gaze of Mediterranean anthropology (see Herzfeld 1987; Kalantzis 2019; Venaki and Nikolaidou 2019). This gaze fashioned ‘images of Greece’ or the ‘Greeks’ for global consumption, whether this consumption concerned wider cinemagoers or academic audiences.

Studying Greek coproductions in comparison to other film industries in wider south-east Europe will first help me interconnect and historically contextualize the formation of the local, regional and global within Cold War historical legacies and hierarchies of power, and then during the enlargement of the 1990s. This comparison will also contribute to studying the formation of the peripheral through film festivals and film markets, not as a result, but as a constitutive part of Project Europe. Film coproductions in this sense emerge as a space of economic, political and cultural collaboration, but also of knowledge and emotional entanglements that dis/connect creators from south-east Europe and the ‘heart’ of the European creative economy.

Salazar, Elliot and Norum (2017: 4) reminded us of Malinowski’s fieldwork, which, although it became synonymous with a territorially bounded study of culture, was really depicting a world of motion, trade and exchange. Mobility was always part of ethnography, even if it was unnoticeable in terms of epistemological and methodological recognition (Clifford 1997). This negligence was recognized in the 1990s. George Marcus (2009: 90) proposed multisited ethnographies to explore ‘chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions’ between various things such as objects, persons, stories, biographies and metaphors. In this work, I follow people (creators, EU officials, festival practitioners), their narratives and their emotions, which circulate in con- and disjunction with EU power hierarchies and the global economic agenda.

My research (from 2016 to 2018) took place during the period of the financial crisis in Greece. Lack of funding was a crucial factor in any travel plans, and in the duration of fieldwork in the three cities I studied, Thessaloniki, Tbilisi and Sarajevo. The crisis also played a significant role in the participation of various creators in festival markets and workshops. As a result, both online and offline fieldwork were undertaken during this research period. But these setbacks made me more aware of how these professionals work and the hardships they face behind stardom and the red carpet, which often overwhelm our imagination of the film industry. Writing these lines during the COVID-19 pandemic and within a regime of strict confinement turned my setbacks into norms.

I already had connections with the people working at the festivals in Thessaloniki, as I have lived in the city since the early 1990s, and in Tbilisi, since my first fieldwork there in 2004. My connection to the Film School at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, first as a student and then as a teaching assistant, also gave me access to Thessaloniki Film Festival. I also had contacts with film directors in Tbilisi, as in 2015 I organized, at the university where I worked, the first documentary film festival dedicated to the Georgian documentary. I built my connections to the Festival of Sarajevo through colleagues doing research in Bosnia–Herzegovina after the Yugoslav wars.

I attended three film markets in total, in both Thessaloniki and Sarajevo. In Tbilisi, there is no organized film market. I also participated in an online session of Creative Europe – Slovenia and Ukraine, which aimed to connect young creators during the pandemic, in November 2020. I discuss in more detail my participation in the markets in Chapter 6. My role as a researcher was known to the other participants, and some creators joked about this role by saying that I was there to ‘examine them’. Most of the time, they were very supportive and helpful, discussing problems in funding their films and all the ingenious but demanding strategies they employed to find producers. Moreover, they discussed ideas, plots and twists, trying to understand if they would work on audiences like me. Often, they asked for information regarding film markets and festivals I visited.

For the interviews, I contacted professionals working at the MEDIA (Measures to Encourage the Development of the Audiovisual Industries) desks and the National Film Centres of the three countries, at festivals, and in particular, at film markets. Through the snowball technique they introduced me to a network of creators and producers in all three industries. I tried to interview, either in person or online, officials in similar positions in all three festival markets. My main targets were EU officials working in the Creative Europe and Eurimages programmes, professionals in film markets, film festivals and national film centres, and creators who had experience of participating in film markets. I used similar tactics (the snowball technique) to get in contact with creators. At the beginning of each interview, I explained to them the goals of my research project and asked for their consent. For extra protection, I use pseudonyms for all the people I interviewed.

Discussing ethnographic methods during the pandemic, Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma and Chika Watanabe (2020) argued that the ‘recombination of home and field have now become necessities’, arguing for a new ‘patchwork ethnography’ that expands in time, values long-term relations, and identifies new ways to do fieldwork despite mobility constraints. Undertaking research under the conditions of a long financial crisis, with no funding, and writing up during an epidemiological crisis forced me to expand my research temporally and to be more resourceful in terms of methods, for example by digging into film databases. In this sense, the pandemic generalized what was for many social anthropologists a reality even before COVID-19, drawing attention to the research problems often faced by anthropologists living on the margins (those at peripheral academic institutions and from economically challenging contexts).

More specifically, my research started with readings on mobility and global economy and culture – such as the seminal work of Arjun Appadurai (1990, 1996) on global dis/junctures, which described the economic and cultural landscape that turned film coproductions into a significant part of the film industry – as well as Cold War cultural histories (Scott-Smith, Segal and Romijin 2012), which can be highly monitored, could produce a different understanding of how films circulate globally. At the same time, the cultural history of the Cold War can reveal the relationships that were shaped despite the political rhetoric of polarization. This prompted me to use the idea of prehistory (Shami 2000) as a way to explore the history of coproductions before the 1990s, when the EU film policies were introduced. I found anthropological works on imagination, cultural improvisation and creativity very helpful, especially the works generated by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK’s conference in 2005 (Hallam and Ingold 2007), in capturing the construction of Project Europe, as well as how film coproductions were embedded in it, how this vision generated emotions as part of political and public discourses, and also how these emotions circulate in different contexts and among different people.

I am also indebted to the work of Annelise Riles (2000) regarding the notion of networks as something envisioned and constructed in policy reports, discourses, charts and maps, which seem to have their own lives in the ways and contexts in which they travel through different actors and scales. One example is the way in which policies circulate from EU reports to festival executives and film market volunteers and creators. Finally, I was inspired by the work of Marilyn Strathern (2020) on the different articulations and meanings of the concept of relationships as a way to generate kin connections, but also forms of knowledge. How do creators understand coproductions and their connections to coproducers and festivals? What do they expect from their participation in film markets, and why do they apply for participation in specific film markets?

In addition to my bibliographical research, I undertook short field trips and held interviews with creators in the three counties, as well as carrying out extensive document analysis (policy papers, EU treaties, reports, etc.). The interviews were planned to involve persons involved in the same capacity in the three fields, such as officials from the head teams of film coproduction markets or creators. In practice, I held interviews with the officials of the coproduction markets in Thessaloniki, and I also had the opportunity to talk to officials from the industry in Sarajevo and Tbilisi. I also interviewed officials from the Greek Film Centre in Greece and the MEDIA desk in the Ministry of Culture in Georgia, as well as the heads of Creative Europe: Culture and the Association of Directors of Bosnia–Herzegovina in Sarajevo. I also contacted the head of the MEDIA desk in Banja Luca via email.

Apart from short field trips to markets to interview creators and market officials, I also participated in three film markets in three different capacities. The first was in Thessaloniki, organized by the European Documentary Network Doc Market in 2014, at which I first pursued the then-rough idea I had for research into film markets. I participated as an observer. The second was in Sarajevo, at a CineLink Drama workshop in 2017 in which I participated as part of a creative team for a TV series. Finally, I participated in an online matchmaking workshop for Creative Media organized by MEDIA in Slovenia and Ukraine, where I was trying to find partners for a project.

I opened the discussion at the beginning of this chapter with an excerpt from my diary. Diary notes were generated on my field trips during this research but are also drawn from diaries of the past. For example, in Tbilisi, where I have undertaken fieldwork since 2002, I used my past diaries and memories to draw comparisons. I also used my diaries written as a child and student in Thessaloniki during the formative years of the Thessaloniki Film Festival. A diary, ‘the first book’ according to Geertz (1973: 347), is an important tool that allows raw first impressions to be processed and reflected on at a distance (in time or space), and in comparison to other ideas.

I used my diary excerpts as flashbacks, to use the terminology of films, not in an explanatory, linear and causative way, but as a context with the potential to deepen my understanding. As George Marcus (2013) stated, montage is more than an innovative syntax of film or experimental writing in ethnography; it can play another significant role in revealing the ideas that shaped fieldwork and the means used to undertake it. As he put it, montage ‘captures this labor conceptually and as process’ (ibid.: 315). I used my diaries in this sense of connecting my thoughts to the process of ‘doing fieldwork’ and exploring how these two labours interacted with each other.

It was the economic and family problems that I encountered, and their proliferation, that made me investigate film databases. In a previous research programme, I worked on producing material for a database through the collection of oral stories, but here I found myself on the opposite side.² I had to deal with the information and protocols with which others worked in order to produce a corpus of knowledge codified in a certain way. Lev Manovich (2000) argued that databases are more than technology. They are cultural modalities, as they organize human and cultural experience in specific historical contexts. He argued that databases have become the dominant cultural expression of the digital age, as novels and the cinema had been during the rise of modernity. In his reading of these different modalities, he stressed that there is a clear opposition. Novels and cinema employ narrative and were thus forms of reasoning in which relationships based on causality were predominant. Conversely, a database privileges a ‘list of items, and it refuses to order this list’ (ibid.). The databases I used were all launched in the 1990s, when the EU identity was being formed. Examining this period as the starting point for film coproductions stresses the economic and cultural shifts that emerged as part of globalization (global markets, media conglomerations, global audiences), but databases tell a story like other archives in specific historical contexts. In this, I follow Katherine Hayles (2007) in her approach to narrative and databases as complementary and coexistent forms of cultural histories. In this sense, I critically examined the story that the databases I studied suggested, and the way in which it corroborated dominant cultural histories. I also tried to identify the histories of film coproductions before the 1990s.

I undertook research with different databases, and the period I was interested in was the first twenty-five years of the EU’s film policies (from 1991 to 2016):

•  Lumiere is a database of films released in Europe that was launched in 1996 as part of the European Audiovisual Observatory. It combines various specialized national sources with the MEDIA programme of the European Union. Each film is introduced with its original title, a translation of the title, the country of origin, the year of production, the director and the producing countries. The names of producers are listed in different national databases in order of importance (from those with the biggest participation in the production of the film to