10/10/2016 - Only one year after its inclusion, Turkey has decided to leave the European Commission’s funding programme

Only one year after becoming a partial member of Creative Europe (read the news), Turkey has decided to leave the funding programme. The country had joined the list of non-European Union member countries able to participate in the scheme (Iceland, Norway, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia).

The country has allegedly decided to leave the programme, which was launched by the European Commission in order to provide support to the cultural and audiovisual sectors, i.e. supporting participation in training, festivals, audience-development and market-access activities, because of their disagreement with the Aghet – Die große Katastrophe project (read more) co-funded by Creative Europe. The symphonic concert project was born to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the ethnical cleansing of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, a genocide still denied by Turkish authorities. The European Commission regrets Turkey's decision and the fact that cultural/audio-visual operators will miss future opportunities for cooperation with their counterparts in the EU, but it respects the sovereign choice of the country, as stated by an EC spokesperson.

The Commission is currently negotiating the conditions of Turkey's withdrawal from the programme as of 1 January 2017. An estimated total of €2.4 million has been allocated by Creative Europe to support Turkish films and cultural projects to date.

The country is also a member of European co-productions fund Eurimages, a separate funding body overseen by the Council of Europe, which hasn’t been mentioned in the government’s withdrawal intentions.