27/10/2006

An interview with Michel Gomez, Director General of the ARP (Association of Authors, Directors and Producers), the organisers of the Dijon Film Meetings, at which a plethora of French and European professionals are meeting until Sunday.

Why did you choose the new film industry, and more specifically VoD (Video on Demand), as the central theme of the Dijon Film Meetings?
The shape of the film industry is currently changing at a very fast pace. For a long time, the sector has been completely watertight in comparison with the rest of the film industry. It experienced its first enlargement with the arrival of audiovisual in the 1970s and 1980s. In some countries, cinema and television overlapped. Then came the creation of another sector, video publishing. Today, a new frontier is appearing that is a fundamental change with new means of broadcasting and new players ranging from telecommunications operators, such as Free, Orange or Club–Internet to IT companies such as Microsoft, search engines and so on.

The Dijon Film Meetings will examine how all that is developing, what is behind the change and how to create the necessary conditions for these changes to continue to aid filmmaking creativity. And VoD (Video on Demand) seems to be an indicator of change or a turning point because it is somewhere between the actual video (which is neither a cassette nor a DVD) and TV (which is not really the same although films can be shown on it), with everything being organised by both historic players (broadcasters such as Canal + have VoD services) and telecommunications operators.

Do this year's Film Meetings include many European professionals?
One of the debates is organised with the support of the MEDIA Programme. The focus is on examining how MEDIA could support new means of commercialising films, in particular VoD. It is also quite beneficial to look beyond our French situation. Our present difficulties lie at a European scale – international even – and it is necessary to solve the problems or at least begin to deal with them on a European level. The European directive is at Brussels, not in Paris, and the MEDIA programme as well. The future regulation of our sector is in part dependent on what is decided in Brussels.

(Translated from French)