“We demand that cinema and audiovisual arts continue to be protected by laws that acknowledge them as cultural fields, including cultural exceptions,” stated filmmakers in a manifesto read by Spanish filmmaker Gala Hernández López, and French filmmakers Jérôme Enrico, Gérard Krawczyk, Marine Francen, and Romain Cogitore at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, currently being held in France since Tuesday.
The manifesto, available online, has been endorsed by numerous organizations of European filmmakers and personalities such as the French figures Claude Lelouch, Agnieszka Holland, Cédric Klapisch, and the Dardenne brothers, Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet, and Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes, among others.
“In Europe, from the Lumière brothers to today, each film is a prototype, a unique proposal that does not necessarily respond to market demand. This has never prevented some commercial projects from achieving major success,” reads the text, as quoted by the EFE agency.
The filmmakers express concern that amidst the “economic war with the United States,” with its President Donald Trump personally requesting the dismantling of protectionist rules, the European Commission is inclined to “erase the cultural character of cinema,” reducing it to “merely its industrial scale.”
They lament that Brussels no longer refers to the sector as “cinema,” “cultural actor,” or even “cultural industry,” but rather as a “creative industry.”
Under this designation, the Seventh Art has been moved from the jurisdiction of the European Commissioner for Culture to that of the European Commissioner for Digital Affairs and the Internal Market.
“Increasingly considering cinema as just another ‘industry actor,’ subject only to market laws, would immediately benefit U.S. productions and would be catastrophic for our profession and the diversity of films we could offer audiences in Europe and worldwide,” they emphasize.
The European filmmakers appeal to European commissioners, urging them not to be “naive,” asserting that “the economic war waged by the U.S. is also a cultural war.”
“European cinema has maintained its strength over decades because, despite Hollywood’s billions and its ‘universal’ English language, it offers, with much less money, an incredible diversity of perspectives, wonderful and fertile freedom of expression, and cultural DNA,” the signatories note.
These “assets,” they add, “are envied even by our filmmaker friends across the ocean.”
Cannes Film Festival is regarded as one of the most significant platforms on the international film industry circuit and is actively engaged in the discussion about the hypothetical imposition of tariffs, announced earlier this month by Donald Trump, to protect American productions.
The U.S. President announced on Truth Social that he would “immediately initiate the process of imposing 100% tariffs” on films shown in the United States but produced abroad.
“The American film industry is dying very quickly […]. Hollywood and many other parts of the United States are devastated. […] Other countries are offering all kinds of incentives to lure our filmmakers and studios away from the United States,” Trump wrote on May 4.
A day later, the White House clarified that “definitive decisions” regarding tariffs on foreign films had not yet been made, but a consensus was being sought in line with the president’s guidance.
