Having advocated for a more ambitious MEDIA budget over the last years, EFAD would like to welcome the agreement reached by EU negotiators on November 10 about the EU budget for the next 7 years.

While the European Commission proposed €1.5 billion and the Council €1.64 billion, the agreement provided for an additional €600 million to Creative Europe. Its budget will therefore reach €2.2 billion for 2021-2027, an increase of more than 50% compared to the previous period (€1.46 billion for 2014-2020).

“We welcome the deal reached on the EU budget, which will allow to substantially reinforce the Creative Europe budget for the next seven years. More resources are needed for the MEDIA programme to better support European co-productions, promote European works across the world, support independent cinemas, festivals, training initiatives and innovative projects. These are all key initiatives to reinforce European cooperation and promote cultural diversity”, declared Luis Chaby Vaz, EFAD President.

Yet, EFAD would like to emphasize the challenges that are still ahead of us as regards EU funding for the audiovisual sector:

1. Ensuring continuity of funding and calls (contingency plan). The negotiations have taken more time than expected it is now vital to avoid any situation of EU funding gap, included for Europe Creative desks. The audiovisual sector rightly identified as one of the 14 eco-systems mostly affected by the crisis, is facing now a severe second wave of the pandemic and will not be able to cope with additional delays.
2. Dedicating at least 2% of the Recovery and Resilience Facility budget to the Cultural and Creative Sectors, as requested by the European Parliament and Cultural and Creative Sectors' organisations. Member States should also fully integrate the cultural and audiovisual sectors in their national recovery and resilience plans and EFAD members will continue to push for this at national level.
3. Reinforcing synergies between the different EU funding programmes (Horizon Europe, InvestEU, Cosme, Digital Europe…) and offering more guidance to the audiovisual stakeholders in order to help them for concretely seizing any funding opportunities of these programmes

“The negotiations took time but we ended up with a good result. Now, what we need is to find a solution so that the different MEDIA calls for projects and funding - including for Creative Europe desks - are neither delayed nor interrupted. The audiovisual sector, currently facing a second wave pandemic, has already been severely affected by the crisis and will not be able to bear a MEDIA funding gap”, added Luis Chaby Vaz, EFAD President.