East Europe's cinema industries since 1989: Financing structure and studios

The decade worth of the East European transition allows us to sum up import ant lessons of the stormy and profound transformation in cultural administr ation. The East European cultural industries were the first ones to suffer massive cuts and withdrawal of secure funding early in the 1990s. Cinema wa s affected most notably. In all of the East European countries filmmaking u nderwent volatile structural changes and was subjected to often contradicto ry undertakings in administration and financing. The crumbling production r outines caused a creativity crisis in many filmmakers. Problems included un fair competition, deepening generation gap, and decline in feature, documen tary and animation output. The concurrent crisis in distribution and exhibi tion led to a sharp drop in box office indicators for all productions carry ing an East European label. Ak the same time some East European films enjoy ed an international critical acclaim. The volatility in East European cinem a coincided with a clearly articulated period of insecurity in West Europea n cultural policies, driven by a growing anti-American sentiment. The estab lishment of such pan-European funding bodies as Media 95 and Euroimage came as a reaction to the overwhelming triumph of commercialism in cinema. The share of inter-national subsidies for filmmaking in poverty-stricken Easter n European studios quickly increased as the concept of "national cinema" ga ve way to a "new European" one. The article focuses on the following topics : changes in East European production schemes, the end of national cinemas, issues of co-producing with focus on Euroimage, media and commercial finan cing, the questions of domestic versus foreign film distribution and exhibi tion, and festivals.