Constantin, Golem, Lucky Red receive biggest grants in 2014; Curzon and Distrify benefit from Online Scheme grants.
Every year more than 200 European distribution companies apply to the Creative Europe MEDIA sub-programme for support towards distribution of European non-national releases.
In this year’s round the most prolific European distributors were Constantin in Austria, Golem Distribucion in Spain and Lucky Red in Italy – each receiving more than €500,000.
The size of the grant companies receive is based on their report on the cinema admissions for the non-national European films they have released in a previous calendar year. The more succesful a film’s performace at the box office, the more substantial the grant. The scheme is therefore a reflection of the size of the market for European non-national films in different European countries.
Out of €21.6 million made available by the MEDIA sub-programme the largest amounts went to France (€3.7 million) followed by Germany (€3.5 million), Italy (€2.7 million) and Spain (€1.7 million).
Poland, Belgium, Netherlands and Austria each received in excess of €1 million.
In the UK six distribution companies received just over €300,000 – an amount comparable with that of Norway or Czech Republic. They were: Curzon Film World, Metrodome, New Wave Films, Peccadillo Pictures, Soda Pictures and StudioCanal.
Also revealed this week were the results of Creative Europe’s Online Distribution scheme, with €5.65 million awarded to 17 projects in 9 European territories.
13 of the successful applicants were European Video-on-Demand (VoD) platforms sharing €4.32 million.
The biggest winner was Eurovod – the European federation of independent VOD platforms, which secured €800,000 for its VoD services in addition to €250,000 for developing online ready packages.
The scheme continued to support Filmin in Spain, FilmoTV in France and Flimit in Austria, amongst others.
In the UK, Distrify and Curzon Home Cinema continued to receive grants totalling €830,000.
Two VoD platforms are dedicated to documentary Doc Alliance and Docs Online and one platform, Dazoo dedicated specifically to short film.
SpeedBunch and Tide Experiment [as previously reported by Screen], which will concentrate on innovative release strategies, were also supported.
