Does automatic funding suck? The cost and value of automatic funding in small nation screen industries in Northern Europe

ABSTRACT

Recent years have seen a rise in automatic funding schemes in the screen industries. This article examines the intended and unintended consequences of automatic incentives in smaller screen economies in Northern Europe. It focuses on the Danish Film Institute’s decision to abolish automatic schemes including tax incentives, and compares this case to other screen industries where automatic funding is well established or has been recently introduced. Based on discussions with executives and funders at national screen agencies, the article investigates who benefits from specific funding schemes and which screen industry automatic incentives prioritise and facilitate. Through this, it examines the political considerations and value systems that underpin funding priorities, and the perception of automatic funding among policy makers, implementers and stakeholders in national screen industries. The analysis indicates that automatic funding is rarely a proactive measure, but rather a response to failing screen industries or competition from neighbouring funding incentives.

KEYWORDS:

• Screen funding
• automatic funding
• inward investment
• screen agencies
• screen policy

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the industry participants (listed above) for their enthusiastic participation in our workshops. We are especially grateful to Claus Ladegaard, Marie Schmidt Olesen, Frank Peijnenburg and Scott Donaldson for reading through and endorsing the article. We would also like to thank the academics who took part and contributed to the success of the workshops: Professors Gillian Doyle, Philip Schlesinger, Martin Kretschmer and Raymond Boyle, and Dr Petar Mitric. Thank you for incisive and insightful comments from Professor Philip Schlesinger in the early drafts of this article. Thank you also for the constructive and useful comments from the editor and the two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

Dr. Eva Novrup Redvall has been a board member of the Danish Film Institute since 2018. She took on this role after the Commissioning Creativity workshops had concluded.

Notes

1. There are three types of tax incentives; tax shelters, tax rebates and tax credits. Tax shelters stimulate investment from high-net worth individuals or high-tax paying firms who can deduct investments in productions from their tax bills. Tax rebates return a percentage of qualifying production expenditure to the producers after spend has occurred and taxes have been audited and collected. Tax credits are similar to rebates but reduce a percentage of qualifying expenditure from the producer’s tax liabilities on a corporate annual tax return. Tax credits and rebates are transferable, that is, can be sold to a third party and borrowed against (Towse 2010, 275–276 and 443–461; Frey 2011, 371; Olsberg 2018, 89).

2. A description of the workshop series can be found at https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/cca/research/ccpr/researchinccpr/commissioningcreativityandfundingfilmsworkshops2016-17/.

Additional information

Funding

This Research was supported by a Royal Society of Edinburgh Workshop [grant #172518].

Notes on contributors

Inge Ejbye Sørensen

Dr Inge Ejbye Sørensen is Lecturer in Media Policy at Centre for Cultural Policy Research, University of Glasgow. She is on the steering committee of Glasgow Film Festival’s Industry Focus, part of BECTU’s screen policy working group, and advises the House of Lords Communication Committee, the Scottish Parliament, national screen agencies, regulators, and trade unions. Inge has secured grants as PI from RCUK (The Revival of Live. Liveness Across Screens and Platforms (2014–15)) and RSE (Commissioning Creativity and Funding Film (2016–17)). She is on the editorial board of the Nordic Journal of Media Studies and a founding editor of the pioneering, peer-reviewed journal of academic video, Audiovisual Thinking. Having worked in the television industry for two decades, Inge is an award-winning producer of documentary and fiction with credits from the BBC, Channel4, Channel 5, STV and National Geographic. Inge’s research interests are the practices, policies and political economy of national and international screen industries with particular focus on Public Service Media, VOD and streaming services; screen agencies, institutions and funding models; and interactive, mixed reality and VR documentary and fact-based media.

Eva Novrup Redvall

Dr Eva Novrup Redvall is Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen where she heads the Section of Film Studies and Creative Media Industries. Her research focuses on film and media production, particularly screenwriting and creative collaboration. She also studies broader issues related to Danish/Nordic cinema and drama series, among them questions of industry structures, of practitioners’ agency and authorship and of cultural and film policy. Among her many publications are the monograph Writing and Producing Television Drama in Denmark: From The Kingdom to The Killing and the edited collections European Cinema and Television: Cultural Policy and Everyday Life (co-edited with Ib Bondebjerg and Andrew Higson) and European Film and Television Co-production: Policy and Practice (co-edited with Julia Hammett-Jamart and Petar Mitric). From September 2019 until February 2023 Eva is the Principal Investigator of the research project Reaching Young Audiences: Serial fiction and cross-media storyworlds for children and young audiences supported by Independent Research Fund Denmark.