A Publicly Owned Media Company Co-Producing Audiovisual Content? The case of Film Väst - Invited Keynote Talk

By the late 1960s, the largest Scandinavian film companies had all closed their sound stages and markedly lowered their annual ambitions with regard to production. This may be seen as a response to several different phenomena. First, television, a medium that was introduced in the region from the mid-1950s on, meant that films lost their habitual audience. Second, the introduction of film support schemes, it has been claimed, tended to obscure the traditional financial incentives of the marketplace. And third, despite the support for national film production, audiences of these films continued to dwindle.
Since then, a large amount of production companies have been created. A few of these – Zentropa, Filmlance, Yellowbird – may be described as qualified successes, in some instances having been merged with international media conglomerates. In general, however, and as in many European countries, the contemporary production landscape appears volatile and fragmented. The segment is mostly populated by small, comparably fragile producers and production companies who, on their part, have to rely on a select group of mainly public financial sources for support.
Searching for continuity, peculiarities, particular traits and larger trajectories in such a production environment, one may have to look elsewhere and examine the entities that represent the stability and longer term perspectives: the public production subsidy agencies, the regional film funds, the transnational support schemes. In this talk, the regional film fund Film Väst (formerly Film i Väst), actually a publically owned media company, will be put under scrutiny.