How Much is a Festival Participation Worth?

Decreasing Lottery Funds

Filmmakers participating at festivals will be entitled to normative grants for producing their next feature film, according to the Motion Picture Public Foundation of Hungary's grant announcement. However, the exact amounts will not be known until next spring.

There are festival news round the clock this year as well: Benedek Fliegauf won a Golden Leopard, Árpád Bogdán and Zoltán Kamondi competed with their latest film in Karlovy Vary and Béla Tarr at Cannes, while Kirsti Stubo, the lead actress of Opium: Diary of a Madwoman by János Szász, won a Best Actress award in Moscow—to name only a few of the “festival goers” in MPPFH's competition calendar for the year 1 March 2007 to 29 February 2008.

Filmmakers participating at festivals will be entitled to normative grants for producing their next feature film, according to the Motion Picture Public Foundation of Hungary's grant announcement. However, the exact amounts will not be known until next spring.

As the competition calendar is three months out of sync with the calendar year, the Forint value fiestas and occasional awards will not be known until next April at the earliest, said László Hegedűs, an advisor for MPPFH. What is certain is that there will be less money for festival participants this year than last year, as the allocated fund for normative grants for 2007 is some 40% smaller.

The decline in funds has been ongoing since the introduction of the feature films' normative grant system in 2005. Back then the foundation distributed almost 800 million forints based on festival participation and domestic audience numbers, while last year that number was 600 million forints, and this year 380 million, although this year's decrease is also down to the 30% cut in state funding of film production.

The lower normative film grants only aim at feature films, but not necessarily because of the tight allocation. According to filming legislation Hungarian films, films with Hungarian participation, or coproduction films with Hungarian directors can only become so-called reference films for funding the filmmaker's next project if they are at least 70 minutes long.

Therefore, even though László Nemes Jeles represented Hungary at the Venice Film Festival, competing in the Corto Cortissimo session with his 14-minute short film With a Little Patience, he cannot apply for a normative grant. Just as Bálint Kenyeres cannot convert last year's European Film Award for Before Dawn into normative forints, although the award is on the list of festivals that qualify for MPPFH's grant Normative funds can only be used to finance feature films, and for that you need feature film success. A short might further the reputation of Hungarian filmmaking, but a festival participation does not allow for jumping categories (the five-strong special board awarding short film grants operates within the  feature film grants special college, so a blurring of the two categories would not be unfounded).

But festival participation so far this year will still enable several films to receive normative grants: Opium qualified for normative funding for the filmmaker's next feature film by participating at the festival in Moscow, Fresh Air in Mar del Plata, Milky Way in Locarno, Dolina and Happy New Life in Karlovy Vary, and The Man from London in Cannes.

The grant amounts will be revealed on 15 April 2007 at the earliest. The MPPFH will announce the grants filmmakers can apply for based on their reference films' festival participation and audience numbers, as well as the grant allocation. In the current system filmmakers score so-called funding points for festival participation and audience numbers, and the Foundation decides on the forint value of these points in view of the applications.

But with the shrinking fund allocation the forint value of these points is also going down: while the 50 festival points scored by Johanna in 2005 were worth exactly 50 million forints (which were funneled into two projects by makers TT Film Workshop, 37.5 million went to Mundruczó's next film Delta, and 12.5 million boosted the budget of The Man from London), Milky Way's 50 points for its Golden Leopard will be exchanged for a much more humble grant—which makes normative funding like a set of winning lottery tickets with the prize pool ever decreasing.