Discussions are already underway between representatives of the Ministry of Culture of Moldova and the Romanian Film Center on the possibility that Moldavian films could also be able to apply for Romanian grants through the Romanian Film Center (CNC).
“We are talking about talent competition and the homogenization of creation,” producer Dumitru Marian told FNE. He is the first distributor of Romanian films in Moldova and also one of the initiators and co-authors of the law on the founding of the Moldavian Film Center.
He also says that Moldavian filmmakers were inspired by the Romanian CNC and they are hoping to have a closer relationship with their Romanian colleagues. “We will surely take examples from the Romanian CNC in order to adjust our system. While writing the law, I communicated very often with my Romanian friends asking for advice. They also put me in contact with important people in Europe, so we were helped from all over the place. Our law is a ‘pastiche’ of the Romanian law which is also a ‘pastiche’ of the French law,” says Marian.
The law on the founding of the Moldavian Film Center (CNC Moldova) already had a vote in the Parliament and was published in the official gazzette of Moldova, but there are a few regulations to be done. Moldova hopes to have its own CNC in 2015.
The law eliminates the control of the state over film production by dropping the Soviet custom of the state granting production funding based on a contest opened on a specific theme. It also stipulates that a producer can receive a production grant of up to 50% of the budget (the producers will thus become the owners of the film.). The law will also boost local distribution on a market dominated by Russian distributors, claiming that from now on the foreign films will have Romanian subtitles (until now they were dubbed in Russian).
The Romanian-Moldavian collaboration bore fruit recently in Igor Cobileanski’s debut feature, The Unsaved/La limita de jos a cerului. The director is Moldavian and the story takes place in Moldova, but the project was funded by the Romanian Film Center as a Romanian feature through its Bucharest-based production company Saga Film.
