Between 1988 and 2015 I worked part-time for the European Union. Through the small lens of the Media Directorate I had an insider view of how the EU worked. Through heading up two EU Media ‘projects’ founded on the principle of co-production, of working together, I saw how my fellow Europeans believed in the concept of a united Europe. EU Media was good business too. It paid for at least twenty projects covering the range of film and TV making from development to distribution via courses in direction, production and managing archives. It subsidised and trained countless young professionals in the media business. Idealism and self-interest went hand in hand. Now we are OUT. What self-destruction! What shame!
My first ‘project’ was MAP TV, standing for Memory, Archive Programmes Television, a silly acronym but based on the need for words common to many languages. I headed a committee of senior professionals from the major broadcasters and independent film companies meeting several times a year to award sizable grants (not loans) for TV co-productions between at least two EU countries on subjects of twentieth century European history. ‘Our common patrimony’ was the phrase. It was a laudable initiative because co-production meant working together on themes that had torn Europe apart. Not that it was all that idealistic. In my experience the French could be self-serving and very guarded about their history in the last war while the British and Germans prided themselves too much in their objectivity. The Spanish sat apart, the Italian representative from RAI seemed most interested in after hours activities.
Yet it was clear from the beginning that the British were still on the other side of the Channel. We were hopeless at languages and this surely revealed a non-European state of mind. Everyone spoke English of course, though the French didn’t want to particularly in France, but it was a question of manners and the British didn’t seem to try. At meals during MAP those for whom English was the first or second language, that is the British, German, Dutch and Scandinavian, sat together and cast paranoid glances at the French speaking table of French, Italian, Belgian and Spanish. (This was the 1990s before East Europe had signed up). There was a temperamental rift here too between north and south yet if the English had made an effort to speak another language on social occasions we would have been more welcome members of the club.
From my viewpoint, the British attitude towards Europe was not only apart but patronising. For reasons I never understood and certainly did not deserve, the French made me a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres - self-serving French again? At a ‘medals may be worn’ dinner in London I decided to chance it and found myself sitting at a table with army officers wearing with ease their row of miniatures. ‘Do tell us, old boy, what is that gong you are wearing?’ my neighbour asked. I told him. ‘Look everybody, this chap’s got a medal – for being able to read and write’. Very funny! A very British joke which would not go down well the other side of the Channel.
Dinners took up a lot of time at MAP and indulgent though they were they displayed how generously host countries welcomed the EU coming to town. Except London. To my embarrassment my employer, the BBC, was an indifferent, not to say virtually non-existent host. It was that state of mind again.
In May 2004 East European countries joined the EU and EsoDoc began, administered by a film school in the Sud Tyrol, Zelig, and with me as Head of Studies. Incredibly, EU Media was prepared to pay matching funding for a training programme under the umbrella of European Social Documentaries that encouraged and enabled film makers to produce documentaries about human rights; conscience-raising films, NGO films for Amnesty or Save the Children (for example) and participatory video as a therapeutic tool for use in institutions. Who else would have done this?
British film makers took full advantage of this. You Tube will show you three examples. ‘Ping Pong’ was a documentary about the World Table Tennis Championships for the Over Eighties in Outer Mongolia (!). It was made by a British company, Banyan Films, and released in 2012, our Olympic year, with the result that Age UK supplied table tennis kit to care homes. ‘Thank You For the Rain’ began as a Norwegian NGO film about a Kenyan farmer, Kisilu, trying to adapt to climate change and then, working with Banyan Films again, it grew into a prize winning full length documentary. ‘Awra Amba’ was an on-line interactive documentary about an Ethiopian village where the utopian headman was trying to build a non-sexist, non-religious, non-aid accepting community. This has led to a remarkable company based in London called Lyfta which works with 700 schools, many of them for special needs, supplying on-line interactive films - ‘windows on the world through other people’s lives’.
These projects began at EsoDoc and scores of others did too. All were shaped up and nurtured by visiting European teachers. How to tell a good film story? How to crowd fund? How to pitch at film festivals? EsoDoc teaches; the world in miniscule ways becomes a better place.
Each year EsoDoc holds three week-long sessions in different European countries, so its impact has to be limited, but it was a joy to participate in a pan-European project, applied for by 200 or so film makers annually from as many as fifteen European countries, and assist the twenty or so selected in forming co-production units. TV companies or film festivals from all over Europe hosted our meetings and match funded with the EU. Except the UK. Not once in 12 years was I able to bring EsoDoc here although we are rightly regarded as leaders in documentary film making. EU Media even had a ‘hub’ in London as a regional centre to organise its activities. I found this shameful but now we are the losers.
In March 2021 the EU Media hub in London will close down and the British will be excluded from all Media projects. Heidi Gronaeur, the German head of Zelig Film School, wrote to me before Christmas: ‘What a mess is Brexit, I am bewildered by it all’. It is our young film makers who will suffer. Anybody who knows anything about the cultural, educational and media offerings of the EU will know that we are the losers.