<< back home

ELEVEN COLOMBIAN FILM INDUSTRY BULLETIN
A project designed by Fedesarrollo for Proimágenes

Special Report: Historical Relationship between Colombia and France

1. Overview

The Year of Colombia and France – 2017 is the most ambitious program ever of cooperation between the two countries. It will be an exceptional, historic moment of exchange between Colombia and France, with a multi-faceted program of over 400 events covering cultural, scientific, commercial, and other fields of knowledge.

In terms of film, the Year of Colombia and France will feature a significant French presence in Colombia at the Cartagena International Film Festival (FICCI), the Bogota Audiovisual Market (BAM), and the French Film Festival. Meanwhile, Colombia will participate in several events in France, including the Biarritz Festival, the Rochelle International Film Festival, and the Forum des Images. We take this opportunity, then, to briefly analyze some figures on the film industry in both countries.

France:
In 2016, total cinema admissions reached 212.71 million (a 3.6% increase over 2015). France also recorded its second highest number of admissions over the last fifty years (217.19 million in 2011). And for the third year in a row, admissions topped 200 million, in a country with approximately 5,800 film screens.

Colombia:
In 2016, there were 61.4 million cinema admissions – the highest figure in the country’s history. With 41 Colombian films released in 2016, domestic films made up 13.14% of total films released in the country, up from 10.65% in 2015; while in France, the market share for French films was 35.3% in 2016. The film exhibition infrastructure in Colombia reached 1,008 screens throughout the country, for around 48 million inhabitants.

2. France-Colombia Co-Productions

Since 2009, there have been 30 co-productions between Colombia and France, of which 22 were feature films and eight were shorts. Sixteen of these co-productions were majority Colombian productions: 14 features and two shorts, with participation by 12 Colombian production houses. There were 13 minority Colombian co-productions, of which eight were feature films and five were shorts.

3. Participation in Festivals and Markets

The National Council of Arts and Culture in Film (CNACC) has been supporting participation in international festivals, awards programs, meetings, markets, and workshops with the aim of boosting the impact and visibility of Colombian productions at film events. Of the more than 200 eligible events, 24 are in France. In this newsletter, we focus on four of the most important festivals in France, where there has been uninterrupted Colombian participation over the past five years: the Clermont Ferrand Short Film Festival, the Biarritz Amerique Latine Festival, the Cannes Film Festival, and Cinelatino (Toulouse).

2017 began with massive Colombian participation at Clermont Ferrand, featuring a delegation of more than 40 people, screenings of 33 shorts in a retrospective, and four shorts in the official selection (two in the international competition and two in the Labo competition). According to the festival’s organizers, this was “the best presence of a country in the 39 years of the festival.”