The European Commission has launched today an awareness campaign aiming at fostering gender diversity and inclusion in the film and news media industries. Launched at the Festival de Cannes and under the title ‘CharactHer’, the campaign will run until the end of the year to increase awareness of inequalities in the sectors.

The 74th edition of the Cannes Film Festival will take place from Tuesday 6 to Saturday 17 July. Seventeen films supported by Creative Europe MEDIA have been selected in various sections of the Cannes Film Festival and its parallel competitions: the Directors' Fortnight (La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs) and La Semaine de la Critique. In addition, MEDIA will be present in several events targeting the audiovisual industry.

The Commission is launching a 3M € call for proposals to strengthen the capacity of the European audiovisual industry to create cutting edge fiction series that can attract audiences across borders, and to nurture a community of European talents able to work across national and linguistic borders. It should enable European companies to scale up their collaboration and to offer talents continuous opportunities in Europe throughout their career. While the audiovisual industry has been severely hit by the COVID-19 outbreak, this new action should support talents as well as European companies, and

The audiovisual industry stands in the middle of the rapidly growing digital industry, which has become the main driver of our economy. Its ecological impact has been underestimated for a long time and still needs to be researched in detail.
There are multiple initiatives in Europe but they would greatly benefit from a better coordination, more accurate data and comparable goals and guidelines.

The 2021 LUX Audience Film Award went to “Collective”, by Alexander Nanau. The winner of this year’s edition was announced on 9 June at the European Parliament’s plenary session in Strasbourg, where the LUX Audience Award Ceremony was held.

The European Investment Fund has signed a guarantee agreement with Triodos Bank that will allow up to €200 million in loans to entrepreneurs in the creative and cultural sectors, in the EU Member States where Triodos operates, namely the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Germany.

The Commission has launched new actions to support the cultural and creative sectors in Europe and beyond, following the adoption of the work programme for the first year of the Creative Europe 2021-2027 programme. In 2021, Creative Europe will allocate an unprecedented budget of around €300 million to help professionals and artists from all cultural sectors to collaborate across disciplines and borders, in order to find more opportunities and to reach new audiences.