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Petar Mitric, "The Co-production Landscape in Europe: From Eurimages to Netflix" (Springer Nature, 2025)
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Dr. Petar Mitric
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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Podcast Announcer
Massachusetts welcome to the New Books Network.
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Priyam Sinha
Hi everyone. Welcome to the New Books Network. I am Priyam Sinha, the host of Today's interview with Dr. Petar Mitric for his recently published book the Co Production Landscape in Europe. Petar is an Assistant professor in Film Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on European audiovisual policy, co production and audience design practices, bridging film studies and creative media industry studies. He has published extensively on European cinema and has collaborated in an advisory capacity with organizations such as Film IVAST and Torino Film Lab. Very welcome. Thank you so much for accepting our request.
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Dr. Petar Mitric
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
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Priyam Sinha
So today he will tell us about his book the Co Production Landscape in Europe. This book explores the evolving landscape of European film and television co productions from traditional models supported by Yuri Images to new collaborations shaped by global streaming platforms like Netflix. It examines how European co production Policies have influenced industry practices, funding structures and audience engagement. Balancing artistic, economic and cultural priorities. Through historical analysis, case studies and stakeholder perspectives, including policymakers, industry professionals and audiences, this book offers fresh insights into the challenges and opportunities facing European audiovisual production today. It is essential reading for for scholars, industry professionals and policy makers interested in transnational media, cultural policy and the future of European cinema. So, heartiest congratulations to you, Petar, and thank you very much for accepting our request to be here.
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Dr. Petar Mitric
Thank you.
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Priyam Sinha
So, before we foray into an extensive discussion about your book, can you tell our listeners about what informed your decision to research co productions?
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Dr. Petar Mitric
Well, it's a mixture of personal attachment to the topic and also professional interest. I mean, I myself feel like a co production, considering that I have lived in so many different countries and experienced a lot of administrative and bureaucratic problems moving from one place to another, but at the same time felt so enriched by mixing so many different cultural experiences and identities. And co productions are essentially that. So they culturally enrich European film culture and European audiovisual heritage, but at the same time they are very complex and bureaucratic and administrative and so on. So I can identify on a personal level with that. But at the same time, co productions are really at the core of European cinema. Those are the most ambitious European films. Those are the most provocative European films, though they move borders, they turn borders into bridges, and as such, I think they are also important policy tools. So as such, I think they deserved also attention through some academic scientific studies, and they've been focus of my research over a decade now.
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Priyam Sinha
That's very interesting. Thank you for that background also, and that sets the tone for the rest of our questions also. So let us begin with a basic understanding about what classifies as European cinema. You explained the inherent ambiguity at the beginning of your book itself in the introduction, so it would be great if you tell us more about it. And what makes the study of co productions especially unique in Europe?
- [06:28]
Dr. Petar Mitric
Yeah, what defines European cinema? That's a million dollar question. Because the notion of European cinema is very, very contested. But to cut long story short, probably the two most common discourses around European cinema are that some scholars, and some people in general think that European cinema is linked to art, to creative autonomy, to sort of creative expression. And the European cinema is only the films we see on film festivals, for example. But then you have another discourse. Who says that kind of perception of European cinema is too elitistic, it's too exclusive, it's not democratic, that there are other European films that are genre oriented, audience oriented, that also should be counted as European cinema. Right. Instead of being ghettoized into some kind of low brow segment. So my vision of European cinema is that we should find a definition that's somewhere in between. And European co production is closer or closest to that definition, I would say. Because what I try to define as an ideal European co production in my book, as a central concept, is a film that would be a festival film that would have a cultural value, but at the same time would have impact on European citizens that would be filmed that can communicate on different segments of European citizenry, both average spectators, mainstream audiences, to this kind of elitist segments. And I mentioned co production is also an important policy tool. It's not just a business model in Europe, meaning that it's very policy driven, very regulated. So co productions are linked with a lot of public funding, a lot of state aid, a lot of lawmaking, like cultural exception for European film, a lot of documents like European convention and cinematographical production and so on. That all means that thanks to European co productions in Europe, people can produce films that are not just market regulated, market driven, because policies can also move them towards cultural directions. So that's a privilege that can combine market financing with this kind of strong policy driven regulation.
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Priyam Sinha
Definitely. So I was very intrigued, noting that your study is also informed by your practitioner experiences that you briefly talk about, especially in creative media work and production cultures. As a screenwriter and even creative producer. Could you tell us more about that experience? Also more so, since media and communication studies in the social sciences continues to be one of the very few disciplines that still values practitioner experiences. And this experience would be very important for a lot of early career researchers or graduate students to know about.
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Dr. Petar Mitric
Yeah, yeah. It is a little bit complex, methodologically speaking, because even though production studies sort of recommend practice based research, and we have researchers like scholars like John Caldwell who comes from that kind of background, and we also have places like different universities in the UK where they really base their research on practice based experiments. But it's not very common that researchers do it. It's not common even in my university. So it is still a sort of experiment to build your data and your research on practice based methods. You face a lot of skepticism sometime. People question your objectivity, people question the quality of your data and so on. So it requires a little bit of courage, even though, as you said, it is a norm in a way within media communication, film studies. But I really like experimenting with practice based because it provides better access when you learn by doing things. It's much Much more informative. It creates also more intimacy with the field you want to research and with the people you want to research. And also in case of my book, where I try to cover also the perspective of underprivileged filmmakers, meaning early career filmmakers, filmmakers who have passion for filmmaking making, who have great stories, but have problems integrating into the field the right networks. So it was much easier to understand them while trying to produce a film. The way they try to produce it, the empathy with them is much higher. And then it also creates some new qualitative data that can help in the research as well.
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Priyam Sinha
So I'm very curious to learn about the qualitative research methods, especially that you've adopted for the data collection in this study. More so, since most studies actually highlighting funding and the financial aspects of production cultures have been heavily quantitative. So what led you to say, conduct semi structured interviews and even reflect upon your autoethnographic insights from this kind of work?
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Dr. Petar Mitric
Yeah, I tend to see quantitative methods in my own research and in my own field as very useful, very important. But in a way we can say historical because quantitative data tell us how the things have functioned so far or how they function in the past. They can also help us define the problem. Because if we check, if we do quantitative analysis of European cinema, for example, we can see that there is a huge gender gap, that there is no balance between female and male directors or scriptwriters. So it gives us a nice overview, acknowledgement of a problem, but it doesn't give us hints to how to solve the problem. And if we want to participate as scholars also in problem solving in a way, or in, in debates around problem solving, then we need qualitative data. And in the first place it is interviews with people. But it's also looking into a lot of documents, especially documents that are not publicly available. Also a lot of observation, participant observation and observation of people at work or in action. I think in this way we get access to different stakeholders, stakeholder group, different interpretive communities, and instead of having only one interpretation, we actually get access to several interpretations which help us create some kind of a meta narrative that can contribute to stakeholders understand each other better, making them understand each other better and creating something that's more like solution oriented, not just something that acknowledges that there is a problem, that there is an issue, that there is a challenge.
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Priyam Sinha
Definitely. So while audience studies and prefiguring of audiences is a concept that a lot of scholars like, as you mentioned, Caldwell, Purnima, Manker, Jonathan Gray, among others, have been highlighting, I'm Sure. Our audiences would be keen on knowing what a culture of co producing films in Europe say about the role of audiences now who largely now finance them through taxes, mandatory license fees and even ticket purchases.
- [15:29]
Dr. Petar Mitric
Yeah, very good and very difficult question. Because films that are co productions, just as any films are made to be seen. Right. But if we look into the numbers for European cinema now we are talking about quantitative data and how they help us define the problem, we can notice that there is a problem because the data shows that market share of European films, domestic, national European films in their countries of origin is below 10% in more than half European countries. Right now we have only France that has market share of domestic French films higher than 30%. The similar situation is when we look into streaming services where even though the presence of European titles, both films and TV series is high, the viewership is not that big. So we can see that even co productions weren't designed to reach larger audiences than strictly national small films. They don't do it according to the numbers. But I don't think that impact is measured only through the numbers. Impact can be measured qualitatively. Yeah. And that's again why we need to talk to people and see how they interact with films in an intimate, on a personal level and what kind of life changing experiences it can provide for them. But that's where the problem with the audiences start. Because when you talk to ordinary people about what they watch, when it comes to European cinema or European co productions, you usually get very disappointed hearing that they don't watch it at all. If you do a simple experiment and ask them, for example, what is your best or favorite European films or how many European films that are not from your own country, that are in another European language have you seen? They don't have the answer. People don't know who won the Golden Palm in, in Cannes last year, or what was the European films that won Oscar last year and so on. So I think that's the problem. The lack of the awareness of European films and the lack of communication between viewers and the film. And that's particularly an issue in the context of co production because as you mentioned in your question, co productions are financed by citizens, through their taxis, through their levies, through the part of the ticket purchase. So they are sort of co financers and they need to get something in return for that. And that's why at the same time, to cut a long answer short, at the same time co productions are designed to reach the audiences, but. But at the same time the system is set in a way that filmmakers are really far away from the audiences. They should talk more with them in different stages of the production process and distribution process as well, in order to make this communication better and in order to sort of make the authentic definition of European co production alive and functional.
- [19:12]
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Dr. Petar Mitric
Imagine fast.
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Priyam Sinha
So I'm also very fascinated to learn about how you draw a difference and also write about the similarities between co productions and concepts like co development, co financing and co creation. Could you tell us more about that? And how do audience becomes actors across such production cultures? Especially since you mentioned that co productions are geared towards both the elite and the average spectators.
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Dr. Petar Mitric
Yeah, I tried in my book to to sort of redefine traditional notion of co production that defines co production as collaboration that happens during the production stage or during the financing stage. And that's how traditionally co productions were set up. But I try to say that co production starts much earlier start in the development phase where already while developing a script filmmaker really benefits by just traveling around talking with people from other countries, from other cultures in order to universalize their stories and in order to test how it works. And also I think that or I believe that co development initiatives were even script writers or producers establish collaboration even legally, even Formally from the start, where they co develop stories together, not just advise each other. And then I show that different examples throughout the book, how it worked for films, how a lot of films that started collaborations early on sort of evolved into organic co productions and also did better with the audiences because from the start they were developing in the right direction. I mentioned also co creation, that's a pretty recent development within the European audiovisual sector where audiences are also invited. And I'm based in Denmark, where we have examples of content for children and young, where people would develop the scripts for their web series or their films by direct communication with their audiences, with their followers. And in that sense it's not a classic crowdfunding because audiences do not participate financially, but it is direct feedback and then you feel obliged to deliver to the audiences. And audiences also expect more from the productions, but they're also more present. They also watch more and get more hungry for the local European titles. But co creation also is happening more and more among the filmmakers and it's more and more stimulated through different policy and funding initiatives where especially in the TV series area, where we have a lot of stimulation for producers get together, screenwriters get together, broadcasters get together and start working on together from day one. I would say that similar initiatives happen also on the audience level, where there is some kind of initiatives for making distributors work together or thinking about the audiences from day one and so on. But that's still pretty much taxative and written in the policy rules. And there are some small initiatives, but the impact is still difficult to measure.
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Priyam Sinha
Yeah, that's very interesting. So just drawing a comparison. For independent films and artistic projects in Japan, India and even the UK to some extent we have scholars like Teroui and Sorenson, among others, who discuss crowdfunding. However, they often highlight that funding decisions by audiences complicates and even interferes with the creative agency of cultural workers or even filmmakers who are then compelled to always make audiences feel that their voices have been integrated and the storyline is informed by a lot of their lived experiences. How different is that culture then when it comes to co production cultures in Europe?
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Dr. Petar Mitric
It's very different. It's totally opposite. I mean, I mentioned these instances of a co creation with the audiences of crowdfunding, but that's incidents. That's not how European co production works, or European cinema or production in general works. As we discussed, there is a lot of public funding and there is like a huge fight for who gets that funding and it's huge competition. So audiences very often are people who Are gatekeeping public funding. So a lot of filmmakers develop their projects sort of cater to the taste of dead audiences that are festival programmers or film fund selection selection committees sitting at different public film agencies and so on and so forth. So in that sense, yeah, audiences may be in the wrong place, not the general viewership. And also that alienates people, citizens from filmmakers because they are not in a direct connection with them in the process of financing. At the same time, co productions or European cinema has the role of not just giving to the audience what they want, but also challenging them, challenging them, surprising them. And sometimes co productions do it with best intentions, but the way they are made just distance the narrative and the aesthetics from the audiences. So that kind of distance that filmmakers as creators, as artists have from the audiences allow them on one hand to experiment formally, aesthetically, with narrative, with storytelling techniques. So it allows them to be artists, to be themselves. But at the same time, it very often prevents their important messages come through the audiences because the audiences can't communicate with their language. So yeah, and it's also there is a lot of. Unlike crowdfunding, where you have direct content with the audience, you understand, demand, filmmakers doing co productions very often construct who the audience is, very often do not even understand who those people are. There is a lot of intuition involved, there's. And that again, keeps the process away. So I think maybe the best solution would be somewhere between classic crowdfunding, where everything is focused on audiences demands, and classical productions where filmmakers have a large amount of autonomy and where audiences is linked to gatekeepers or limited to gatekeepers only. So maybe the true or the best model. True, best model would be somewhere in between when it comes to the audiences.
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Priyam Sinha
That's very interesting. So you also frequently mention about the study being largely conducted against the backdrop of COVID 19, which also coincided with when streaming platforms altered the traditional formats of viewership and cinema going audience cultures. So apart from telling us about the context of conducting your interviews, then could you also elaborate on the challenges of studying production cultures and audiences at such a time and moment? And also how did your positionality inform your data collection process and ethnographic inquiry?
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Dr. Petar Mitric
Yeah, Covid was a little bit of a traumatic experience for me because it just came in the middle of my research somehow. And my research until that point was very ethnographic. It involved living with people, talking to people, traveling a lot to different festivals, attending different co production markets, pitching forums, developing your own film and stuff. So Covid just came and limited everything to zoom meetings and online communication. And that was Difficult because in zoom meetings you can talk to people, but you really miss the context. You don't see anything around them, you just hear the information that they convey. When you spend time with them in person at the festival, you also have time to go for lunch with them to see how they behave in action, how they communicate with the other people, to conduct some informal interviews and informal chats on the side, and so on. So for example, this is one of the central case studies in my book. The Egyptian, French, Danish co production the Brink of Dreams is done. Research around this project was done completely online because I was audience designer for this film where we tried to provide a case that would point to the solution to the exactly same audience problem we defined. So like, how can an art house socially engaging film reach wider and the right audiences? So we were discussing this and developing this strategy online, but I had the need to meet filmmakers in person before I finished the book. And that made me actually or motivated me to travel to Cairo or to Egypt and spend one day with them within their natural environment and talk with them in a more relaxed way to understand better their context. And it really helped and I was happy and was ready to publish this as a case only after that experience. In that case, ethnographic or autoethnographic studies or my own positionality is pretty much influenced by by in person communication. And I hope that all these kind of online tools will not become a norm in our research, at least in my field.
- [32:18]
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- [33:20]
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- [33:34]
Dr. Petar Mitric
Hey.
- [33:34]
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- [33:45]
Dr. Petar Mitric
Uncrustables are the best part of the sandwich. Sorry, Crust.
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Priyam Sinha
You very often highlight how streaming platforms and a global preoccupation over US produced content has intensified the existing pressure among filmmakers in Europe to secure funding for their own projects. So for instance, you mentioned that the national broadcasters are reluctant to support minority TV co productions and available funding is limited to only certain geographical areas. So could you tell our listeners more about such underlying concerns and funding issues that largely are geared and informed by a lot of global preoccupations?
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Dr. Petar Mitric
Yeah, I think in the context of European cinema we need to understand that the arrival of global streaming platforms was a huge earthquake. It was like a colossal change because global streaming services affected the audiovisual sector on so many levels. First of all, they, so to speak, took the European audiences, especially during COVID as we said, when everybody was just streaming, people stopped going to cinemas and cinemas have never actually recovered. Statistics say that it's just 2/3 of the pre Covid capacities or profit is back now. Then the streaming services started taking European producers and filmmakers because by investing in the local originals they would took the best projects or fight for the best projects and the most talented filmmakers and producers. But what's even more important and so to speak controversial, is that streaming services are affecting the diversity of European cinema and television. Because the classic European co productions, as, as we discussed before, they have cultural diversity in their DNA. They want to democratize access to filmmaking, they want to include as many European countries as possible. And thanks to European co productions, all European countries are or producers from all European countries, depending regardless of their economic situation or the capacity levels in terms of audiovisual industries, they all participate in one way or another. With the arrival of streaming services, we still have a process that goes against promoting diversity. It's really streaming services collaborate only with the biggest countries, with the most powerful producers with the richest segments, which really reduces Europe than to just like five big countries or 10 territories and so on. Yeah, yeah. So the solution to this problem was maybe doing more television co productions because traditionally co productions were only films. But doing television co productions means involvement of broadcasters, not film funds. Because film funds do not have capacity and do not have resources to cover also television. And that's where the problem you mentioned in your question appeared, because. Because public service broadcasters in particular, they're very, very provincial, so to speak, very, very locally oriented. So the Danish public service broadcaster would fund only Danish content. And if it's co production. It would be maybe locally with other Scandinavian countries, with Norway, Sweden, maybe Germany or Iceland and so on. They would not experiment with things like being minority co producer in a Bulgarian project or Bulgarian TV series co production or Portuguese and so on. Or if it would happen, it would be very rare, very, very unusual as an incident. A lot of policymakers believe that the future of Europe, the solution to all kinds of problems in European cinema is more TV co product, more collaboration between broadcasters. But it's still long way to go, so to speak. That's why I was a little bit critical towards that. And as you noticed in your question.
- [38:26]
Priyam Sinha
So you also provide a detailed case study of the Council of Europe's co production fund, Yuri Images. Could you tell us the reasons behind choosing that as your site of study and who are the main stakeholders in it?
- [38:42]
Dr. Petar Mitric
Yeah, Erimage is a game changer in European co production field. That's the fun that appeared in the late 80s, which was a very, very symbolic moment in European history. That's the period when the Berlin Wall fell, when Eastern and Western European countries got together, when European Union emerged and so on. So there was a need to. To invest into cinema not just as an economic sector, but also as a driver of cultural and political integration of Europe. And your image was created as an instrument that would help, that would facilitate that process. And they did it very well. It's still the central fund in the European co production field. It's also the central policy hub. That's where. Where a lot of co production policies are cooked and then transferred to national states in Europe. And they really elevated co production from just like economic collaboration, financial collaboration, to something that's more cultural, that's authentically European. Yurimage created European co production as a brand that was also exported in some other regions in the world in the coming years. The stakeholders I used in the context of your image story are first of all policymakers, like politicians, who were eager to put on their agendas creating such a fund and assigning this kind of cultural and political role to the film. It started with French politicians, but also every European country got this kind of political circle or this kind of ideological circle that, that wanted to invest money and time and energy in that. But I also used the case of Yurimash to identify policy implementers as a stakeholder group. And policy implementers are those gatekeepers of the funding, people administering public film funds primarily, and people that represent national countries in their images, a European fund and so on, because they were not just bureaucrats, as you may Imagine they were not just people implementing the rules, they're people who have vast knowledge about film industry, about filmmaking. They combine this kind of national, local knowledge with this transnational elements because they meet with their colleagues from different countries, they. They define policies on international level and so on. So. So their role emerged, emerged as some kind of irrelevant bureaucrats, irrelevant in terms of policy making. But it has evolved through decades into much, much more important and central role where they even, as I show in some chapters of the book, initiate policy models on the policies on their own and implement them there on their own, independently from politicians as policymakers. Yeah. And finally, Yuri Mash shows the role of practitioners on their own and how much their feedback and their experiences informed the development of co production field. Especially I mentioned the case of Zentropa, the Danish company that launched Lars Frontier together with Yuri Maj when he was still unknown, relatively new and unknown name. And this is like a symbolic example of the entire trend and the entire legacy of Yurimaj. I decided to use or to write about Yuri Maj in my book only in a historical context, because it would be maybe too controversial to talk about Urimaj as it is now, which is also going through some huge reforms and there are debates around what the role of Yurima should be and so on. So I thought it was easier to focus only on the 90s, the first decade of the fund, because. Because when I looked into all the archives, I consulted both physical archives in Strasbourg in France, where the fund is situated legally, its legal seat, and also their online, I realized that a lot of problems the fund encountered in the 90s are there now as well. So in the 90s we had the UK that left the fund because they thought it's too much cultural or it's too much against British economic policy around film. And then you had Brexit in 2016, which was sort of history repeating. Yeah. So, yeah. So I decided to focus on this formative decade because it also speaks about the present moment, as all the issues I analyze and all the controversies I touch upon in this historical period resonate very well with what's happening today in one way or another.
- [44:05]
Priyam Sinha
Yeah, definitely, definitely. It does bring about a lot more insights about the geopolitical scenario. So as it becomes evident, and just drawing on this answer as well, gatekeeping and symbolic capital building is central to how we understand the negotiations that, that a lot of filmmakers in Europe are expected to navigate. Since every region and its film industry has its own set of challenges. Could you tell us more about the perspectives policymakers have and the role that they play in strengthening European co production models, increasingly competitive global media industries and these screaming cultures does.
- [44:54]
Dr. Petar Mitric
Yeah, I try to sort of summarize all these policy actions that try to kind of save the European cinema and make it relevant in these kind of new global developments and these kind of digital developments as well. So yeah, so I dedicated a lot of time to initiatives that, that have already been tested and functioned well. And that's in particular around this international development and co development, as we discussed earlier. So you can see that every country, every film festival in Europe has some kind of industry segments where they allow filmmakers to pitch their upcoming projects or that create these kind of training programs and labs where filmmakers can collaborate with some kind of international script editors or script doctors as they call them, to improve and enhance their stories and find the right voice. There are also a lot of co development initiatives and so on. So all that creates more unity, more collaboration, more solidarity between filmmakers and that also democratizes again access to filmmaking because it involves people at these early stages when the risk is not high and then more stories circulate. It's also important to mention that European Union tried to integrate global streaming services like Netflix and Amazon or Disney plus into the local European policy world by introducing the investment obligations. So now every streaming service that benefits or profits from local subscribers in European countries is obliged to pay something back, is obliged to invest into the local industries and in that sense enhance the capacity of local audiovisual sectors. And that means that streaming services are forced to spend some money according to the European cultural policy, right? Not just this kind of economic, market driven. And that's why some streaming services are forced to transfer some of their profit to local film institutes that then spend money according to their own regulations that are very locally based and targeted towards maintaining the local national industries and so on. Another important policy action is television co production. We're going back to Yuri Maj. They are the most active fund there, but also the Creative Europe media program. And that's again, television as a format is the most popular right now, the most audience friendly and good television co productions can always compete with streaming services and also allow more independence and more creative autonomy to their filmmakers. But to conclude, we are still lacking policy initiatives on the audience levels because all these, these initiatives are still directed primarily towards production, towards stimulating more and more and more content, which is good because that allows more content, that creates more diverse content, that creates jobs, because more productions, more employment. But somehow people still prefer watching streaming services and we still need a policy solution there.
- [48:44]
Priyam Sinha
There yeah, definitely. So thank you very much for this very insightful discussion about your book and exciting work. As we have approached the end of our conversation, I'm sure our listeners would also be very curious to learn about your ongoing and future projects and something that we can look forward to.
- [49:09]
Dr. Petar Mitric
Yeah, I think it shines through already. It is the audience. I would really like to continue using practice based research in order to understand how audiences can be more integrated into making European films or European co productions in particular. If that is the case, I would really like to work with filmmakers who are ready to start thinking about the audiences from day one and to observe how this kind of. How audience insights can be integrated into projects without. Without deter. Without putting in danger the creative freedom, the creative autonomy of the filmmakers. Is it possible and can it lead to films that would be both artistically and culturally relevant and significant, but also audience impactful in one way or another? I think that this context of European public film financing creates a base for that kind of films, that kind of production cultures. And I would like to research if that's really possible and to which extent. And that's where my future plans are. Are. Yeah. In terms of coming research projects.
- [50:39]
Priyam Sinha
Thank you. Thank you so much for all your time and interest.
- [50:43]
Dr. Petar Mitric
Thank you too. It was great talking to you.