Festival to receive additional funding from Germany’s State Minister for Culture and Media in 2017.

The Berlinale is set to benefit from a planned €74m increase in the German government’s national arts budget from 2017, according to the State Minister for Culture and Media (BKM), Monika Gruetters.

In the draft budget which was passed by Angela Merkel’s cabinet last week, Germany’s leading film festival would receive an additional €1m annual cash injection on top of the current €6.7m institutional funding allocated by the BKM towards the Berlinale’s overall €23m budget.

Screen understands that this additional funding from central government would go towards offsetting the increase in costs accumulated by the Berlinale in recent years as well as providing more financial support for film and TV industry networking platform and summit Berlinale Talents.

The draft bill also envisages that the BKM would be able to provide an additional €15m over and above its current commitment to its cultural film funding programme, €1m for the digitisation of German film heritage, and €300,000 more to its budget for the international activities of German cinema.

State Minister Gruetters had already indicated during this year’s German Film Awards in May that she would be lobbying for an extension of this year’s €15m increase to her cultural film funding programme into 2017.

She had received support from the highest level for these plans when Chancellor Merkel alluded to Gruetter’s proposal in a speech at a discussion by the CDU and CSU parliamentary parties on the roof of the Reichstag at the beginning of June.

Subject to the draft budget passing through parliament this autumn, nationally supported cultural institutions and projects could then benefit from an overall arts budget of €1.35bn in 2017, an increase of around 5.8% on the current year.