The European Commission (EC) has issued a revised budget breakdown for the proposed Creative Europe framework programme from 2014-2020.

In a letter to the secretaries general of the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, Klaus Welle and Uwe Corsepius, EC Secretary-General Catherine Day explained that the revised budgets for the programmes under the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) had been “adjusted following the conclusions of the European Council on February 7-8”.

Day noted that the table of programmes is “intended to facilitate the on-going negotiations between the European Parliament and Council”.

The seven-year breakdown, calculated at 2011 prices, is:

  • 2014: €168.3m
  • 2015: €164.1m
  • 2016: €173.7m
  • 2017: €183.7m
  • 2018: €194.1m
  • 2019: €204.9m
  • 2020: €204.8m.

The overall budget for the new framework programme would therefore amount to just over €1.293 bn.

These proposed figures for Creative Europe’s budget under the new MFF for 2014-2020 are more than €300m less than what the EC was proposing two years ago in the summer of 2011.

At that time, the EC’s Communication on the MFF declared that the new “umbrella” programme for culture and the audiovisual industry would be allocated a total of €1.6bn.

The annual budgets in this case would be:

  • 2014: €182m
  • 2015: €197m
  • 2016: €212m
  • 2017: €227m
  • 2018: €242m
  • 2019: €257m
  • 2020: €273m.

According to the European Parliament Budget Committee, negotiations on the MFF will only start once the EC’s so-called ¨amending budget¨ for 2013 is passed to cover outstanding payments from 2012.

And this proposed supplementary budget - which includes an additional €2.5m requested for the MEDIA Programme for 2013 - is regarded by the European Parliament as a pre-requisite for an agreement on the next MFF.

EU support for Southern Mediterranean

In a separate development, the EU’s Euromed Audiovisual III Programme is planning to unveil a Southern Mediterranean Film Marketing Association (SOUK Al FILM Al ARABY aka SAFA) at next month’s Cannes Film Festival.

The first joint initiative of the SAFA network in Cannes will be to launch a film catalogue presenting all of the films - feature-length fiction films and documentaries- produced between 2011 and 2013 by filmmakers from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, and Tunisia.