|
Cinema and audiovisual media |
 |
||||||||||||||||||
|
A
Survey on National Cinematography |
|||||||||||||||||||
|
Identically, heading the list of largest feature film imports are the United States of America and Europe. In 1997, whereas 53 million North Americans saw European films in cinema theatres, 388 million Europeans saw 480 Hollywood films. The balance of film imports and exports between both regions is favourable to the United States of America by fully one third, representing a net yearly income of US$ 5.6 billion. Canada follows with 220 foreign films screened, although it produces only 24 titles yearly. The ranking of main film-exporting countries is almost identical to the hierarchy of film producing-countries, including Asian nations. India leads with an export output of around 60% to the eastern African markets, with a peak of 62% for Tanzania. Proportionally, African countries are the largest importers of productions from the United States of America as compared with other foreign film sources. Divided mainly into two large distinct linguistic sub-regions, the anglophone African countries annually receive about 70% of American films as opposed to 15% French and European productions. Inversely, French-speaking African countries import the same proportion of European and American productions (40%). An exception is Morocco, with an average of 46% of films imported from Hollywood, compared with 20% from India and only 8.5% from France. It appears that while some Northern industrialized countries are - through their international cooperation programmes - investing in developing weak economies, other donor countries are more concerned with exporting cultural products and values. In Latin America the imbalance seems greater since European productions do not exceed 10%, for example in Chile or in Costa Rica where Hollywood films represent 95% of the domestic market. The European and Asian markets preceded this trend in the 1960s. On both markets the average number of imported American films is still increasing, varying nowadays from 50% in Sweden to 97% in Cyprus. An exception is the Islamic Republic of Iran, where United States of America productions represent only 7% of the import market. Iran produces 62 feature films per year, and is by and large the most balanced importer, buying foreign films from a balanced variety of cultural and linguistic sources. In the range of medium-producing countries, the China Hong-Kong SAR studios (excluding China) and Taiwan account for large sales outside the Asian continent, especially in Africa and South America. The same applies to Japanese productions, which are increasingly being shown in Europe (23) and in the Americas (96). Others, like the Russian Federation, France, Germany and Italy are establishing their positions in Asia and Africa. The United Kingdom is probably the country with the higher number of foreign sales for their domestically produced films. However, these figures do not represent other extraneous phenomena with large effects on the international trade of moving images, such as national protection quotas, government censorship, large government aid plans to encourage domestic productions and far-reaching dumping practices in emerging markets. Last update 02/10/01 |
|
||||||||||||||||||
