Board member Kasia Klimkiewicz speaks for screen directors at European Commission High-Level Roundtable on Artists’ Working Conditions

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In preparation for the upcoming Culture Compass – the European Commission’s guiding framework designed to support the cultural and creative sectors – Commission Executive Vice-President for Social Rights and Skills, Quality Jobs and Preparedness, Roxana Mînzatu, together with Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture and Sport, Glenn Micallef, hosted a high-level roundtable on artists’ working conditions on 8 December.

FERA Board member Kasia Klimkiewicz participated in the discussion, contributing her perspective as an active screen director. She addressed the main issues that must be tackled to improve the working conditions of artists and creatives, and highlighted the measures needed to support artists and cultural professionals in order to secure a resilient cultural ecosystem in Europe:

“Being an artist is not only a profession, it is a passion. And for that we pay a price. Our passion makes us vulnerable to abuse: being confronted with unrealistic expectations, put under immense economic pressure, not being paid for big chunks of work. We manage and lead diverse crews and operate within million euro budgets, we are expected and contracted to deliver first class audio visual works, but when it comes down to our needs we are neglected. We are the cornerstone of a billion euro film industry, yet we are treated as commodity.

The reality is brutal: most directors manage to make just one film every five years. The rest of the time, we’re forced to survive on second jobs. But these jobs, taken out of necessity, steal a lot of time and energy that directors need to craft strong stories. If film directors continue to be overworked, underpaid, and forced into endless unpaid development, the stories we lose will be far greater than the stories we manage to fund.

Creatively, those five years between films are not so-called idle time: we spend them actively developing original ideas to pitch: not just idle musings we scribble down in minutes on napkins in restaurants, but substantially formed foundations, excavated, built and stress-tested over months of detailed, unpaid work that are a sound basis for a resilient, marketable creative product. This unpaid labour has become the norm, even though it drains filmmakers financially and creatively: we are forced to work our second jobs while we wait for months for the decision makers to validate our projects. It takes too long. We need mechanisms that will shorten the decision making process.

Public funding is needed to financially support European film directors in the initial phase of research and writing. At the same time, we need support in the final and crucial phase of a film’s production – promotion, it includes participation in festivals and screenings, interviews and so on. This phase is essential to ensuring the film’s success, yet it is entirely the responsibility of the director, who receives no compensation for it

We need financial and psychological support, so that we can have a minimum sense of security. We want to be able to support our families while creating those thoughtful, emotional, entreating stories. Because we need stories to make sense of everything that happens around us. We need to share stories to bond us as humans.”