Brussels leaves the film business out of trade with the United States

Important filmmakers from the old continent had publicly denounced the attempt to suppress it.

The Council of the European Union approved, last Friday June 14, to guarantee the cultural exception in the future free trade agreement with the United States. After 13 hours of negotiation and in the face of the mobilization of more than 6,000 European creators and the threat of a veto from France, the Trade Ministers of the European Union agreed to exclude the audiovisual sector from the mandate of the European Commission in the negotiations of the Free Trade Agreement Trade between the EU and the US (referred to as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership TTIP).

The Audiovisual College of the SGAE Board of Directors has welcomed this important decision, which leaves the sector out of the commercial transaction. In this sense, the members of said association (Miguel Hermoso, Imanol Uribe, Jose Luis Cuerda, Inés París, Julia Altares, Enric Gomá, José Luis Acosta, Ángel Illarramendi and Mercedes Cruz) have stated that they unanimously and energetically support the position of the French government in the sense of excluding the audiovisual business from the aforementioned project, as well as the concept of "cultural exception", which excludes and protects national culture beyond its conception as simple merchandise.

They have also asked the Spanish government "to show our position, and defend us in the same way that the French government does with its creators."

There is talk of "cultural exception" to refer to the specific situation of cultural goods and services, in general, in international negotiations of trade agreements. Thus, both in the negotiation of the GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) and GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) agreements in the Uruguay Round (1986-1994), the position of a series of states (mainly the European Union-led by France and Belgium- and Canada) regarding its refusal to include the cultural sector as one more good/service in the free trade negotiations.

European creators have mobilized massively in recent months to request the exclusion of audiovisual and cultural services from the future Free Trade Agreement. Great filmmakers from the continent went up in arms to stop the initiative. Michael Haneke, Pedro Almodóvar, Fernando Trueba, Constantin Costa-Gavras, Paolo Sorrentino and Bertrand Tavernier, among many others, signed a tough letter addressed to the heads of state of the member countries asking them to support the exclusion of audiovisuals from these trade negotiations. The same was done by Jean-Michel Jarre, president of CISAC, and his four vice-presidents (Javed Akhtar from India, Marcelo Piñeyro from Argentina, and African creators Angélique Kidjo and Ousmane Sow).

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