Cinema: France is investing to once again become a land of filming

As part of the France 2030 program, “La Grande Fabrique de l’image” was launched in 2022, intended to create centers of cinematographic activity in the region and to allow France to become attractive again in terms of filming. Already benefiting from a tax credit which makes foreign filming attractive on French territory (a measure maintained in the budget announced by the Ministry of Culture), this program, endowed in 2023 with 350 million euros, also seeks to invest in the creation of new film studios in order to make up for the gap between France and its European competitors in this area, as Joël Augros explains:

***”*The Sierpinski report, which was published in 2019, showed that France had a film set deficit compared to its European competitors. Now, Great Britain, which is more than in Europe, but which is well in the lead, then Germany, then Hungary, France then places itself after these countries and therefore simply, in a way, recovers the filming of the films which cannot be made in foreign films rather which cannot be made in Hungary, in Germany, in Great Britain. So it is the big image factory was to multiply the number of square meters of studios, roughly to double the number of square meters. We currently have approximately 60,000 square meters of studios and should increase to 150, a little over 150,000 square meters.”

Today’s news:

• The Jeannot floor has just been restored and is on display in Paris after having undergone restoration for almost two years. This work of outsider art is once again visible at the Museum of Art and History of Sainte-Anne Hospital until April 2025. Discovered in 1994 by a neuropsychiatrist on a farm in Béarn, this text engraved in capital letters on a wooden floor is the work of Jean Crampilh-Broucaret, a man suffering from psychiatric disorders. Detached when the house was put up for sale, this floor was quickly exposed as much for its artistic strangeness as for its testimony to psychiatric disorders.

• The Dresden Symphony Orchestra in collaboration with the city’s Technical University have just created a robot capable of conducting an orchestra. With three arms that articulate independently and each have their own wand, this robot was able to conduct musicians for the first time this weekend. For this first, the robot directed The semiconductor masterpiece, a work by German composer Andreas Gundlach composed especially for the occasion.

• Considered one of the best amusement parks in the world, Le Puy du Fou is exported in a British version, which should see the light of day in 2028, around fifteen kilometers from Oxford. A project which will be based around the history of the country as the franchise already did in Spain a few years ago.

• Marina Abramovic exhibits for the first time in Asia with “Transforming Energy”, which is on view until February 28, 2025 at the Shanghai Museum of Modern Art. It is the largest exhibition ever organized by the artist which offers spectators the opportunity to participate in the works as shown in his piece Counting the Rice for example, visitors seated at small tables must separate white grains of rice from black grains, count them and write the result on a piece of paper which they take home.