An economic singularity is taking place in the collective film organization Aipa. The eternal recipients of taxpayer’s money have also usurped its management.
Every autumn, Portorož hosts the Slovenian film community. The first half of October is already a pretty dead tourist season if the weather is cold and wet. Tourists leave, and there is a business event here and there. It’s quiet and peaceful. But if it’s Indian summer, Portorož is a mix of symposium and festival-goers and late tourists and swimmers looking to steal the last sighs of the departing summer. And, of course, Slovenian film stars. How exciting.
This year, the sun was warm, and Slovenian filmmakers spent a week indulging in the belated summer and the premature art of home cinema. It was a kind of harvest. Harvesting the fruits of their labor. The music and dance of a hermetically sealed circle of self-confident stars and artists marveling at their masterpieces. A glass of rum and mediocre works become great. With a little extra stimulation of the neuronal synapses, Slovenian audiovisual products become suitable for a Lion, a Bear, or an Oscar. But unfortunately, a sober assessment of quality Slovenian filmmaking in recent years has – with very few exceptions – produced disastrous films.
The Slovenian public-funded filmmaking community, high on imaginary success spends a week – on public money – bragging and deceiving itself that they are great, better, the best. In Slovenia, which is a microscopic market for audiovisual creativity, the high art of filmmaking does not find contact with its own population and audience. Let alone with a global audience. Potential domestic audiences, who by the metropolitan standards of the domestic film avant-garde are mostly the peripheral population, who do not read into the messages of Slovenian cinema. Painful! The karma of a common language and culture has punished a group of self-praising filmmakers with two million morons who don’t understand their high art.
But let us not waste words on matters that are difficult to measure, weigh, assess and judge. Ratings – or tickets sold in Slovenian cinemas – are no longer of interest to filmmakers. They have long been their benchmark. Perhaps they are only interested in some third- or fourth-rate film awards, where the rule of friendly reciprocity applies. I give you an award at my local festival, you give it back to me at your festival. And we both have arguments in front of the local decision-makers and audiences that we belong on the level of the international winners. That’s it! The audience that listens to popular radio music and for whom Kekec (popular film from 1951) is still the best Slovenian film cannot really be taken as a reference by the domestic alternatives. Let’s change the nation!
Manna from Heaven
The same community that, for the most part, cannot create and realize artistic narrative masterpieces, can do something else. Sniff out money. At first, public money, but in recent years, even private money, was collected in the collective organization Aipa, which democratically – does not – distribute money to the beneficiaries. Or distributes illegitimate crumbs. Manna from heaven. But the twenty real owners of the bulk of the money collected cannot outvote the two hundred who have illegal voting rights – illegally. They have sold their material rights and handed them over to the producer. And they know it.
The same CMO Aipa, which, by the way, is one of the sponsors of the Slovenian Film Euphoria Week, presented a study in Portorož this year entitled Strategic Plan for the Development of the Audiovisual Industry in Slovenia until 2030. The authors and thinkers of this strategy are (almost without exception – may the exceptions forgive me) the masters of emptying cinemas and switching TV viewers to other channels. A group of filmmakers who have never been active in the market and who have, for the most part, always been strapped for taxpayers’ money, will now be researching and teaching how to tame, calculate, financially regulate and stabilize the audiovisual industry?
Thank God. Numbers are numbers, and you cannot claim anything here that the numbers and the formulae do not support. Finally, one constructive one from the film visionaries, so that we can debate, calculate and, in the end, reasonably agree or disagree. The renowned auditing firm Deloitte was invited to participate in the analysis of the situation and the projections of the future of cinema. Financial professionals watched over the calculations. Excellent.
But in the plan, called the Strategic Plan, one can see from the very beginning a kind of taken-for-granted exclusivity of budgetary funding for film productions. This is a remnant of a time when the authorities understood and respected the purpose and power of film. For identity, for the creation of history according to the taste of the victor, for indigenous culture and the impression of the infallibility of the rulers. Filmmakers imagine that state money belongs to them. I would even agree with them, but only on condition that the funds obtained from the state budget must be justified in terms of quality. And, in the event of a failure, to be held to account. At least financially, if not criminally. But filmmakers are not very good at this kind of thinking. Their understanding of budgets and state property is not up to standard. Our filmmakers take for granted the free or ridiculously cheap rentals of state film equipment, props, sets, costumes, studios, and offices of Viba Film. In the end, the completely unrealistic information about the ownership and the final price of the film is leaked to the public.
Blind adherence to leadership
Another, even crazier lesson in socialist capitalism has been happening for the last thirteen years in the collective management organization – Aipa. There is an economic singularity going on. The perpetual recipients of state money have taken over its management, which otherwise has well-known private owners – rights holders. In Aipa, however, the majority of decisions are taken by non-owners and non-rights holders. Or owners who fall under someone else’s roof. It is as if the Mercedes general meeting were attended by stakeholders who, in addition to Mercedes’ shares, also hold shares in BMW, Ford, and Toyota. And they vote with those as well. The collective organization is a kind of joint stock company. It has a membership – it has shareholders or rights, it has a management or board and it has control or owners – rights holders. And what does the owners’ control do in Aipa? It blindly believes and agrees with the management. It does not investigate management’s moves and decisions. If a supervisor questions too much, the management democratically removes him with the aforementioned illegal and invalid votes.
Aipa has more than 15 million undistributed cash in its accounts. The director, Gregor Štibernik, receives a staggering salary which, on an annual basis, represents five hundred times the annual royalty payments of a highly successful independent production company. So what and who does Aipa serve? Perhaps Klemens Dvornik – the “mastermind” of the strategic plan. He is talking about a kind of audiovisual Sazas (Slovenian music CMO), where screenwriters, directors, cameramen, etc. should receive some kind of royalties when their (good or bad) co-authored works are screened, as is the practice with musicians and their collective organization. They went even further. If, by chance, the project is a success, the creators are entitled to additional compensation. Of course, if the project collapses and has a negative balance sheet, they have nothing to do with the debts and the negative balance sheet. This is then the producer’s problem.
Slovenian film producer Danijel Hočevar was also very active in the creation of the strategic plan. If not, at least he should have known that the execution of an audio- or audiovisual production is very different. Musicians, for the most part, do their work (whether as authors or performers) for free. And they become shareholders in a successful or unsuccessful project. Meanwhile, an audiovisual production always has a producer who enters into a contract with the author or performer, pays him/her according to that contract and thus transfers all rights to him/herself. This is how the whole normal world works. We are, of course, smarter than that.
It is therefore the professional footprint of the strategic plan makers. One has no hope of anything sensible coming out of such a bunch. Or useful. But here, as has already been said, a reputable audit firm has helped. The multinational Deloitte, a trusted partner who, unlike artists, knows how to calculate, predict, compare and plan for the financial tensions of the market. I suppose they did all the calculating, the hope-mongering and the high-flying theses for a fee. And the already excellent state of the audiovisual guild.
All of us who still work in the free market know that the audiovisual production market has completely collapsed in the last year. According to the calculations of the Slovenian Independent Production GIZ Snavp (producer.si), the production of Slovenian audiovisual works generates approximately EUR 15 million a year. This can also be seen in Slovenian cinemas, where the average Slovenian film may reach two or three thousand viewers. In the category of internet access to audiovisual works, piracy is rampant. On the screens of domestic broadcasters – televisions, where, at peak viewing times, foreign series, foreign films, foreign or domestic licensed creativity … I am left speechless.
In the face of these facts, it is hard to believe the path and the dreams of the Strategic Plan of a bright filmmaking goal and a billion cash flow in 2030. And, at the very end, Deloitte, like Pontius Pilate, in the small print, washes its financial statements linked to the 2030 Strategic Plan. It says: “No representation, warranty or guarantee (express or implied) is made as to the accuracy or completeness of the information contained in this document and Deloitte, its member firms, affiliates, employees and agents shall not be liable for any loss or damage which may be suffered, directly or indirectly, by any person as a result of reliance on this document”.
In other words – not all of the above may be true!
Some of us creators cry foul and shout about anomalies. We moan into the walls of the most stagnant and foggy valley at home and wait for the echo. The whole story is more than obviously ripe for investigation. Or at least, for goodness’ sake, finally a good substantive basis for a great script. Of all the echoes, in Echoes we get the presenter and Klemens Dvornik, who present the dream already described to a large crowd of male and female viewers. The echo thus helps to confirm the seriousness, credibility and excellent vision of Slovenian filmmaking. The foolish Slovenian nation, which, as has already been said, is not appreciated by filmmakers and would be replaced by them, is welcome this time in the case of ensuring public legitimacy. Because it knows. Only honest and successful artistic visionaries who can be trusted are ever invited to Odmeve. The journalist takes Klemen Dvornik at his word. She is not looking for a counter-argument, she has no second opinion, she has not checked the reality on the ground. What Dvornik said and what Deloitte calculated is as true for her as it is for the viewers. Professional PR in the most respected and credible news programme on national television. Cinematic.
Tomaž Grubar
