17-01-2017

Montenegro Founds Film Centre

By
    Sehad Čekić, head of the Montenegro Film Centre Sehad Čekić, head of the Montenegro Film Centre

    PODGORICA: In the last days of 2016, Montenegro founded its own Film Centre, making it the last country of former Yugoslavia to have an official film institution. The centre’s head will be the producer Sehad Čekić and the budget for 2017 is 560,000 EUR.

    According to Sehad Čekić, the Film Centre was built after successful practices in the region, and its main activities will include the management of the film fund, the support of new film productions, the promotion of Montenegrin cinema and its potential for international productions, as well as a series of activities around film festivals, that will improve professional capacities, such as training programmes. The aim is to make the institution a proactive agency with a small number of employees in order to concentrate on projects and activities set to ameliorate the conditions for the development and promotion of the cinema of Montenegro.

    Apart from Čekić, the founding board members are director-producer Gojko Kastarović, film theorist Maja Bogojević and journalist and film critic Vuk Perović.

    The centre’s first tasks are of legal nature as the board will have to outline the institution’s legal and legislative structure, and will later focus on the promotion of both the Centre and Montenegrin cinema, as well as the fight against piracy.

    In Čekić’s opinion, the establishment of the Film Centre is a result of a long-standing effort to make Montenegrin cinema compatible with its regional counterparts on an institutional level. “With that, the creation of the centre also follows a series of mechanisms that were introduced according to European examples and standards and adapted to Montenegrin realities, such as the establishment of a film fund with diversified sources of revenue and the introduction of incentives for international productions shot in Montenegro,” he said, adding that the work of the Film Centre will reap cultural and economic benefits.

    Montenegro is a member of Creative Europe and its MEDIA sub-programme since 2015.