Lars Henrik Gass, festival director: Opening speech of the 51st Festival, 5 May 2005

Please note that this is a rough translation used to assist the interpreters on opening night!

Dear Lord Mayor, Dear Mr. Wehling,

Dear State Secretary, Dear Mr. Morgenstein

Dear members of the federal and regional parliaments, sponsors, guests and friends.

I welcome you warmly to the short film festival and am pleased that you are spending this evening with us.

Allow me first to express a personal welcome to two people in particular: My former co-manager, Ulrike Erbslöh, who rendered the festival a great service, and also to Mr. Burkhard Drescher, the Lord Mayor of the City of Oberhausen, who has stood by and supported the festival for many years.

Before starting I must apologise, especially to our guests from abroad, for dealing with issues of a rather cultural-political nature. There are good reasons for this, however, because what is currently being discussed in this country under the heading of financial cuts in culture represents, in my opinion, a change in the funding process of public cultural funding. In order to avoid possible misunderstanding, I would like to add that my following considerations are of course not directed at cultural funding in general, but at individual cases. I am fully aware of the fact that I am walking on thin ice in dealing with subject matter which I, in my function, am probably not even allowed to tread. As a receiver of funding myself it may even seem a little careless.

Nevertheless, I find it important to deal with such issues within the framework of a festival and to initiate discussion in this area.

I would like to present you with three new types of cultural funding.

Firstly, Europe funding

Alongside Europe funding, there is lighthouse funding

And alongside the Europe funding and lighthouse funding, there are finally funding managers.

Europe funding defends Europe - against US supremacy and against fundamentalism of the Arabic world. Its funding guidelines are, above all, a set of standards, an instrument for laying down norms. The intention is to provide Europe with a culture and identity. It ensures that Europeans see European culture made by Europeans. The recently published survey :"Does Europe need a foreign policy?" puts it bluntly: it is all about a "Europe-specific community of shared values".

In order to strengthen European film, the European community demands that film festival programmes are made up of at least 70% European contributions. Furthermore, European networking and programme exchange is also demanded. Non-fulfilment of quotas means: Money back! But with 70% of European contributions in the programme, the title of "international" loses credibility. The bigger, the more expert an audience, the higher the number of contributions from remote parts of the world, the less can a festival be in favour of such demands. This leads to a paradoxical situation whereby the most important festivals, those with the highest standards, can hardly or not at all fulfil these requirements. Only festivals that are directed at local audiences and have names such as "Mediterranean Festival" or "Festival of European Film" receive the highest funding and recognition.

And I ask you: Can we seriously believe that European importance increases in proportion with the number of European contributions? Surely this cannot be a funding criterion for successful festival work which, after all, aims for uniqueness and the possibility of seeing that which is different?

Such political directives are hardly questioned by festivals. Unconditionally they are prepared to co-operate and submit to directives which are almost impossible to fulfil while, with decreasing success, they formally apply for shrinking project funds. The more Europe-centred a project is, the more networking it has undergone, the more money it receives from Europe for a film or for a festival, the less it distinguishes itself by any kind of individuality. The resulting funded films and funded projects closely resemble the directives according to which they have originated.

Huge amounts of time are consumed in reading and compiling enormous contracts. Probably between 20 and 30% of the funds for projects go into the very administration that is not meant to be funded at all.

The provincialism in this view of Europe, the disappearance of individuality is also the result of an unacknowledged anti-Americanism which is turning Europe into a cultural bulwark, into a Europe which defines itself mainly from the inside. But I ask you, is the Europe we want really as one-dimensional as that?

It is high time for a new extremism in culture, a culture of the stubborn.

Lighthouse funding too is a relatively new type of funding. It wants to put an end to what is insignificantly small in one's own country and sees to it that individual cultural projects radiate way beyond regional (or national) borders. Culture is made to be attractive, which means attracting people and attracting attention, reaping media resonance and reputation. So far so good. But lighthouse funding never asked itself whether the existing cultural substance, whether the projects for which a lighthouse is deemed necessary, ever had the means at their disposal to enable such wide illumination. Let me demonstrate this by means of the present application of German cities for the European cultural capital: While currently millions are being spent on these applications, there have been severe cuts in cultural funding on a regional level. The state of North Rhine-Westphalia has made around €50,000 less available for the Short Film Festival 2005 than it received 10 years ago. The regional association of the Ruhr-area, most avid applicant for Essen as the cultural capital has, over the same period of time, steadily reduced funds and has even cut these to zero this year . Of course it was not only Oberhausen that was affected by these savings, and these funds are not, of course, directly diverted into lighthouse projects.

Please excuse me for finding it difficult to celebrate the candidacy of the Ruhr area as cultural capital in face of the many cultural events that have been funded "under the poverty-line" here in recent years. A letter of the regional association of the Ruhrgebiet makes it clear how prestige objects are made possible at the expense of cultural substance: "In order to ensure that the efforts put into applying for European cultural capital are not jeopardised on the home stretch, it has not been possible to maintain the funding budget for local/municipal projects.." Whereas an international festival is certainly no municipal project, it is being declared as such. In plain: the states and regions are positioning their own cultural projects vis a vis the local authorities: newer, nicer, bigger - all at the expense of substance. The responsibility towards the institutions, their continuity and security of their staff and the substance of a cultural event are all placed squarely on the shoulders of the municipality. So-called "Initiatives", or "pilot projects" with fancy sounding names are preferred. To quote from a randomly chosen statute: the project, which needs to be internationally orientated and trend-setting can, as a rule, only be funded for a maximum of 3 years. - The funders get a better deal than before, but nobody asks how the staff, which runs operations, will be paid.

It has already become reality that the majority of film festivals in Germany are maintained not by cultural funding, but by personal initiatives and by the federal agency for employment. Festivals are only still possible with the help of a culture-industrial reserve army. The problem of cultural funding at present is, however, not so much due to a lack of money or any obscure hostility towards culture, but by the lack of a consistent funding model.: Cultural funding has turned in image politics.

Christian Thomas has called this "branding as defining culture" in his article in the Frankfurter Rundschau: "May the pool attendants in public swimming pools be missing, may the screens of communal cinemas stay dark (...) the thinking behind this strategy of compensation is done on such a grand European scale, that its justification could be that no tourist from Athens of Barcelona, London or Warsaw would visit Essen because of its public pool or visit Görlitz for the Camillo cinema." Thanks to local politics, Oberhausen sees things differently.

The strict renunciation of "branding" which traditionally distinguished public funding from sponsoring, is decreasing considerably. And it is exactly this which has reached previously unknown dimensions in the third type of funding, that of funding managers. A completely new kind of cultural management has emerged: not committed to culture, but to subsidy. Dazzlingly high sums are administered here. But the main concern is with the issue of presenting oneself in the best possible light. Funding managers will not even stop at participating in juries that they themselves pay. They donate unrivalled amounts of prize money.. And they can afford it. Everyone wants to benefit from the wealth of this funding institution, everyone depends on this funding. You can even afford to appoint the director of an institution which you fund yourself Whoever pays calls the tune. Influence is everything.

Yet such a centralism of a culture has never done it any good. The polyphony of culture - that no individual dictates what culture is for everybody - has always been a special historic asset in the federalism in Germany, its wealth. In times of tight budgets all this falls into disrepute, being called the "watering can" principle, and centralisation appears as an effective solution to every problem. But all it has done is to increase the dependence of applicants and threaten to promote a climate of fear and of cultural uniformity.

Although the majority of the funds available to the funding manager consist mainly of taxes and fees, they are almost fully removed from any direct parliamentary control. Whereas cultural funding has thus far clearly differed from private sponsoring and has been able to do without branding altogether, funding managers now threaten to become so powerful, that it is permissible to ask whether this still corresponds to democratic diversity of opinion and to their tasks. What culture is supposed to be and where its priorities rest is now decided by funding managers and no longer by politics, i.e. the people. Cultural funding has been made to serve a representational purpose.

In concluding I would like to thank all those who, in spite of constraints of their own, have continued their funding of the Oberhausen Festival over the years: above all, I respectfully and heartily thank the City of Oberhausen who has maintained its financial support at a time when others have made cuts, especially the members of the supervisory board of the Short Film festival, the chairman of the supervisory board, Daniel Schranz, counsellor Reinhard Frind as well as the department of participation; the North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of Urban Development and Housing, Culture and Sports, which is still able to recognize the difference between film culture and film industry, followed by the cultural foundation of the states,, the foreign office as well as the Federal Press office. I thank our premium sponsors BMW, NRW.BANK and Tiscali, our main sponsor Nokia, our sponsors BERO Zentrum, EVO and the Stadtsparkasse Oberhausen, which has given special support for the children and youth cinema of the Oberhausen Festival, as well as the RoWo company. I thank our Media partners ARTE, 3sat, KiKa and INTRO, which see to the dissemination of our content. My personal thanks go to the team of the Short Film Festival.

I thank you for your attention and wish you all fruitful days in Oberhausen