EU Ministers Snub Matrix Reloaded at Cannes

CANNES -- While the crowd at the Cannes film festival unlocked the secrets of the new Matrix just in from the United States, EU ministers current and future worried instead about saving European cinema from Hollywood.

'We're not aiming to build walls around Europe,' said Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner responsible for culture and education. 'We want diversity for ourselves as well as for others. So we say: why not US films? But not just US films.'

For the first time in its history, the Cannes film festival held a European Film Day on Thursday with Reding and 25 culture ministers from the new enlarged European Union-to-be pondering ways to breathe life into the movie industry .

The ministers agreed to subsidise films, to promote films for the young and to boost pan-European distribution, Reding said.

A European film won the last Oscars -- Roman Polanski's The Pianist -- and European nominations (mainly French ones) dominate the field vying for this year's top Cannes prize, the Palme d'Or, squeezing the number of US contenders to just three.

But the overall figures look bad for Europe.

Europe produces about as many films as the United States each year -- 600 compared to about 700 -- but has only 30 per cent of the European market, Reding told AFP this week.

The European Audiovisual Observatory this week said US films took the lion's share at the EU box office last year, with two out of three films made in the United States, more than the previous year.

Reding said that meanwhile European films had problems crossing their own borders because of a 'lack of promotional means and fragmented distribution while American films are distributed continent-wide.'

But the plot went a little awry for the EU at Cannes on Thursday.

That was also the day that Keanu Reeves and the other stars of the Matrix sequel descended on Cannes to premiere the blockbuster, and attention definitely was on the world of Hollywood special effects rather than on Europe.

The ministers nonetheless stuck to their script, choosing to attend the evening premiere of the Swiss entry for Cannes's coveted Palme d'Or -- Ce Jour-La (That Day) by Raoul Ruiz -- missing the premiere of The Matrix Reloaded, which is not in competition for the Palme.

'Today's event at the festival IS the Raoul Ruiz film,' laughed French Culture Minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon, when asked if the Europeans felt they were missing out on the day's big happening. -- AFP