Luxembourg Looks to Future

With six Luxembourgish projects on display, this year’s Venice Film Festival served as a victory lap for a modest state with an outsized impact. Boasting 1,200 professionals, a vibrant animation sector, and an output of 25-30 titles per year, the Grand Duchy’s co-production driven ecosystem is all the more remarkable for its relative youth and for the speed of its ascent.

“Thirty-five years ago we had no professional infrastructure and no real audiovisual production,” says Luxembourg Film Fund chief Guy Daleiden. “We had to build everything from the ground up, developing an autonomous sector with production companies and technicians that are now highly regarded across the globe.”

In the subsequent decades, local daughter Vicky Krieps has given the country its biggest star and “Mr. Hublot” directors Laurent Witz and Alexandre Espigares brought homegrown projects to the Oscar podium, together tracking a wider blueprint to develop the live action and animation sectors in tandem. Today, animation accounts for 40% of local activity with live action work rounding out the rest – all while non-fiction outfits continue to make waves.

Premiering in competition at Venice, Wang Bing’s “Youth (Homecoming)” caps what Daleiden calls “an historic grand-slam” that saw the series’ two previous volumes, “Youth (Spring)” and “Youth (Hard Times),” play in respective competitions in Cannes and Locarno. Festival laurels aside, the full 10.5-hour deep-dive into Middle Kingdom sweatshops has also plugged local producers into a more global circuit.

“Co-productions with Belgium and France are relatively common,” says Daleiden. “But [the film’s producer] Gilles Chanial has pushed past those usual partnerships, traveling further to make unconventional work. [We should follow his lead] diversifying and branching out to new territories.”

Pursuant to those ends, the country’s royal family and culture minister will take the Lido alongside a delegation of nearly 30 local producers, all looking to seize the attention offered by this year’s Venice Production Bridge focus on Luxembourg and Francophone Belgium. Digital innovations will be a major point of pride – a fact that should come with little surprise given the fact that Luxembourgish productions like “Ceci Est Mon Cœur” and “Oto’s Planet” make up five projects at this year’s Venice Immersive program.

That another Venice Immersive selected title — “Ito Meikyu,” co-produced by Gilles Chanial of Les Films Fauves — shares a similar team with “Youth (Homecoming)” also reflects the wider industry’s transmedia remit.

“We consider virtual reality, augmented reality and immersive works to be a key element of audiovisual production, on a par with cinema, television, documentary and animation,” Daleiden explains. “All forms of production need to evolve alongside one another, so neglecting technological developments would be a big mistake. That’s why we encourage everyone in our industry to take an active interest in technological development and digitalization.”

“We can’t remain stuck in the past,” he continues. “We have to change and adapt to be ready for future evolutions. Every company in Luxembourg has been encouraged to get involved in virtual reality or immersive works. As our Prime Minister used to say, when the digitalization train sets off, we don’t want to be stuck on the platform; we need to be the locomotive.”

With an output of 30 projects per year, and a single, all-encompassing support fund, endowed with an annual budget of $35 million split between all forms of production, the local sector’s future growth is tied to further investment. 

“The trend is very clear,” says Daleiden. “More and more projects are being made, driving more and more interest in producing and co-producing with Luxembourg. We can only benefit from additional financial resources in order to continue diversifying and evolving, because we can see the demand is much greater than ever before.”