If America wants a thriving cinema culture, we have to start treating it as something worth cultivating, supporting, and protecting. Other countries have made that choice. What would it take for us to make it too?
We’ve almost reached the end of this exploration of what America’s cinema business needs. We began by asking what we’re actually trying to sustain, and moved through the conditions required for lifelong creative practices, the concentration of corporate power, and the rules and deals that determine who benefits from the work. In Part Five, we turned to how people come to love cinema, why theaters and programmers matter, and how we might cultivate audiences instead of assuming they’ll magically arrive when the movie is ready.
Now comes a question that’s been lurking beneath this newsletter since its earliest incarnations. I’m a little surprised it has taken me this long to ask it outright.
What would America look like if we actually made cinema a national cultural priority?
A boy can dream, can’t he?
I don’t intend this to be another celebration of Hollywood as America’s greatest export, or another ledger of jobs generated when a blockbuster comes to town to shoot. Those things have value. I’ve spent enough of my life in the business to appreciate what a successful production can do for the people working on it. But surely a country with our extraordinary filmmaking history, resources, and talent can imagine ambitions that extend beyond employment statistics and global box office.
I’m talking about the kind of country we want to live in. Quality. Of. Effin. Life. A country where beauty, curiosity, imagination, and the opportunity to encounter different perspectives are part of what we think everyone deserves.
Movies can contribute an enormous amount to that. And if we’re willing to look beyond our borders, we can find some useful clues about how to give them a better chance.
Other Countries Have Made Different Choices
France has spent decades treating cinema as both an industry and a matter of cultural policy. Its Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée—the CNC—supports production, distribution, exhibition, and other parts of the sector through automatic and selective assistance.
One particularly interesting mechanism connects theatrical activity with continuing investment. A portion of the tax collected on cinema tickets generates support that exhibitors can use for eligible improvements to their theaters. Think about that: the cultural activity helps replenish some of the resources necessary to sustain it.
France has plenty of challenges, and we shouldn’t romanticize its system (or its revolts against that system, either). Public support can produce bureaucracies and orthodoxies of its own. A subsidized cinema culture can become too comfortable with certain kinds of work, just as our commercially driven system can become reluctant to support anything that takes any risk, aesthetic or otherwise.
But the French have institutionalized an idea America resists: cinema’s continuing cultural life deserves deliberate public support. Did you ever wonder whether the behavioral incentives over here might be a bit out of whack?
Over in the UK, the British Film Institute offers another approach. Its 2026–2029 National Lottery Funding Plan allocates £150 million over three years across filmmaking, audiences, education, heritage, workforce development, and other activities. It gets even more interesting when we look at how they divide the money. There’s £61 million for filmmaking and talent development, but also £33.5 million specifically for audiences and £13.3 million for education and heritage. Those are budget categories, not just a well-wordsmith’d mission statement.
Imagine what our priorities might look like if American film institutions made comparable commitments. Not necessarily those amounts, or even the same categories. I’d be delighted if more organizations just clearly identified what they were trying to strengthen and then committed sustained resources to doing so. What gets funded changes what becomes possible. We know that from filmmaking. Don’t you think the same is true of cinema culture?
Canada Reminds Us That Cinema Has A Public Purpose
I got to grow up and age in an era when we knew our neighbors to the north were our friends, maybe even family, and certainly our allies. We could collaborate, share ideas, and occasionally learn a thing or two from each other. They have some institutions I wish would migrate and propagate a bit south of the border.
The National Film Board of Canada is one of them. Created in 1939, the NFB doesn’t merely help other people finance movies. It has a public mandate to produce and distribute films. Its work has helped generations of Canadians encounter their country’s different communities, histories, perspectives, and possibilities. Wow. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something like that down here?
I would love to see an American National Film Board with the ability to commission, produce, and circulate work that deserves a cultural life even when its immediate commercial prospects are uncertain. Particularly when they are uncertain. And not a government propaganda machine. Or another institution whose chief accomplishment is constructing an elaborate application process. I’m imagining a public filmmaking institution with a commitment to artistic freedom, a wide range of American voices, experimentation, and the continuing availability of the work it helps create.
We should study the Canadian institution’s successes and failures, including how its mandate and funding have evolved. The United States already has a rich collection of public and nonprofit cultural organizations. A new board would need to complement their work rather than compete with them for resources simply to duplicate what they do. Still, what would it mean for America to acknowledge that helping communities tell their stories, encounter one another’s experiences, and preserve those perspectives has value in itself? I find that possibility pretty damn exciting.
Public Investment Shouldn’t Require Official Approval Of The Art
Of course, any discussion of government support brings us to an uncomfortable question: who gets to decide what deserves funding?
Governments likely would be even worse than studio executives in advising filmmakers what to write and how to write it. We would need genuine separation between political authority and artistic selection, transparent criteria, rotating and diverse evaluation groups, meaningful appeals, and protections for people whose work challenges prevailing taste or political power. There would have to be public accountability for how money is spent without allowing officials to dictate what the resulting art must say. That’s a difficult cocktail to mix. Bottoms up, chum.
The important distinction is between supporting artistic expression and controlling it. Our existing National Endowment for the Arts provides a foundation for imagining broader cultural investment. Or at least it did before this current administration. The NEA had a Film & Media Arts grant category. We are not starting from zero. What might become possible if cinema were considered part of a sustained national cultural strategy rather than a collection of relatively disconnected initiatives. But existing institutions don’t eliminate the need for a larger cultural strategy. Nor does the possibility of political interference make the ambition less important. Particularly in the current climate, it makes the safeguards more important.
Perhaps this belongs on the Future Film Coalition’s agenda. Hey, whaddayathink?
Why do we require the marketplace to solely determine our cultural future?
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