Moreover, the concern about expanding the film production evaluation system has been raised at the highest level. In 2021, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, following a meeting of the Government Council for the Development of National Cinematography, instructed the Ministry of Culture, together with the Cinema Fund and the professional community to finalize the National Cinematography Development Concept until 2030, including the need to establish indicators of its effectiveness[18].
The government, of course, will be ready to provide financial, administrative and legal support. But as soon as the state subsidy has been received, the producer works in a market environment. <> And the result should be not in how much money was used, but in the box office and an assessment of the impact the film had on the society. <> Lets have a rating for this, lets see. Because Im sure there are movies that wont bring any dividends or revenue, but can have such a great impact on people that we will all heartily support it. And the state will support it, Mishustin said.
During the meeting, Minister of Culture Olga Lyubimova emphasized that the Ministrys task is to develop the art of cinema. The Cinema Fund, on the other hand, is focused on supporting big-budget entertainment projects. In this regard, the department is interested in debut films, auteur cinema, social impact films, childrens cinema, documentary and popular science films and auteur animation.
The need to develop qualitative assessment methods to evaluate the content created, the fact that the film industry is not only about numbers and money, but also about producing behavioral experience and value systems, was emphasized at the meeting by Fedor Sosnov, the Russian Cinema Funds Executive Director, Leonid Vereshchagin, General Director of Nikita Mikhalkovs TriTe Studio, and Konstantin Ernst, General Director of Channel One Russia[19].
IMPACT FACTOR TODAY
The relevance of social impact of a film as its success criteria is receiving more and more attention, and everyone seems to be coming to realization that social impact is just as important as the quantitative indicators. There is a clear understanding that this assessment format is becoming a trend to focus on.
We talked to key experts in film production about the prospects for the development of impact assessment in the domestic film market.
Olga Zhukova, Executive Director of the Association of Film and Television Producers (APKiT), believes it is difficult to predict at the script stage, what the impact of a film project on the audience will be like. Likewise, you can predict your box office receipts, but this forecast will not necessarily be close to the actual performance in the theaters. Im all for impact assessment, Olga Zhukova agrees, but the right tools must be chosen for it. In my opinion, it is not enough to take the entire target audience of a film project and assume that 20 % of these people will definitely be affected, in terms of change of attitudes or change of behavior patterns. In her opinion, assessment will only be objective if there is a baseline measurement of audience with the right sampling. Moreover, it is important to perform social impact assessment in specific groups a qualitative study with a baseline measurement, a display of some content, and then a discussion and a follow-up measurement perhaps not right away, but after some time.
The expert explains: This can be done by mixed-method research (qualitative and quantitative): determine which pictures are considered to be socially significant by the experts, take a sampling of the target audience and show them the film. This will give a good understanding the effect produced. The Russian film market certainly looks promising, and the need for impact assessment is certainly there, so it is important to measure the baseline attitudes in the society towards certain social phenomena.
The Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, in addition to the traditional areas, has also launched a competition to support social impact films quite some time ago. At the same time, you cannot find a definition of this type of films in any legal documents, and having a clear understanding of the terms is vital, given the situation, says Galina Sytsko, producer, head of the Social Programs Department of the Roscongress Foundation, lecturer at Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), and former Deputy Director of the Department of Cinema and Digital Development of the Ministry of Culture.
Currently the state support is segmented there are areas of support for entertainment films made for commercial distribution; auteur cinema the so-called art of cinema, where the skill level prevails over the commercial potential; documentary film; animation. Social impact films can fall under any of these categories, so allocating them under a separate segment, as done by the Ministry of culture, is, according to the expert, more of a PR move, focusing on the fact that the films receiving state support must produce a certain impact on the society.
I think the most obvious assessment property of social impact cinema is the audience size. We are not concerned about revenue generated, or awards given the key is that as many people as possible watch the film, and, more often than not, its about a specific target audience. And unlike entertainment and auteur films, the success of which is determined in the first weeks and months of its life, the influence of social impact films can be assessed after a very long time. Probably the best example is the film Doctor Lisa it gathered a huge audience, and the Fair Help foundation has confirmed that hundreds of people joined them as volunteers after seeing the picture, Galina Sytsko says.
The President and the Government of the Russian Federation regularly give orders for systemic support of films dedicated to socially impactful topics, and for development of the National Cinematography Development Concept. The drafts of the Concept focus heavily on the issues of support and assessment of socially important content, but because all the KPIs have become unpredictable since February 2022, Galina Sytsko believes we should not expect the Concept to be adopted any time soon. Moreover, the thesis about increasing state support for cinematography is quite debatable, because while formally the funds allocated by the state are indeed increasing, these efforts are in fact aimed not at making more films, but rather at preventing a drop in their numbers. Theres always inflation, rising production costs, catastrophic losses of the film industry in the years of the pandemic and a further drop last year, the problems of attracting extra-budgetary funding, equipment, supplies, software and unpredictable currency exchange rates, the expert explains.
We can definitely be confident about the feasibility of assessing the impact of childrens cinema, because in this case, we could and should use the tools from pedagogy and child psychology. In addition, this year there will be a significant change in the system the maximum public funding limit of childrens films will be raised from 70 % to 100 %. Accordingly, producers will no longer have to be concerned about economic performance, so we are hoping there will be more high quality films aimed specifically at children. But since the film production cycle is 23 years, the effect of this law will not become clear until 2026.