Young European Filmmakers Are Slipping Through the Cracks of a Broken Funding System

A new study from the University of Vienna has put hard empirical evidence behind a frustration long whispered on film sets and in festival queues across Europe: the people who make the continent’s cinema are being filtered out not by talent, but by bureaucracy, money and connections. In-depth interviews with 27 young filmmakers aged 18 to 35, conducted in eight European countries between January 2024 and March 2025, reveal a system in which the very instruments designed to nurture emerging talent—European and national film funds, diversity schemes and training programmes—routinely exclude the people they claim to serve. The researchers, publishing in the European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, argue that the exclusion of young filmmakers is not merely a market failure but a structural failure of governance, one that risks narrowing the demographic range of voices in European film for years to come.

The study, led by Katharine Sarikakis and colleagues at the University of Vienna’s Department of Communication, was conducted within the REBOOT project on European film competitiveness, funded under the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme. Participants came from Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Ukraine, and worked across directing, producing, editing, screenwriting, acting and film promotion. The researchers combined focus groups and semi-structured interviews, each lasting 40 to 60 minutes and producing 295 pages of transcription, with a short survey to map demographic patterns. The analysis followed an inductive thematic approach, and the team was deliberately reflexive about its own position: three of the five researchers fall within the same age bracket as their participants, and one is a young filmmaker herself.

What emerged from the transcripts is a portrait of an industry whose entry points are governed less by merit than by access to financial capital and informal networks. Over half of the respondents cited involvement in independent projects and on-the-job learning or apprenticeships as their primary route into the industry, while only 11 participants had formal film education as their point of contact. When asked about initial support, 19 of the 27 said they had relied on family or friends, and 15 on industry networking opportunities. Just three participants had obtained governmental funding or grants. The pattern is stark: the resources that should, in principle, be distributed through public policy are in practice distributed through private relationships and personal wealth.

The interviews document the human cost of this filtering with uncomfortable precision. One director described waiting nearly five years after graduation for her first directing job, recalling that during her studies “the worst fears of nobody being interested simply came true.” A producer described working in a supermarket after finishing his degree and only finding a foothold in the industry when a post-pandemic production boom opened temporary gaps. An editor reported that peers on university internships earned 420 or 450 euros at best, and that most were not paid at all. Others described working days of 10 to 16 hours without compensation that covered basic living expenses, treating exhaustion as the entry fee to a career.

The most quoted voice in the study belongs to a producer who identifies as autistic and who gave the paper its title. “I feel like I slip through the cracks,” he said. “The criteria are so tight. For example, there is support for non-academics—that is not me. There are many programmes for women—that is not me either. Diversity and minorities are considered, and I present myself as an autistic filmmaker, but there is no lobby for that yet, at least not in my country. I honestly do not know how I can finance my work.” The researchers read this not as an anomaly but as evidence that current diversity frameworks lack the nuance to address intersectional identities, leaving individuals who fall between categories without any route to support.

That sense of falling between categories extends to the funding architecture itself. The European Union operates an elaborate apparatus for the audiovisual sector: the Creative Europe programme and its MEDIA strand, the Audiovisual Media Services Directive requiring on-demand platforms to carry at least 30 percent European works, the Cinema Communication allowing member states to fund culturally significant works, and the Media and Audiovisual Action Plan launched in December 2020. Between 2016 and 2019, direct public funding accounted for an average of 26.3 percent of European film budgets, and 91.7 percent of films received some form of direct public sponsorship. Yet the young filmmakers in the study described Creative Europe funding as perceived to be intended for bigger productions, its application procedures opaque and its co-financing requirements prohibitive. “The requirements are crazy, and it’s scary, so it repels people from attempting to get those funding,” one young producer said. “As a young producer, all I want is just a place where I can go, I say, this is what I have, this is the message I want to show, how can you help?”

The data on remuneration reinforce the picture. Among audiovisual directors in Europe aged under 35, less than 20 percent had received full remuneration for project development, less than 30 percent for pre-production, and less than 20 percent for promotion, according to figures cited in the study. Among emerging screenwriters, only around 20 percent were fully paid for project development and roughly 10 percent for writing on their own initiative. Previous research cited by the authors found that over 80 percent of young creatives had performed unpaid labour within a two-year research period, a considerable share of it illegal. Against this backdrop, the study’s finding that 19 of 27 participants regarded unpaid internships or low-pay opportunities as necessary stepping stones—while simultaneously naming financial constraints as their biggest challenge—illustrates how thoroughly such conditions have been normalised as an unquestionable component of career progression.

The researchers frame this normalisation through the concept of precarity under post-Fordist labour regimes, in which the risks of freelance, project-based work are shifted entirely onto the individual. The “catch-22” their participants describe—needing connections to get work, but needing work to build connections—is, they argue, not a logistical accident but a structural mechanism of exclusion that reproduces the dominance of white, middle-class men in the screen industries, a pattern documented in both European and Hollywood contexts. Female participants described gendered power dynamics on set, feeling intimidated in technical roles, and being hired to satisfy gender expectations while men still secured the large-budget productions. “If you look at who does the big budget film in this country, it is still the men,” one director said. “I think you get projects but not the same projects that men get.”

The study also documents a persistent disjuncture between policy intention and lived experience. EU initiatives nominally aim to support emerging talent and diversity, and Creative Europe co-funded 16 platforms highlighting emerging artists between 2021 and 2023, paying over 1,000 artists for around 7,000 days of work between 2017 and 2020. Yet participants reported that national funds, where they existed, were more accessible than European ones, and that citizenship or residency requirements created funding disparities between countries and restricted cross-border collaboration. Some called for smaller, less bureaucratic grants of around 50,000 euros specifically for emerging filmmakers and pan-European productions; others asked for diversity quotas, youth representation on funding committees, mentorship programmes and film education in schools. One participant argued the EU should foster “artistic innovation, rather than wide audiences and profit-oriented productions.”

The authors’ conclusion is deliberately pointed: public policy and funding mechanisms alone will not fix a system whose problems are rooted in industry practice. They argue the film sector should treat emerging talent as its future leaders, with advancement guided by creative vision rather than a strictly linear climb based on age and experience, and they warn that if “life-friendly” conditions do not materialise, talented people will simply leave. The stakes extend beyond individual careers. Young audiences, research suggests, prefer authentic storytelling that showcases diverse voices, and a homogenised industry risks growing detached from the very audiences it needs to survive. Without targeted governance reforms that simplify access and address intersectional barriers, the study warns, the European film industry will keep filtering out the diverse worldviews that make its output worth watching—leaving a generation of skilled filmmakers, in the words of one participant, to conclude that “in the end, it all comes down to money.”

Subject of Research: Governance gaps and precarity among young filmmakers entering the European film industry

Article Title: “I feel like I slip through the cracks”: governance gaps and the precarity of young filmmakers in Europe

Article References: Sarikakis, K., Chatziefraimidou, A., Haslauer, S., Ramadani, G., & Yeroshkina, M. (2026). “I feel like I slip through the cracks”: governance gaps and the precarity of young filmmakers in Europe. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 16, Article 16374. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16374

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16374

Keywords: young filmmakers, European film industry, precarity, Creative Europe, film funding, governance gaps, cultural industries, meritocracy, diversity, unpaid labour, intersectionality, University of Vienna