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  • State Support System for Film Production in Modern Russia and Reasons for Its Inefficiency: Data-Journalistic Investigation

State Support System for Film Production in Modern Russia and Reasons for Its Inefficiency: Data-Journalistic Investigation

Student: Bukina Ekaterina

Supervisor: Tina Berezhnaya

Faculty: Faculty of Creative Industries

Educational Programme: Data Journalism (Master)

Final Grade: 9

Year of Graduation: 2020

The topic "State Support System for Film Production in Modern Russia and Reasons for Its Inefficiency: Data-Journalistic Investigation" is a study of the system of governmental subsidies for film producers, which is based on legal documents, research on the topic, interviewing experts, and open data. The purpose of the study is to identify factors that have had a negative impact on the system of state financing of Russian film production. This study presents two working hypotheses. The first working hypothesis is that the lack of transparency of reporting, imperfect legislation, and conflicts of interest are the main reasons for the ineffectiveness of state support for Russian cinema. The second working hypothesis supposes that expert commissions do not have sufficient competence, as a result, funds are allocated for projects with low creative. Within the framework of the study, the following tasks were set: 1. to analyze the dynamics of changes in the system of state financing of film production in modern Russia; 2. to study the criteria that determine the system of state financing of film production in modern Russia, and assess their effectiveness; 3. to find and process open data related to state financing of film production in Russia; 4. to get expert comments on the processed data; 5. to create a media project based on the results of the study. Within the framework of this research, we analyzed the Provisions, Orders and other regulatory documents of the Government of the Russian Federation and the Ministry of culture related to the support of national cinema. The documents and the Charter of the cinema Foundation were also analyzed. After examining official documents, we were able to see the dynamics of changes in state support for the film industry and identify a number of factors that have a negative impact on the process of subsidizing. First, the high dynamics of changes in the regulatory framework and the level of autonomy of the Fund has deprived the system of a clear structure, which makes it difficult to understand the tasks of each of the participants in the subsidy process. Secondly, the priority of the bureaucracy over the creative potential of films entails the financing of films that are not commercially successful or are not talented (the effectiveness of the film Fund and the Ministry of culture is determined not by the quality of films, but by the number of grants issued). The methodology for selecting projects is questionable: according to the official rules of the film Foundation, the right to subsidize gets a picture that during the competition was able to get more than 1 point out of ten possible. Third, the subsidy system is not transparent, and much of the decision-making process remains unknown (for example, it is not known who selects the first scenarios, and who makes the final decision about allocating money). In the course of the investigation, open data from the EAIS database, Kinopoisk, and the film distributor's Bulletin were collected, sorted, and processed. The data was interpreted and transformed into an infographic accompanying the investigation. In this Chapter, we have identified the area of topics for interviewing experts, worked out the structure of the investigation and created a long read based on it. We also prescribed the media project blocks, its UX and UI design, and came up with a number of ideas for multimedia illustration. The result of this work is a data-journalistic investigation in the format of a media project, performed on the Tilda platform.

Full text (added May 12, 2020)

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