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 European films with MEDIA support are strongly represented at this year’s 78th Oscars. All in all, there are five MEDIA supported films nominated for one of the prestigious golden statues which will be awarded on Sunday, 5 March 2006, in Hollywood.
 Three out of the five films nominated for the Oscar in the Best Foreign Film category have received MEDIA support: Merry Christmas, Paradise Now and Sophie Scholl - The Final Days. Merry Christmas, a four country European co-production with a truly European cast, including Daniel Brühl, Guillaume Canet, Diane Krüger, Gary Lewis, Benno Fürmann and Dany Boon, was distributed in cinemas across Europe with support from the MEDIA selective scheme.
PARADISE NOW Paradise Now, the Palestinian entry, is a Dutch/French/German co-production and received financial support from MEDIA’s i2i scheme for independent production companies who raise money through bank discounting. Sophie Scholl – The Final Days has been sold to ten countries across Europe and its P & A campaign has been supported by MEDIA’s selective scheme. It was distributed in the UK by ICA Projects. Luc Jacquet’s box-office success, March of the Penguins, has been nominated for Best Documentary Feature and also received MEDIA support. BRITISH MATCH POINT The British film Match Point, directed by Woody Allen and distributed in 14 European countries with support from MEDIA’s selective scheme, is nominated for Best Original Screenplay. The nominations of these movies for the Oscars underline not only the vitality of the European film industry, but also the importance and success of the European MEDIA programme – aimed at supporting the European film industry. Besides these three fiction movies, two other MEDIA supported films, the French March of the Penguins and the Austrian-Belgian co-production Darwin’s Nightmare, have been nominated in the category Best Documentary Feature. VITAL INDUSTRY SUPPORT The current MEDIA-programmes, MEDIA Training and MEDIA plus, run from 2001 to 2006 and have a budget of 513 Million Euros. According to the European Commission the MEDIA Programmes remain of vital importance to the European audiovisual sector. In 2005, MEDIA invested 100 million Euros in European cinema, in the fields of training, of development, of distribution and of promotion. Last year, among other actions, MEDIA financed more than 1.500 distribution projects, enabling European films to be seen outside their territory of origin. For the EU’s financial period 2007-2013, the European Commission has suggested doubling the budget of the follow-up programme, MEDIA 2007, to more than 1 billion Euros.
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