France Boosts Oscar Campaign Support as Industry Sounds Alarm Over Exports

France’s National Film Board (CNC) has rolled out a new strategy to boost the profile of French movies and talent navigating the Oscar race.

Unveiled during a conference on film and TV exports held at the CNC on Monday, the new strategy will see the government-back organization double the financial aid granted to campaigns. The CNC has also appointed Sébastien Cauchon as its “Academy Awards” liaison. Under this newly created role, Cauchon will spearhead the campaign for “Minotaur.”

France has not won the international feature prize since Régis Wargnier’s “Indochine” took the honor in 1993, despite boasting a record 43 nominations, more than any other country.

The exec, who recently founded the Paris-based consultancy Cinema Collectors, comes into the role fresh off the Oscar-winning campaign forn Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh’s “Two People Exchanging Saliva.” His other awards work includes serving as a consultant and international publicist on Mubi’s campaign for Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance,” as well as a longstanding collaboration with Florian Zeller that included “The Father,” which won two Oscars.

Speaking at Monday’s conference, Cauchon said France has been relatively slow to embrace the kind of specialized awards strategy.

“An awards strategist is a profession that isn’t very widespread in France, or even in Europe,” Cauchon said, describing the job as combining publicity, marketing and influence to make sure films and talent are seen by Academy members and stay on voters’ radar throughout the race.

For the CNC, the broader goal is also to move beyond France’s traditional focus on the international feature category and better coordinate campaigns across directing, acting, screenplay and craft categories.

“In France, we sometimes focus a lot on the best international film category,” Cauchon said. “But we have such a diversity of productions and talent that we’re represented much more broadly across all the categories.” Case in point, many French movies that thrived in the awards season in recent years, from Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” to Florian Zeller’s “The Father,” Gints Zilbalodis’s “Flow,” and Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” did not represent France in the Oscar race.

This year, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Cannes Grand Prize winner “Minotaur” (Mubi) will represent France, but other films that were shortlisted by the French committee could turn up in nominations, notably Marine Atlan’s Cannes Critics Week winner “La Gradiva” (1 2 Special), Louis Clichy’s animated feature “Iron Boy” (SPC) which won a prize at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, and Antonin Baudry’s “De Gaulle” (Samuel Goldwyn Films). There’s also Lea Seydoux with two movies, “The Unknown” by Arthur Harari (Neon), and “Gentle Monster” by Marie Kreutzer (Netflix).

The CNC’s new approach will aim at pooling resources earlier in the process and work alongside U.S. distributors.

That tension between France’s cultural standing and the increasingly competitive global marketplace ran through Monday’s conference, where French film and TV figures warned that the country’s international position can no longer be taken for granted. Figures compiled by the CNC and unveiled last month during Unifrance‘s event in Le Havre showed that international sales of French audiovisual programs dropped 21.6% to €164.3 million ($190.8 million) — the lowest level in a decade.

CNC president Gaëtan Bruel pointed out France still remained in 2025 the third most represented country after the U.S. and U.K. in terms of content broadcast on linear TV worldwide, but the country has so far failed to achieve the same level of success on streaming platforms.

“We’ve spent years, rightly, celebrating the fact that we fill the top 100 fiction rankings on television, without seeing that we were losing the streaming battle,” Bruel said. He noted the contrasting performances of countries such as Spain and South Korea, where local programming commands a much larger share of streaming consumption.

“To put it clearly, Spanish Netflix subscribers watch Spanish series first, ahead of American ones,” Bruel said. “French subscribers watch American series first, and then more Spanish and Korean series than French ones.”

Speaking of Korea and Spain, he said there were “smaller markets that were forced to think internationally from the outset because their domestic industries could not sustain production on their own.”

France, on the other hand, has relied on its own market for a long time thanks to its “unusually robust internal system of financing, production and distribution.”

“That’s an immense strength and there is obviously no question of abandoning it. But I think that strength explains why we have had less need than others to think internationally from the very beginning of projects. That is what now has to evolve, because the world has changed,” Bruel said.

UniFrance president Gilles Pélisson similarly warned that the rise of tech giants, streaming platforms and AI had fundamentally reshaped the balance of power facing European content producers.

“The tech giants, which are now publishers — more or less, depending on the company — are taking power,” Pélisson said. “And all of this is happening in the context of the evolution of AI, which is impacting absolutely every sector.”

Pélisson, who works alongside Unifrance’s well respected managing director Daniel Elstner, called for France to revamp export support schemes, including funds for film, television and shorts, as well as assistance for foreign distributors who release French works.

“We have to think more broadly than our French territory,” he said. “Foreign distributors are obviously allies. How do we continue supporting them? We probably need to think about creating new forms of support.”

For Pélisson, one of the industry’s most pressing battles is over data. Streamers’ reluctance to share detailed viewing data, he argued, is directly tied to the economic value of the works they carry.

“Data today is the underlying key to the value of works. And that’s why, strangely enough, the platforms have so much difficulty sharing data. Of course they do — it’s exactly what determines the value of our works and the value of your works.”

French sales agents, meanwhile, said France already boasts one of the strongest networks of international sellers in the world who are handling major non-French festival titles, for instance MK2 Films with “Minotaur,” Goodfellas with “La Bola Negra” and “Fjord,” and Charades with “Club Kid.”

“We have in France the best, densest and most effective export network. Producers from all over the world come to France to have their films sold,” said Pierre Mazars, co-founder of Charades which sold “Club Kid” to A24 at Cannes, among other films.

Yet, Mazars, who also co-presides over the French exporters association ADEF, warned that those companies need to be incentivized take risks on French movies.

“The reality, and we have to say it, is that for exporters it is often more attractive within the ecosystem to sell a foreign film than a French film. The system isn’t sufficiently incentivizing for us to sell French films,” Mazars.

French sellers, he said, are increasingly being asked to put up sizable minimum guarantees while international competitors, such as in the U.K., are introducing schemes aimed at reducing those risks.

Mazars also called on France to explore ways of attracting private equity into film financing, citing MK2’s partnership with IPR.VC, a Helsinki and London-based fund manager, as one possible model.

“I think there is work to be done between exporters, the CNC and perhaps Bpifrance to bring private equity funds into French cinema. We all know the difficulties producers have financing their films,“ he said.

Clara Flageollet Schmit, sales manager at SND and ADEF’s co-president, said the role of international sales agents themselves has changed dramatically as they take on more financial exposure at ever earlier stages of production.

“We’re no longer simply intermediaries. Today we’re real financiers of cinema, and particularly French cinema. We’re getting involved earlier and earlier in projects, sometimes from the development stage,” she said. “We also participate in casting, and we’re putting up increasingly substantial minimum guarantees, often on first and second films.”

While preliminary UniFrance figures suggest French films should reach around 42.5 million admissions and €272 million in international box office revenue in 2025, Flageollet Schmit said the sector remains roughly 26% below pre-pandemic levels while the cost of doing business has soared.

“It’s becoming increasingly complicated to accompany films abroad, particularly French films, where we’re investing more and more,” she said. “Supporting risk means supporting investment, and supporting investment means supporting international growth.”