France boosts Oscar campaign support amid export concerns

France’s National Centre for Cinema (CNC) has doubled financial support for Oscar campaigns and appointed awards strategist Sébastien Cauchon as its “Academy Awards” liaison as the country seeks to strengthen the global profile of its films and talent.

The new strategy, unveiled at a CNC conference on film and television exports on Monday, will see Cauchon lead the Oscar campaign for Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur,” which is representing France in this year’s international feature race. The CNC also aims to coordinate campaigns more effectively across acting, directing, screenplay and technical categories rather than focusing primarily on the international feature category.

France has not won the international feature Oscar since Régis Wargnier’s “Indochine” in 1993, despite receiving a record 43 nominations in the category. Cauchon said France has been relatively slow to adopt specialised awards strategies, while noting that French films and talent have recently performed strongly across other Oscar categories.

The CNC’s move comes as France’s audiovisual industry faces declining international sales. CNC figures showed that overseas sales of French audiovisual programmes fell 21.6% to €164.3 million ($190.8 million), the lowest level in a decade.

CNC President Gaëtan Bruel said France remained the third-most represented country globally on linear television in 2025, after the United States and United Kingdom, but had struggled to achieve comparable success on streaming platforms. He said France’s strong domestic financing and production system had reduced the industry’s need to think internationally from the early stages of projects.

Unifrance President Gilles Pélisson also called for reforms to export-support schemes, warning that technology companies, streaming platforms and artificial intelligence were reshaping the global content market. He urged greater support for foreign distributors and stressed the importance of access to streaming data.

French sales agents meanwhile warned that the industry needed stronger incentives to promote domestic films internationally. Pierre Mazars, co-president of the French exporters association ADEF, said exporters often found foreign films more commercially attractive because the existing system did not sufficiently reduce the risks of selling French productions.

Preliminary UniFrance figures indicate French films could generate about 42.5 million international admissions and €272 million in overseas box-office revenue in 2025. However, sales executives said the sector remains about 26% below pre-pandemic levels while the cost of international distribution has risen sharply.

- MaT