France’s National Film Board (CNC) has launched a new strategy to increase the profile of French films and talent entering the Oscar race.
The new strategy, announced at a conference on film and TV exports at the CNC on Monday, will see the government-backed agency double financial aid to campaigns. CNC has also appointed Sébastien Cauchon as responsible for the “Academy Awards”. In this newly created role, Cauchon will spearhead the “Minotaur” campaign.
France hasn’t won an international feature award since Régis Wargnier’s “Indochine” took the honor in 1993; but with a record 43 nominations, it received more nominations than any other country.
The executive, who recently founded Paris-based consultancy Cinema Collectors, enters the role on the heels of the Oscar-winning campaign for Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh’s “Two People Exchange Saliva.” Other awards work includes Mubi serving as consultant and international publicist for Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” campaign, as well as long-running collaborations with Florian Zeller, including the two-Oscar winning “The Father.”
Speaking at the conference on Monday, Cauchon said France had been relatively slow to adopt this type of special reward strategy.
“Awards strategist is a profession that is not very common in France, or even Europe,” Cauchon said, describing the job as combining promotion, marketing and influence to ensure films and talent are seen by Academy members and remain on voters’ radar throughout the race.
The broader goal for CNC is to move beyond France’s traditional focus on the international feature film category and better coordinate campaigns in the directing, acting, writing and craft categories.
“In France we sometimes focus too much on the best international film category,” Cauchon said. “But our productions and talent are so diverse that we are much more broadly represented across all categories.” For example, many French films that have achieved great success 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”, could not represent France in the Oscar race.
This year, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Cannes Grand Prize winner “Minotaur” (Mubi) will represent France, but other films shortlisted by the French committee may also be nominated; particularly Marine Atlan’s Cannes Critics’ Week winner “La Gradiva” (12 Specials), Louis Clichy’s animated film “Iron Boy” (SPC), which won the Cannes Un Certain Regard award, and Antonin Baudry’s film. “De Gaulle” (Samuel Goldwyn Films). There is also Lea Seydoux, who has two movies under her belt: “The Unknown” by Arthur Harari (Neon) and “Gentle Monster” by Marie Kreutzer (Netflix).
CNC’s new approach will aim to pool resources and work with U.S. distributors early in the process.
Tensions between France’s cultural standing and an increasingly competitive global market continued at Monday’s conference; Here French film and TV figures warned that the country’s international standing could no longer be taken for granted. Figures compiled by CNC and released last month during Unifrance’s event in Le Havre showed that international sales of French audiovisual programs fell 21.6% to 164.3 million euros ($190.8 million); this is the lowest level in a decade.
CNC president Gaëtan Bruel noted that France still remains the third most represented country after the US and the UK in terms of content broadcast on linear TV worldwide in 2025, but so far the country has not achieved the same success on broadcast platforms.
“We spent years celebrating our rightful place in television’s top 100 fiction rankings, without realizing that we were losing the streaming war,” Bruel said. He noted the contrasting performances of countries such as Spain and South Korea, where local programming accounts for a much larger share of streaming consumption.
“To put it bluntly, Spanish Netflix subscribers watch Spanish series before American series,” Bruel said. “French subscribers watch American TV series first, followed by Spanish and Korean TV series more than French TV series.”
Speaking of Korea and Spain, he said they were “smaller markets that were forced to think internationally from the very beginning because their local industries could not sustain production on their own.”
France, on the other hand, has long relied on its own market thanks to its “unusually robust internal financing, production and distribution system.”
“This is a huge power and of course there is no giving it up. But I think this power explains why we need less than others to think internationally from the very beginning of projects. This is what needs to develop now, because the world has changed,” Bruel said.
UniFrance president Gilles Pélisson similarly warned that the rise of tech giants, streaming platforms and artificial intelligence are fundamentally reshaping the balance of power facing European content producers.
“The tech giants, which are more or less publishers depending on the company, are seizing power,” Pélisson said. “And all of this is happening in the context of the evolution of artificial intelligence, which is affecting absolutely every industry.”
Working with Unifrance’s respected chief executive Daniel Elstner, Pélisson called on France to renew its export support plans, including funds for film, television and short films, as well as aid to foreign distributors releasing French films.
“We must think wider than our French territory,” he said. “Foreign distributors are of course our allies. How can we continue to support them? We probably need to think about creating new forms of support.”
According to Pélisson, one of the industry’s most pressing battles concerns data. He argued that publishers’ reluctance to share detailed viewing data is directly linked to the economic value of the works they carry.
“Today, data is the key to the value of work. And that’s why, oddly enough, platforms have such a hard time sharing data. Of course it does; that’s exactly what determines the value of our work and the value of your work.”
French sales agents, meanwhile, said France already has one of the strongest international dealer networks in the world handling major non-French festival films; for example, MK2 Films with “Minotaur”, Goodfellas with “La Bola Negra” and “Fjord”, and Charades with “Club Kid”.
“We have the best, densest and most effective export network in France. Producers from all over the world come to France to sell their films,” said Pierre Mazars, co-founder of Charades, which sold “Club Kid” to A24 in Cannes, among other films.
But Mazars, who also co-chairs the French exporters’ association ADEF, warned that these companies should be encouraged to take risks on French films.
“The truth, we have to say, is that it is more attractive for exporters to sell a foreign film within the ecosystem than to sell a French film. The system is not incentive enough for us to sell French films,” Mazars said.
He said French dealers were increasingly being asked to provide significant minimum guarantees, while international rivals such as the UK were introducing plans aimed at reducing these risks.
Mazars also called on France to explore ways to attract private capital into film financing, citing MK2’s partnership with IPR.VC, a fund manager based in Helsinki and London, as a possible model.
“I think there is work to be done between exporters, CNC and perhaps Bpifrance to bring private equity funds into French cinema. We all know the difficulties that producers have in financing their films,” he said.
SND sales manager and ADEF co-chair Clara Flageollet Schmit said the roles of international sales agents have also changed dramatically as they take on more financial risk in the earlier stages of production.
“We are no longer just intermediaries. Today we are real financiers of cinema, especially French cinema. We get involved in projects increasingly earlier, sometimes from the development stage,” he said. “We also participate in casting and often give increasingly significant minimum guarantees for the first and second films.”
Preliminary figures from UniFrance suggest French films should reach around 42.5 million viewers and €272 million in international box office revenue in 2025, while Flageollet Schmit said the industry remains around 26% below pre-pandemic levels even as the cost of doing business has increased.
“It is becoming increasingly complex to accompany films abroad, especially French films, in which we are increasingly investing,” he said. “Supporting risk means supporting investment, supporting investment means supporting international growth.”