Breaking through the East-European Ceiling: Minority Co-production and the New Symbolic Economy of Small-Market Cinemas

Abstract

This chapter combines questions about the structural position that minority co-production occupies within the Czech screen industry ecology and about local producers as its key agency. It starts with a picture of minority co-production vis-à-vis other international “production technologies” and with reconstructing producers’ cautionary discourse on majority co-production. After providing basic structural industry and policy analysis, it switches to day-to-day collaborative processes as seen by the local independent producers, focusing on their strategic thinking and lived realities. It asks about the role of knowledge transfer and symbolic capital accumulation on one hand, and about the new power hierarchies and barriers emerging from such transnational production contexts on the other.