Duncan Roberts: In November, a year later than planned, we will finally get to celebrate the local film industry at the Filmpräis awards. How has the delay affected the event?

It was difficult because the main activity of the Filmakademie is to organise the Filmpräis every two years. And, of course, as the new president, I was looking forward to celebrating film--it’s a great event. But the delay gave us a chance to make a whole lot of changes that we had already planned. Also, because it's at the end of the year, we will be able to invite a lot of people and, hopefully, it will be a festive event.

You mentioned the changes, which include a new voting system to select the final nominees. Why that particular change?

Because it needed to be done. I mean, all the academies in Europe, and even the Oscars, work with this two-tier system. Before, we had a selection committee that decided who was nominated. And then, the members voted. And, you know, Luxembourg is small and everybody is involved in everything, so there was one production here or there, where someone [on the committee] might be involved, and you never get rid of this suspicion… And also, the new system allows us to give more power to the members.

It actually makes it more competitive, because now, after the first round, we have a maximum of five nominees. Before, we had categories where, in the last round, you sometimes had 14 nominees.

You have also introduced some new categories, including for Best Music. Does this reflect a growing pool of talent making music for films in the grand duchy?

There used to be a Best Music prize a long time ago sponsored by [music copyright agency] Sacem. I mean, the best score was since included in the best artistic contribution prize… But when we saw that we have enough potential nominees, we thought, let's do this now. And it’s nice to slim down the Best Artistic Contribution category, which already includes sound engineers, set designers, costumes, hair, makeup, script writers…

And you split the Best Acting prize into gender categories…

Yeah, that's interesting, because there's a discussion in other festivals about whether they should bring the acting prizes together. We had a discussion with Actors.lu [the association of actors and actresses] and they decided this is what they want.

We have seen several co-productions winning prestigious international awards over the past two years. Do you think this year’s Filmpräis will be the best ever in terms of quality of the nominees?

I think it has been an incredible the last two years. If you look at the selection this year, in most categories, we have very high quality. I mean, we have seven [purely] Luxembourg productions where, in the past, we sometimes only had two or three. Look at the level of co-productions and animation, it’s a very good vintage, I think.

The last Filmpräis ceremony in 2018 became quite political, with several recipients calling on the government to provide more support for the industry in Luxembourg. Has the government’s response been satisfactory?

Of course. I mean, the budget was increased. But one victim of that was that the studios planned for Dudelange are not going to be a built. It was a battle, because there were tensions between the minister [Xavier Bettel is responsible for the audiovisual industry] and the sector. They won and got the increase in budget, but the minister said ‘I can't do everything’. So it's a question of what was more important…

 This article first appeared in the November 2021 edition of .