TRE SNABBA: Nostradamus 2025

Den senaste Nostradamus rapporten släpptes i Cannes i förra veckan. Hillevi Gustafson summerar tre insikter som hon tar med sig framåt. 

The annual Nostradamus report was launched at an event at the Marché du Film in Cannes on May 19^th where the author, media analyst Johanna Koljonen, presented the findings as well has hosted a panel discussion with two of the interviewees. BoostHBG is one of the key partners of the project and has supported both the writing of the report as well as the establishment of the Nostradamus Collective. This is an initiative to ensure that the insights of the report are shared in the industry and create opportunities for real world impact. (You can read more about the Collective’s first event at Göteborg filmfestival 2025 here) The report, titled Reality/Resistance, can be found here and I encourage you to take the time to read it in its entirety. As always, the report is based on interviews with industry insiders who look at the structural challenges and opportunities facing the film industry moving forward. There is a lot to dig into from the report and here are three things that really stuck with me:

1. You cannot ignore reality. The film industry is built, in part, on the collective delusions of thousands of optimists who believe against all odds that they can will their project into existence. Filmmakers have always had to be, as the report puts it, both ‘reality-resistant dreamers and hard-working, agile realists’ and the currant uncertain landscape makes that even more true. There are many things that we do not want to believe that we, as an industry, have a hard time grappling with because of this refusal. We do not want to believe that audiences might prefer a small screen to a cinema experience, we do not want to believe that artistic freedoms might become limited in countries where it was previously protected, we do not want to face the global social, political and environmental context that destabilizes the film industry as much as any other.

‘On the industry level, our individual refusal to succumb to overwhelming odds may have created an illusion that every crisis can be overcome by putting in more hours. But you can’t hustle your way out of the climate crisis, a war, or an autocratic breakthrough – nor of macroeconomic trends, political shifts, and technological transformation. When fundamental market dynamics or physical and financial infrastructures are impacted, what needs to flex and change are the structures of the industry.’

How do you navigate a project when one of the funding partners suddenly finds themselves in a war? How do you keep yourself and your creative colleagues safe from reprisals in increasingly autocratic systems? How do you tackle the sustainability concerns when funding is being eaten up by rising costs in general? What do we do if public funding suddenly comes with more narrow political demands? These are big questions that no one person can tackle alone, and many lift the importance of collaboration to find solutions moving forward. The report states it clearly – in the coming years the film industry can either be an area of resistance against the democratic backsliding globally or become implicated in it. The first step is facing reality such as it is, and meeting people there so that we together find the resilience and strength to fight back against that which we find unacceptable.

2. You must rethink development. One of the interviewees, Samya Hafsaoui, is a millennial screenwriter, filmmaker and TikTok content creator. She speaks clearly and strategically about why she decided to delve into the world of social media as an integral part of her development strategy. When she was faced with the repeated claim that she needed to have an influencer in her movie to make it viable in the marketplace, she became that influencer. This gave her a better seat at the table but also opened up new possibilities to test her ideas with her intended audience. She could literally gather data on what choices mattered to her audience and what was worth pursuing.

BoostHBG has long been an advocate for the iterative process, and we encourage filmmakers to have the courage to test out their ideas with the audience they wish to tell their story to. There is one quote that really stood out and encapsulated much of what we explore together with our regional filmmakers – the courage to move on from the project that isn’t working:

Katarina Tomkova: There is a certain stigma to letting a project go. A feeling of failure [in the words] “they didn’t continue into production”. I don’t think that’s the right approach. We should be free to try things in development, to play around, and trust that the producer as well as the creative team is able to assess at the end of the development period whether the project is worth producing or not.

While that project that didn’t make it all the way to production might feel on the surface as some kind of failure, it is possible to reframe that thinking so that it is more about what you learned from the process and the tools you can take with your into the future. It is a greater failure, especially in a time of scarce resources in both time and money, to spend years working on a project that is not achieving the storytelling objectives you hope for and will never meet the audience you want to talk to. Now, this doesn’t mean that every filmmaker needs to embrace TikTok in the same way. There are a lot of ways to build an audience – both online and offline. What matters is the mindset, which leads me to my final takeaway.

3. You have to ‘dare to be cringe’. This is a quote from Samya Hafsaoui as she encourages more filmmakers to use the tools that social media and the internet provides in terms of building an audience for your work. But it is clear from reading the report that this is generally very good advice in the film industry (and perhaps the wider social context we currently exist in). Often people will hold themselves back – from trying out new ideas, from developing a new skill, from reaching out to a potential new collaborator, from speaking out about injustice, from standing up for political change – because of a fear of being cringe, of doing it wrong, of not being perfect.. The industry needs more of this kind of thinking. The report makes a case that this is a time of great uncertainty. In such times it might be worse to wait around for the hoped for perfect solution rather than to test out the glimmer of an idea that you have today.