ABOUT
The Coproduction Research Network was founded in March 2016 by Petar Mitric, Julia Hammett-Jamart and Ben Harris, to respond to the dearth of information about the increasingly significant practice of international coproduction.
International co-production – both official and non-official – has become the norm for many national film industries,
a way of increasing budgets in order to make films that can better compete with Hollywood in the global market,
to facilitate creative collaboration across industries, and to penetrate territories that might otherwise be inaccessible. Research about co-production, however, has not kept pace with the practice itself, in part because the data is not readily available, but also because of an inadequate articulation between policy, research and practice.
The aim of the Co-production Research Network then, is to step into this breach, to offer a forum where information is shared across disciplinary boundaries and indeed across the traditional policy-practice-research divide, with a view to improving policy effectiveness and production outcomes, as well as enriching scholarly accounts of national and transnational production.
Petar Mitric
Copenhagen
Co-Founder
Petar Mitric is a PhD Fellow at the University of Copenhagen. His thesis focuses on the second generation of co-production treaties and co-production agreements in Europe. He is also an independent producer, with a number of official co-productions in development.
Petar holds degrees in film history, from the Central European University in Budapest, and global studies awarded jointly by the Roskilde University and Vienna University.
He attained experience in the European film industry during his residency at the Danish Film Institute, European film fund Eurimages, MEDIA Desk Austria, and while working as a producer for production companies in Vienna and Belgrade.
In addition to his work with the Co-production Research Network, Petar has been active within the MeCETES research project and the French research association CineCoSA.
Petar is an active member of SCMS and NECS.
Julia Hammett-Jamart
Paris
Co-Founder
Dr Julia Hammett-Jamart is a media industry expert with over 20 years professional experience spanning production, policy and scholarship. She is a graduate of Australia’s national film school (AFTRS), has produced and directed numerous short films as well as documentaries for public broadcaster SBS-TV, and holds a PhD in Communication and Media Studies. Prior to moving to France, she worked at the Australian Film Commission, where she was Policy Officer (2004-06) and then Manager of Governance and Strategic Planning (2006-08). She was a member of the Transition Team responsible for overseeing the merger of Australia’s three public film funding agencies into a single agency, Screen Australia. Julia has held visiting fellowships at Université Paris III (La Sorbonne Nouvelle) and the British Institute in Paris (University of London), and has written numerous articles - both in French and English - about her research into policy implementation on official coproductions. She is currently authoring a chapter for the book Reconceptualising Film Policies (Routledge) and co-editing a volume on European co-production.
Benjamin Harris
Berlin
Co-Founder
Benjamin Harris
Berlin
Co-Founder
Benjamin Harris is Head of Programme for Serial Eyes, Europe’s premier postgraduate training programme for TV writers and producers. As such, he is responsible for the curricular and administrative oversight of the programme, which is a collaboration between the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB), Den Danske Filmskole and the London Film School: www.serial-eyes.com.
Prior to that, Benjamin was the Assistant Director of the MFA Producers Program in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television for eleven years.
He is a TV writer and a film and television industries scholar, and teaches classes on story development for features and television, creative producing, and the US and international media industries.
Benjamin holds an M.A. in Radio/Television/Film from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.F.A. in Producing from UCLA. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Cinema & Media Studies from UCLA.
International Membership
The Coproduction Research Network is constituted of academics, practitioners and policy professionals from around the world.
It is the diversity of our constituency, both in terms of geography and their professional backgrounds, which is the strength of the Network. It means that we can organise conferences with meaningful exchanges and constructive outcomes, undertake research from an informed perspective, and publish articles and books with relevancy to educational institutions, public policy agencies and the industry at large.
You can consult a list of active members here.