Lumière Declaration Sets 15 Principles for Global Film — SkimNews
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- The Lumière Declaration was adopted Monday at the Lumière Summit in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, jointly presented by France and the Republic of Korea under their respective presidents' co-chairship, setting out 15 principles and remaining open for further signatures.
- Algorithmic platforms are the explicit foil the declaration draws a sharp contrast against, stating 'the attention of an audience is not a resource to be captured, but a trust to be honored,' and calling moving images 'a common good: a vehicle for emotion, memory and knowledge.'
- Three of the 15 principles address technology, with the declaration endorsing AI as a creativity tool but insisting 'human creation should always remain at the heart and foundation of works' — and uniquely warning about the 'possible advent of a world' in which agentic AI mediates access to works.
- The audiovisual industry is described as 'a powerful engine of economic growth,' with the declaration arguing 'the diversity of works, across budgets, languages, genres, formats and geographies, is not a constraint on competitiveness; it is its foundation.'
- Theatrical cinemas receive an explicit commitment: 'Diversity needs cinemas in order to thrive; cinemas need diversity in order to fulfill their cultural, economic and social role,' alongside a warning about the 'critical period for the conservation of physical archives, whose elements degrade inexorably over time.'
- Image literacy closes the declaration, which identifies cinema as 'one of the last places where individual screens are switched off and where we learn, again, to watch together,' committing signatories to develop best practices for sustainable production, distribution and exhibition.
Why it matters: As the first multilateral text on cinema governance since the Lumière brothers' first public screening 130 years ago, the declaration gives France and South Korea a shared diplomatic instrument to push back against algorithmic platforms and agentic AI. But the text itself describes this as only 'the beginnings' — signatures remain open and no enforcement mechanism is specified.
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