EFM Berlin — The European Film Market and How to Use It Properly

What the EFM Is and Where It Sits in the Market Calendar

The European Film Market is the trade market that runs in parallel with the Berlinale — the Berlin International Film Festival — every February. Like the Marché du Film at Cannes, it exists alongside a major film festival but operates as a separately accredited, commercially focused market. The festival selects films for competition and generates significant cultural prestige; the EFM is where the industry conducts its business, sells rights, and makes the deals and relationships that drive the commercial side of European independent film.

The EFM sits at a specific point in the annual market calendar that gives it a distinct strategic character. It follows the industry’s natural period of reflection in January, when buyers and sales agents reassess their rosters and acquisition priorities after the end of the previous year. And it precedes Cannes by approximately three months, making it the first major opportunity to present new projects and begin conversations that will be concluded at the Marché in May. Projects launched at the EFM that generate interest from European buyers and co-production partners arrive at Cannes with momentum. Projects that do not attend the EFM arrive at Cannes in the same conversation from a standing start.

How EFM Differs from Cannes and AFM

Each of the three major markets — EFM, Cannes, and AFM — has a distinct character shaped by its timing, location, and the specific community of buyers and sellers who prioritise it. Understanding those differences is essential to using each one strategically rather than treating all three as interchangeable.

The EFM’s European character is its defining feature. The buyers who prioritise the EFM over the other markets are disproportionately from continental Europe: Germany, France, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia, Italy, and Central and Eastern Europe. The co-production funds — Eurimages, the MEDIA programme, and various national film institutes — have a strong presence at the EFM that is not replicated to the same degree at Cannes or AFM. And the general sensibility of the market is more intellectual and more co-production-focused, and less focused on commercial genre, than AFM in particular.

For British and Irish producers, the EFM occupies a specific strategic importance. European co-production partners — the producers in Germany, France, and Scandinavia with whom UK and Irish producers build bilateral treaty co-productions — are more accessible at the EFM than at any other market. The conversations that establish those partnerships, and that eventually lead to bilateral co-productions with combined incentive access, are most productively started at the EFM.

The Physical Layout and Character of the Market

The EFM is headquartered at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, a monumental nineteenth-century building on Niederkirchnerstraße in central Berlin, a short walk from Potsdamer Platz. Additional market venues extend to the Gropius Passages and the hotels clustered around Potsdamer Platz, which has become the commercial centre of the Berlinale and the EFM over the decades.

The Martin-Gropius-Bau hosts the majority of the EFM’s official market activity: screening rooms, company stands, and the accreditation infrastructure. The surrounding hotels — the Ritz-Carlton, the Grand Hyatt, the Marriott — are where the most commercially significant meetings take place, following exactly the same pattern as the Croisette hotels at Cannes and the Loews at AFM. Sales companies and production houses take suites and conduct their EFM programmes from those rooms.

Berlin in February is cold. This is worth stating plainly, because the physical experience of moving between venues — across exposed plazas and along streets that are frequently in below-zero temperatures — is genuinely demanding in a way that Cannes in May and Santa Monica in November are not. The logistics of an EFM attendance require more thought than either of those markets: appropriate clothing, realistic meeting schedules that account for travel time between venues in the cold, and a base hotel close enough to the market hub to avoid losing significant time to weather.

Who Attends the EFM and What They Are Looking For

The EFM attendee profile is distinctly European. The strongest buyer presence is from German distributors — the German market is one of the most important in Europe for independent film — followed by French, Scandinavian, and Benelux buyers. Italian and Spanish buyers attend in meaningful numbers. Eastern European broadcasters and distributors, for whom Berlin is geographically and culturally closer than Cannes, attend in numbers that give the EFM a specific value for projects targeting those markets.

The co-production community at the EFM is its most distinctive feature. European production companies looking for bilateral or multilateral co-production partners attend specifically because the EFM is the market most focused on this type of creative and financial collaboration. The meetings are longer, more exploratory, and more relationship-focused than the transactional buyer meetings at Cannes or AFM. A co-production conversation started at the EFM may take three or four market cycles to conclude in a signed agreement — but it is the right place to start it.

The public funding bodies have a strong EFM presence. Eurimages, the Council of Europe’s film fund, is accessible at the EFM in a way that is difficult to replicate elsewhere. The MEDIA programme representatives, national film institutes, and regional funding bodies from across Europe attend and are available for meetings. For producers who have not previously engaged with European public funding, the EFM is the most efficient context in which to begin understanding what is available and how to structure projects to access it.

What to Prioritise at the EFM

The EFM is a ten-day market, but the most commercially active period runs for approximately seven days. The priority hierarchy for an EFM attendance is different from AFM or Cannes because the objective set is different. Here is the priority sequence that produces the most value from an EFM attendance.

Practical Preparation for the EFM

The preparation discipline for the EFM mirrors that of any other major market, with two important differences specific to this event. First, the European buyer research required before the EFM is more demanding than for AFM simply because the territory landscape is more fragmented. Germany has multiple regional distributors in addition to national ones. Scandinavia comprises distinct national markets with different buyer profiles in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. Understanding which specific buyers in which specific territories are relevant to your project requires more granular research than the comparatively uniform English-language buyer landscape at AFM.

Second, the co-production research required before the EFM is specific to the treaty framework you are targeting. UK-German co-productions operate under a different bilateral treaty structure from UK-French or UK-Scandinavian co-productions. The eligibility criteria, the required minimum contribution levels, and the qualifying criteria for each national fund differ substantially. Understanding the specific framework that applies to your target co-production before arriving at the market makes the conversations substantially more productive.

The EFM and the Markit Approach

At Markit, we attend the EFM every year as a core part of our market calendar. Its strategic value for our slate — which includes projects with significant UK-Irish elements and active co-production conversations with European partners — is distinct from what Cannes and AFM provide. The European co-production relationships we are building and maintaining are most efficiently advanced at the EFM. The German, French, and Scandinavian buyer conversations for our slate projects are most productively started here. And the intelligence we gather about the European public funding landscape directly informs how we structure our productions to access it.

Inner Circle members who are building European projects, developing co-production relationships, or working in territories where EFM attendance is strategically relevant to their slate find that the monthly calls in the first quarter of the year are heavily informed by what we learn in Berlin. That intelligence — which buyers are active, which co-production conversations progressed, what the Berlinale selections signal about European taste — is current in a way that no trade report can replicate, because it comes from being in the market when it is happening.