Author: VK
Ministry of Culture has identified 12 priority issues on which the government will support the cinema. "On the basis of opinion polls we have identified the so-called priority themes, applications for which will be addressed and considered by the state as a priority," Vladimir Medinskiy, Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation, said. These are, in particular, the 70th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, the fight against drugs, the heroes of labor, the 100th anniversary of the First World War.
In addition, Ministry of Culture is now beginning to order scripts of the films on desired subjects. "We announced screenwriting competition for the top 20 scripts on the proposed issues," the Minister said. Scripts selected for the competition will be supported by the Ministry of Culture proposed for implementation to the filmmakers.
Cinema Fund, according to Vladimir Medinskiy, should concentrate on the production of socially significant blockbusters, "I say "socially significant", but that is not necessarily about the “United Russia" party, Medinskiy said. According to him, now some of these blockbusters – "Stalingrad" by Fedor Bondarchuk and "Ivan Poddubny" by Gleb Orlov – are being made.
Speaking about his ministry’s work, Medinskiy said: “The main task that faced the ministry was the fulfilment of the decree of the president, including the most difficult position - raising the wages of workers of culture. I can say that in 9 months we carried out serious preparatory work to raise wages, and we'd love to have this done not only due to the additional funding, which is determined by the government, but primarily due to the restructuring of the cultural institutions themselves. This restructuring involves the redistribution of the appropriations to be allocated, outsourcing of non-core activities, finding additional, extra-budgetary funds and reasonable reorganization and optimization of the structure. Starting from Monday, we allocate to all of our institutions additional funds for higher wages. Now we do it consciously, in the first third of 2013, because practically most of our institutions effectively fulfilled these basic parameters for the "road map" of signing a new contract. Already today we can say that the work has paid off, and if a year ago, at the beginning of 2012, the average salary of the employees of federal institutions of culture was less than 20,000 rubles, or more precisely, 19,800 rubles, as of April 1 year, exactly a year later, this salary has increased by almost 50% and now stands at 28,800 rubles. We hope that this figure by the end of the year will increase even more”.
Medinskiy wants to make the ministry open to all areas of activity: “Perhaps the prime example of such openness is the discussion of the problem of moving the collection of impressionists from the Hermitage to Moscow. I think the destruction of the museum of new western art, as the first museum of modern art in the world, the museum created by an amazing intuition of genius and artistic flair of our great collectors Shchukin and Morozov, was a huge mistake, and I'm afraid that the correction will be an even bigger mistake. This year we just opened the Museum of New Western Art - a virtual one, combining all the collections, at least, all that was left of them, and making them accessible to every Internet user”.
In addition, according to Medinskiy, director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Irina Antonova, will head the commission on state purchases of works of art. Now Ministry of Culture collects the procurement of works of art from the federal and regional museums. Subsequently, the Commission will assess them, the head of which will be Antonova. "She will rate them by value. And at the end of the year we will buy collections for our museum. And we will not ask additional funding for this. In the past year we spent on the completion of the museum funds more than 250 million rubles. For Ministry of Culture this is a significant amount. It is 3.5 times more than we usually spend annually. This is money that has not been given to us later. We got them saving money from bidding”, Medinskiy said.
The minister said that in the past year Ministry of Culture has saved nearly a billion rubles. "For the public body this is a very large amount. This is the annual budget of several major federal museums. Now the State Duma prepares amendments for the current year. According to the innovation, the increase of the budget will be about 3.6 billion rubles", Vladimir Medinskiy said.
