The European Solidarity Fund for Ukrainian Films renewed for a fourth consecutive year at €1.5 million in February, on a budget increased from 2025 and a remit that has shifted from development grants to production support. [1] Eighteen European national film centres and ministries of culture, plus the EFAD association itself, are the contributors. France's CNC manages the fund. In three years it has awarded 70 grants totalling €4.3 million; 18 ESFUF-supported films had already screened at major festivals by the time the 76th Berlinale opened on 12 February. [2]
That is the artifact, not a disqualification. The Berlinale 2026 ran Ukrainian films across Panorama Dokumente (Alisa Kovalenko and Marysia Nikitiuk's Traces, on Russian wartime sexual violence), Berlinale Classics (the restored 1934 Crystal Palace), and the retrospective (Mykhailo Bielikov's 1990 Decay on Chornobyl). [3] The festival's Ukrainian programme was supported by ESFUF money that nineteen funders had agreed to continue while Cannes was running into the Hollywood-Gaza-blacklist row Paul Laverty named in his opening press conference on Tuesday.
The European-festival politics that ate the spring — Berlin's Ukrainian-cinema programme, Cannes's Gaza-loyalty allegations, Eurovision's five-country boycott of Israel — is one compound argument about which wars European institutions will fund, defund, or politely refuse to discuss. The ESFUF renewal is the line that did not move. Brussels did not retract the Ukrainian fund this spring even as the bandwidth for Ukraine inside European cultural politics narrowed. The four-year continuity is the news this culture beat owes the reader. The "Cinema of Defiance" framing this paper carried into the budget did not survive primary-source verification; the renewed fund did.
-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin