East European film directors are realizing with growing bitterness that the democracy they once longed for is bringing more than free expression - for them it could spell economic disaster.
Thanks to the collapse of Eastern Europe's Communist regimes, more directors than ever have been able to bring their works to the Cannes film festival this year, matched by a rec-ord number of East European journalists.A total of 20 East European films, compared to only 12 last year, will be shown at the Festival Palace. Four of them are competing for the prestigious "Golden Palm" award.
Two of the competitors, Polish director Ryszard Bugajski's 1981 film "The Interrogation" and Czechoslovak director Karel Kachyna's 1969 work "The Ear," are only now getting a proper screening after years of government censorship.
But this success is turning sour, as directors realize that the repressive governments they learned to live with might have been less of a threat to their art than capitalism's free market.
Former dissident directors and producers at a "Cinema Without Frontiers" conference attended by European film celebrities said their work was being edged out of local cinemas by the likes of "Emanuelle 2" and "Rambo."
"The doors are wide open now to all the bastards, the exploiters and the crooks," Soviet producer Otar Iosseliani told the Saturday conference, for which French Culture Minister Jack Lang and President Francois Mitterrand's wife, Danielle, served as hosts.
"In the past our freedom survived despite government pressure . . . Now I am very, very worried," he said.
And while American films are flooding the East, East European films are still largely limited to specialist venues in the West.
"Cinema in the East is in crisis because freedom has arrived. This is the contradiction," said Hungarian director Jancso Miklos.
Soviet director Pavel Lounguine, whose first film "Taxi Blues," the story of an unlikely friendship between a Moscow taxi driver and a saxophonist, premiered Saturday, said the market was saturated with American B movies or cheap local imitations which quickly covered their costs.
"We must work to retain a united European film industry and not become a kind of Hong Kong of the north invaded by American films," he said.
The competition has made it harder for Eastern European directors to get backing for their projects.
Lounguine would never have been able to make his film without enthusiastic French backing.
Co-productions of this kind and some form of government regulation hold the only hope for the future, said delegates who now find themselves in the ironic position of begging for state intervention.
"I appeal to the West not to force us to be the only ones to watch East European films," said Polish director Andrzej Wajda, whose "Korczak" is being shown on the fringes of the Cannes competition.
"Being free only constitutes half our duty - the other half is to know how to use that freedom."