An interview with Emelie de Jong, the Programme Director of the famous European culture TV channel.

Starting with 2022, Emelie de Jong is the Programme Director and member of the Management Board of ARTE, after previously being Director of the Arts and Performing Arts Unit (2011-2021) at this European public service TV channel dedicated to culture, launched in 1992 as a joint initiative of France and Germany.

In January, she was in Bucharest for the 60th anniversary of the Élysée Treaty, a treaty of friendship between France and West Germany signed on January 22, 1963. To celebrate this event, the French Institute and the Goethe Institute in Romania organized ARTE FILM WEEK, which included screenings of French, German and Romanian films co-produced by ARTE, as well as talks with special guests.

In an interview for Films in Frame, Emelie de Jong spoke about ARTE’s editorial policy on cinema, especially the focus on documentary production and broadcasting, as well as what culture means today and the channel’s role in the streaming era.

Apart from producing its own programs, ARTE is also a co-producer on various European films made for the big screen – among its most recent and popular titles are Triangle of Sadness (2022), by Ruben Östlund, and The Worst Person in the World (2021), by Joachim Trier.

What is the editorial policy of ARTE in terms of choosing the documentary projects that it wants to produce?

ARTE is a French-German channel, but also a European channel, so we have an editorial policy that is decided between our members. And we have a bible, as you would say, that each content has to fit into the entire offer. We have slots, of course, as any television broadcaster, with a very specific description for each of them. Every time we have a digital programme that is new, we all decide in the programme conference if that is really right for the whole offer of ARTE. Basically, our guidelines are very humanistic. Each slot has its guidelines, of course, but the general guidelines are to respect our public service values and to reach the audience. 

ARTE has a lot of documentaries about European history, nature, social issues, science, but also about film directors, actors and all sorts of other artists.

Documentaries are 42% of our offer. We do every type of documentary. We have history documentaries, geopolitical documentaries, portraits of major cultural actors, we have what we call discovery, meaning that we have a very good science offer where we try to understand how the world works. Our formats are 26 minutes, 52 minutes or 90 minutes. 52-minute documentaries are our basic offering. Today ARTE is very recognized as a documentary and cinema offering channel.

We always think about the public

ARTE has these documentaries that it produces itself and it is also involved in producing feature films that are meant for cinema.

In fact, ARTE doesn’t produce much itself. It co-produces with producers all over the world, but mostly European. For example, we entered into the co-production of some major European series, drama series, fiction series – Norwegian, English, Italian. In terms of documentaries, we don’t do in-house productions, we have co-producers. So a French or a German producer comes to us with a project and we decide if we put money into that. About 80% of all we do is co-production.

How do you decide on the projects?

We have these guidelines for our slots. Nobody has an infinite amount of money, so of course it’s according to what we need to make a wide offer and to make the offer as eclectic as possible. We have editorial teams that choose, by the quality of the offer, by the way it comes into the whole, by the public interest. We always try to think about the public.

What do you mean by public interest in the case of ARTE?

What I mean is that we always think about the public we are talking to. We always think of how a program can reach the public. So for example, if we have a very good project, but the narration is not strong enough, we are not going to take that project, even if the subject is interesting. We want the narration to be strong enough so that the public can understand the subject. 

ARTE is more and more not only a channel but a cultural label

How does ARTE’s public look right now? We know that young people don’t watch television anymore, they are rather on TikTok.

ARTE is also on TikTok.  

I was thinking moreabout broadcast television, not the online platform.

It’s difficult to separate the two because what we have today is a global offer. On broadcast television we have, of course, a programming schedule that is recurrent every week. So there is a ritual for people who watch broadcast television. We try to organize the broadcast in a certain way – and that’s an older public, a more traditional public. Then we have our digital offer – 70% of that offer is only bought and produced for our digital platform. There we have a public aged between 35-55. And then we have social media. We are on Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, and there we make very specific programmes for that public also, which is a very young public. 

Today ARTE is more and more not only a channel but a cultural label. A European cultural label which englobes this offer with three major vectors – the traditional broadcast channel, which will never disappear, because it is very important for our older viewers, the digital offer, which is very large, and the social media offer. 

How do you see this digital platform of ARTE in the context of the bigger picture of streaming?

ARTE is a public service television, so it’s extremely important for us to stay free because it’s paid by French and German taxpayers and by the other European taxpayers, as we also have money from the European Commission. Of course, there are rights issues. We can not show everything everywhere. Today’s context is difficult also in terms of finding and keeping talents because there is more and more competition in the world. But ARTE always remained very faithful to its core values, which are the quality of its offers, the quality of the culture it proposes, and the fact of being free.

Everything is culture

What does ARTE understand by culture?

Everything is culture, in a very large sense. Culture is in the definition of the channel. You can talk about all the different types of culture, but of course, culture is creation. What is interesting is the difference between the culture in France, culture, and in Germany, kultur. In France, culture is more typically arts, music, performing arts. In Germany, culture can also be history, social sciences, human knowledge, patrimonial issues. I think culture on ARTE is all of that. It’s ArteKino Festival, which is showing patrimonial films throughout Europe, it’s our history offering. Even a science program is culture. Maybe geopolitics is not culture and maybe social issues are less cultural. But culture is in our DNA, so it’s everywhere.

How do you see the future of ARTE?

ARTE is already in the heart of the European network. ARTE is necessary today in Europe as a cultural label, but also as a way of bringing together European talents, this common European cultural conscience. With digital technology, we can reach out to different countries and audiences more and more.

Photo: © Paul Blind

Ionuț Mareș

Journalist and film critic. Curator for some film festivals in Romania. At "Films in Frame" publishes interviews with both young and established filmmakers.