German directing great Volker Schlöndorff is more qualified than most to talk confidently about the realities of European cinema.

He has been making films for more than half a century, gathering a slew of awards along the way. His black comedy The Tin Drum, an adaptation of the homonymous novel by Günter Grass, won the Palme d’Or in 1979 and the Best Foreign Language Oscar a year later.

Schlöndorff is considered to be one of the drivers of the New German Cinema movement, which sparked a renaissance in German film and inspired many other German filmmakers to raise their game.

When the EBU invited him to be a Eurovision Film Week Ambassador, he accepted in a heartbeat because the project is broadly attuned to his own beliefs about the European film business.

Talking to Eurovision Film Week Project Manager Natalija Gorscak on the Parisian set of his new film La Diplomatie, Schlöndorff asserted that European films, unlike US productions, are held back by a market that creates little export incentive.

“We don’t depend on exports, not even to our neighbouring countries, and that’s a real disaster,” he said. “If we don’t need to think, how will my film be received in France, how will it be received in Denmark, or Spain or Italy, then our horizon shrinks and we become a provincial industry. That’s the big problem for European cinema, that the films are not exchanged between one country and another. Every year there are fewer and fewer.”

On the role of public service broadcasters, Schlöndorff believes they should do more to enable films to transcend European borders.

He said: “We still have a lot of public service broadcasters here in Europe. They broadcast the films they’ve coproduced and that means national films, their own productions...they very rarely broadcast films from other European countries. How else can Europe grow together – the economy, banking, taxes, or what have you – how can there be any feeling of solidarity when the different cultures are so separate from each other?”