Emergence of film industries in small countries: On the needs for an integrated clusterand branding strategy

Studies on the spatial organisation of film industries have grown steadily during the last decade. This literature has, however, neglected to pay attention to the specificities of the challenges faced by small countries aimed at building up a film industry in the context of global dominance by media conglomerates located in major audio-visual hubs. The conventional cluster and regional innovation systems-literature highlight respectively, reduced transaction costs, cluster-based learning and knowledge externalities, tax incentives and systemic effects in explaining the spatial distribution of film activities. These issues are all supply factors. We illustrate how the supply factor-based explanations need to integrate demand side factors for explaining emergence of film clusters located in small countries. Based on an original case study on the emergence of the Copenhagen film cluster, we document how the co-evolution of cluster externalities and shared branding (i.e., demand side) paved the way for its successful transformation.