Earlier today, the European Parliament passed a bill, known as Creative Europe, which will grant over $2 billion of financial assistance to the cultural sectors of domestic film and television production and dissemination. MEP lawmakers’ voting tally, an overwhelmingly supportive 628-32, largely attests to the program’s reputed value and necessity within present-day Europe despite the continent’s overarching fiscal woes which are at the forefront of global political and economic discourse.

Creative Europe, a bill formulated to disperse funds over a seven year period, is to take effect immediately, providing media-related content creators with a 9 percent increase in funding and subsidies from the cultural propagation program currently in place. According to THR, administrators of the program plan to distribute over half of available funding to the film and audiovisual sector via the MEDIA sub-program, with just under a third given to the culture sub-program for the visual and performing arts.

As is expected, a number of high-ranking executives of various European cultural preservation and proliferation organizations were outspokenly elated at the Parliament’s decisive voting turnout.

Amanda Nevill, CEO of the British Film Institute, commends the support for Creative Europe as “a clear and very welcome recognition from the European Parliament of the importance of the creative industries to the wider economy and its major contribution to the growth agenda of Europe and the U.K.”

Though the fundamental goals of Creative Europe do not stray far from those of MEDIA 2007, the previous government funding program, Creative Europe’s MEDIA sub-program reportedly aims to strengthen and expand its efforts to foster international co-productions, better and more efficient TV programming and training, as well as spectator development and research.

In ideological counterpoint to those disgruntled by the Parliament’s decision to allocated a portion of Europe’s limited governmental monetary supply to the arts in such a fragile economic climate, Nevill goes on to claim, “I wholeheartedly agree with [European Union] President Barroso’s assertion that culture is not a ‘nice to have’ but a ‘need to have’.”