Fifteen Principles, Five Declarations, One Billion Euros: The Lumière Summit Draws the Battle Lines Between AI and Cinema

On 7 September 2026, in the gardens of the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the global film industry did something it has rarely managed in its 130-year history: it acted like a nation-state. Convened by French President Emmanuel Macron and South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, the Lumière Summit gathered political leaders, studio chiefs, and filmmakers from 65 countries to confront a question that has quietly become one of the defining issues of the decade — who governs culture when the means of producing images falls into the hands of generative AI?

The answer the summit produced is not a treaty in the formal sense. It is something more unusual: a coordinated set of declarations, funds, and institutions designed to give the moving image what the closing text calls “the beginnings of a global governance — a multilateralism meant to grow.”

What was actually decided

The centerpiece is the Lumière Declaration, a 15-principle charter adopted at Saint-Paul-de-Vence under the co-chairmanship of the French and Korean presidents. Its framing is deliberately pointed. The document opens by acknowledging that “artificial intelligence transforms the conditions of creation,” and then lays down markers: works are placed “at the centre”; images are not to be “reduce[d] … to the attention they capture”; and — in a clause aimed squarely at the direction of travel for AI interfaces — the signatories declare themselves “equally mindful of the new opportunities and challenges posed by agentic artificial intelligence and the possible advent of a world in which access to works would increasingly be mediated by automated agents.”

That last sentence is the sharpest edge of the text. It is a warning that when AI agents, rather than humans, become the layer through which audiences discover and consume films, the entire economics of discoverability — already strained by algorithmic feeds — changes again. The declaration commits its signatories to ensuring distinctive works remain “visible and accessible to audiences” even in that scenario.

Alongside the headline declaration, the summit adopted five thematic declarations, and the most consequential of them is the Saint-Paul-de-Vence Declaration on Artificial Intelligence. Its stance is not prohibitionist — AI is described as already “embedded in screenwriting, previsualization, visual effects, editing, dubbing, localization and content recommendation.” Instead, the declaration sets out six principles intended to shape legislation and industry conduct:

1. Cultural scope: AI systems that produce, disseminate, or transform cultural works — or are trained on them — fall within the scope of the 2005 UNESCO Convention on cultural diversity.
2. Human foundation and fair payment: human-created works are the foundation on which generative systems depend, and any use of protected works for training must honor intellectual property law and “result in fair payment” to rights holders.
3. Employment: the preservation of human artistic and creative employment is reaffirmed as “an enduring public policy objective.”
4. Transparency and enforcement: disclosure of what training datasets contain and where material comes from; clear identification of AI-generated or AI-altered content; and mechanisms giving rights holders the means to identify and enforce uses of their work.
5. Sovereignty: nations and regions retain the authority to design and update their own cultural policy frameworks as technology shifts.
6. Linguistic diversity and likeness rights: backing for AI development in languages outside the dominant global canon, and rights protections extending across the full creative chain — writers, producers, performers, and voice artists — including rights over likeness and voice.

The declaration also opens a pathway for further work within UNESCO, including a potential update to the working rules of the 2005 Convention and examination of a supplementary protocol on creator protections, data transparency, and discoverability.

The money: a €1 billion France-Korea partnership

Declarations without funding tend to evaporate, and the summit addressed this with the Lumière Partnership — a joint commitment by France and South Korea to invest €1 billion (approximately US$1.15 billion) in the film and audiovisual sector over the next five years, through 2031. Each country contributes €500 million; France’s share flows through state investment bank Bpifrance between 2027 and 2031. The partnership is explicitly open to other states joining, and its stated purpose is to support the growth of companies in the sector while promoting “the principles adopted in Saint-Paul-de-Vence: the primacy of human creativity, respect for copyright and cultural diversity.”

Three further institutions launched at the summit:

• IRIS (International Resilience Initiative for Independent Screens) — a support network for independent cinemas, distributors, and networks, seeded with €1 million from the French culture and foreign ministries and targeting €30 million from international partners. Its international council of more than 40 filmmakers includes Juliette Binoche, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, the Dardenne brothers, Isabelle Huppert, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Tilda Swinton, Denis Villeneuve, and Wim Wenders.
• The Lumière Alliance — the first global network of public institutions responsible for film and audiovisual policy, with 54 national film agencies already joined. Members will meet annually in Cannes.
• Audiovisual Next Gen — an 18-month mentoring program led by France’s CNC in partnership with Netflix, RTL Group, and Mediawan for 20 professionals under 35. The first cohort, announced in January 2027, will consist exclusively of women.

Macron’s warning: the attention economy as adversary

The most quoted lines of the day came from Macron’s opening speech, and they were not about AI directly but about the environment AI operates in. “We’ve never watched more images. But we’re running the risk of not seeing anything,” he told the crowd, warning that “this constant flow will digest everything, gobble everything up capturing our attention.” His bluntest formulation: “Our attention is an economic resource.”

The subtext was barely submerged. Traditional film and television now compete not only with each other but with YouTube, TikTok, and the creator economy for the time of younger audiences — and generative AI is accelerating the flood of cheap, engagement-optimized content into that same feed. Macron’s argument, echoed by Lee Jae Myung, was that countries should act collectively to protect their ability to finance local filmmaking rather than “leave the future of cinema entirely to market forces and global platforms.”

The choice of co-chair was itself a statement. South Korea is the clearest existing proof that a national industry can achieve global cultural export at scale — and Lee used the platform to tie the €1bn pact to production and animation capability-building, calling independent cinema “the guarantee of sustainable growth and the source of new imagination.”

The attendees tell the story

The guest list read less like a film festival and more like a geopolitical summit: Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, Disney’s Dana Walden and Alan Bergman, NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley, HBO’s Casey Bloys, Sony’s Tom Rothman, CAA’s Bryan Lourd, Cannes president Iris Knobloch and Thierry Frémaux, the DGA’s Russ Hollerman — plus George Clooney and Anthony Russo for star wattage. The Motion Picture Association signed two of the declarations and participated in roundtables with both presidents. Attendees likened the security and the caliber of the convening to gatherings “usually reserved for topics such as finance or climate change.”

CNC president Gaëtan Bruel made the analogy explicit: the goal, he said, was “addressing these issues with the same seriousness and the same method that we have applied to climate change or global health.”

Why it matters beyond cinema

Two things make the Lumière Summit more than a film-industry story.

First, the six AI principles are a template that travels. The demand for training-data transparency, fair payment for copyrighted works, AI-content labeling, and likeness rights maps almost exactly onto live disputes between AI labs and publishers, authors, and visual artists. If the UNESCO pathway matures — a supplementary protocol on creator protections and data transparency — the screen industries will have succeeded in internationalizing demands that AI companies have so far faced only in fragmented national litigation and legislation. Notably, the declaration’s framing through the 2005 UNESCO Convention is a legal move: it routes AI governance into an existing instrument of cultural law, where states have far more policy latitude than under trade frameworks.

Second, the summit is a data point in a broader realignment: culture is being securitized. When the leaders of two G7/G20 powers co-chair a one-day summit on film policy, invite 65 countries, and commit a billion euros, they are signaling that audiovisual output is now treated as strategic infrastructure — an economic engine, a sovereignty question, and a governance problem in the age of generative models. The declaration’s own closing line makes the ambition plain: “the moving image now has the beginnings of a global governance.”

The declarations remain open for signature. Whether Silicon Valley’s AI labs engage with them — or simply route around them — will determine whether Saint-Paul-de-Vence becomes a turning point or a footnote.