Countries, screen industry bodies and rights organizations adopted five thematic declarations at the Lumière Summit on Monday at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, establishing shared frameworks across artificial intelligence, piracy, image education, gender equality and environmental sustainability.
Among the signatories are France, the Republic of Korea, SACEM — the Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique, France’s music authors and publishers rights society — and Adami, France’s collective management organization for performers’ rights. All five declarations remain open for signature.
AI is already embedded in screenwriting, previsualization, visual effects, editing, dubbing, localization and content recommendation across film, television, animation, video games and immersive work. The Saint-Paul-de-Vence Declaration on Artificial Intelligence does not ask whether the screen industries should use it — it sets out to determine on what terms, and who decides. Its six principles are intended to shape legislation, industry conduct and cross-border cooperation going forward.
The first principle places AI systems that produce, disseminate or transform cultural works — or that are trained on them — within the scope of the 2005 UNESCO Convention on cultural diversity. The second affirms that human-created works form the foundation on which generative systems depend, and that any use of protected works for training purposes must honor intellectual property law and result in fair payment to those who hold the rights. The third recognizes the preservation of human artistic and creative employment as an enduring public policy objective. On transparency, the declaration calls for revealing what training datasets contain and where the material comes from, clear identification of content that has been generated or altered by AI, and mechanisms that give rightsholders the means to identify uses of their work and enforce their entitlements. It also reaffirms the sovereign authority of nations and regions to design and update their own cultural policy frameworks as the technology landscape shifts.
A sixth principle backs AI development in languages outside the dominant global canon, while extending rights protections covering the full creative chain – from writers and producers down to performers and voice artists – and extending to rights over likeness and voice. The declaration opens a pathway for further work within UNESCO, including a potential update to the working rules of the 2005 Convention and examining whether a supplementary protocol on creator protections, data transparency and discoverability can be agreed.
The Declaration on the Fight Against Film and Audiovisual Piracy addresses the growing gap between nationally based enforcement and piracy operations that cross borders. Signatories committed to four lines of action: creating a permanent multilateral body linking regulatory and enforcement agencies, each with a designated contact; strengthening intelligence-sharing on illicit services; advancing cooperation with online intermediaries on site-blocking; and developing baseline standards that allow enforcement actions taken in one country to carry weight in others. The initiative draws on frameworks already in operation through ACE, the MPA, the EUIPO Observatory, WIPO ALERT and Inperpol I-SOP. Signatories include France, the Republic of Korea and the Motion Picture Association.
The Declaration for Safer Sets and Greater Gender Equality records that progress has been real and remains insufficient. It advances three commitments: equal opportunity across employment, financing and festival participation including equal pay; stronger prevention and reporting mechanisms for workplace harassment; and greater representation of women and underrepresented groups in creative and decision-making roles. Since 2021, France’s CNC has made public funding conditional on companies meeting harassment-prevention obligations. The U.K. created the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority, a cross-sector watchdog spanning film, television, music and theatre.
The Manifesto for Universal Image Education, a joint initiative of France and Italy, calls for image literacy to be treated as a foundational competency for the twenty-first century and calls on UNESCO to work toward a binding international instrument specifically addressing image literacy. The Declaration Towards More Sustainable Screen Industries seeks convergence of existing sustainability tools, methodologies and funding mechanisms globally, and backs development of a shared European standard through the CEN, the European standards body, where harmonization is feasible.
