European Film Academy to Restructure Board Membership to Ensure Fairer Geographic Representation
The board of the European Film Academy – the organization behind the European Film Awards – has decided to restructure board membership for 2024. The change will ensure an equal voice for different parts of Europe in strategic decisions.
From the upcoming elections onwards, representatives on the board will be chosen from 15 regions in Europe. The move is designed to give a more equal distribution of voices from across Europe on the board.
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The restructuring will take place in two stages, allowing current board members elected in December 2022 for a two-year period to finish their mandate until the end of 2024.
Additionally, one of the board seats is to be reserved for a transnational ethnic representative, and academy members belonging to either the Sámi and/or Roma populations in Europe will be eligible to be elected. The first mandate for this seat will be for an elected member from the Sámi population.
The board consists of 19 members, including one chair and two deputy chairs. The academy works in 52 European countries as well as Israel and Palestine. Currently, 25% of the board members represent all 30 Eastern and South-Eastern European countries. With the restructuring of the board completed by 2025, this will be 50% of the board seats.
The 15 new regions have been defined by the board as follows, and will all have one representative in the board from 2024 or 2025 onwards:
Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia
Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein (as of 2025, after current mandates end)
Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia (as of 2025)
Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands
France, Monaco
Ireland, U.K.
Italy, Malta, San Marino
Poland, Ukraine
Andorra, Portugal, Spain
Turkey, Azerbaijan, Palestine
Bulgaria, Moldova, Romania
Armenia, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece, Israel
Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia
Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
And one additional seat fortransnational ethnic representation (current eligible groups: Sámi population and Roma population)
“These changes will make for a more diverse and more democratically representative board to serve the European Film Academy,” said EFA’s chair, Mike Downey. “We are making a number of structural changes to the way the academy is run, in order to bring it up to date with contemporary best practices, and this is just one of the changes which will help us serve our membership better, and provide a voice for some of those territories which have occasionally been marginalized or sidelined, not through any malign will, but simply by virtue of their geo-political location.”
Matthijs Wouter Knol, CEO and director of the academy, added: “Making sure we serve our academy members better is an important aim of the European Film Academy. Therefore, including members from different regions of Europe that haven’t been part much in the workings of the academy is a great step forward. It also forms part of making the organization more sustainable, ensuring its future and its ongoing support by members from all the 52 countries we work in.”
The academy will continue to enable all its members to nominate themselves as a candidate for the region they live and work in.
Members of the board are elected by all members of the academy registered to vote. The first step is a six-week self-nomination period, starting in mid-August. During the second part – the board elections that begin in October – the members have another six weeks to elect or re-elect the new board members who are announced at the academy’s general assembly in early December and take up their mandates in January.
The last time changes in the board structure were made was in 2018, when the maximum duration of mandates for positions within the board was limited to six years.
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