Screenwriters of Europe met in Thessaloniki, Greece, on 21 & 22 November 2006, on the occasion of the Thessaloniki Film Festival.
The first ever Conference on European Screenwriting was a two-day event with over hundred participants including screenwriters and audiovisual professionals from all over Europe and the world covering artistic topics relating to story telling and to legal issues relating to authors’ rights and to the funding of film and television programmes. The issues were divided into three round tables – the stories, the rights and the money. Speakers considered the relationship between writers and subsidies, writers and producers, the role of collecting societies and the new problems and opportunities of online content. They also addressed questions related to authorship, the gap between theory and practice in moral rights, the problems of shared writers’ credits. The conference climaxed with the signing of a Screenwriters’ Manifesto by the conference participants.