Tariff agreement 1947–1995—regulated international film print distribution and customs exemptions for cinema prints. Relevance declined with WTO founding 1995, now historically relevant only.
The GATT agreement of 1947 established an international framework for the cross-border shipment of film prints for the first time — a logistical and financial problem that the industry had previously solved on an ad-hoc basis. For distributors, this specifically meant that feature films could be transported as cultural goods with reduced or waived customs duties. This was crucial because a 35mm print was expensive at the time, and each country had to be supplied separately. Without these customs exemptions, the global distribution of films — especially for European and American movies — would have been economically far less viable.
In practice, this meant that distribution prints received a status during customs clearance that distinguished them from normal commercial goods. A 35mm print sent to France, Italy, or Spain could cross the border duty-free or with cultural goods concessions. This saved distributors significant costs — and ensured that cinemas on the continent had regular access to international films in the first place. This was particularly important for smaller production countries: without GATT regulations, they would have had great difficulty distributing their films internationally.
The relevance of the agreement declined from the mid-1990s onwards, when the World Trade Organization (WTO) replaced GATT as a multilateral system in 1995, integrating film print provisions into a more complex, modern regulatory framework. Furthermore, with the advent of digital distribution and DCP (Digital Cinema Package), the classic physical print became obsolete anyway — a TMS shipment no longer requires customs exemption like a film canister.
Today, GATT is primarily of interest in the context of archival restoration and film history. Anyone tracing old distribution prints or analyzing the logistics of international film distribution in the 20th century will encounter GATT regulations that were the norm back then. For current production, the term no longer has any operational significance — but its existence explains how international film distribution functioned at all before digital networks simplified everything.