In times of intensifying political and economic tensions between and within European countries, culture is increasingly assigned the task of mediating conflicts and contradictions that politicians appear unable to solve.  Cultural expressions are supposed to provide opportunities for transnational identification and unifying experiences.  Cris Shore (2000) warned that harnessing the cultural nation-building instruments of the nineteenth century for the purpose of European identity-construction would import the problems of nationalism (especially with regards to the subordinate role of women and the discrimination of ethnic others) and reconstitute them at a transnational scale. Less skeptical authors have pointed to the way in which European cultural policy fosters diversity as a core value (Sassatelli 2009).  However, diversity often denotes the plurality of national cultures in Europe and do not foster diversity in the sense of envisioning political alternatives to prevailing value systems. The neoliberal restructuring of European economies, and the austerity measures implemented since 2008, have affected the conditions of cultural production, aligning it more closely with EU interests in some cases, and reinforcing the criterion of commercial profitability in many others. However, the de-nationalizing and transnationalizing of cultural production, along with technological changes and alternative funding options, have also opened opportunities for representations of Europe that urge confrontation, reflection, and change.  The panel explores the conditions for critical cultural production in terms of policy and funding environment, and explores how cinema and the museum can become sites of conflict and contradiction as the precondition for envisioning a range of European futures.