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Nato is holding closed-door meetings with film and TV screenwriters, directors and producers across Europe and the US, the Guardian can reveal, prompting accusations the alliance is seeking to use the arts to generate “propaganda” for the bloc.
The alliance has held three meetings with film and TV professionals in Los Angeles, Brussels and Paris and is due to continue its “series of intimate conservations” next month in London, meeting with screenwriter members of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB), which represents professional writers in the UK.
The planned meeting in London has caused consternation among some of those invited, who felt they were being asked to “contribute towards propaganda for Nato”.
The topic of conversation at the meeting, to be held under the Chatham House rule – in which participants are free to use information received, but identities of attenders are not revealed – will be the “evolving security situation in Europe and beyond”. Former Nato spokesperson James Appathurai, who is now deputy assistant secretary general for hybrid, cyber and new technology, is understood to be planning to attend, along with other officials from the alliance.
In a WGGB email seen by the Guardian, it was suggested that the meetings had already led to “three separate projects” in development, which were “inspired, at least in part, by these conversations”.
It also said that Nato was “built on the belief that cooperation and compromise, the nurturing of friendships and alliances, is the way forward”, adding that “even if something so simple as that message finds its way into a future story, that will be enough”, according to the organisers of the event.
Alan O’Gorman, writer of the film Christy, which won best film at the 2026 Irish Film & Television Awards, called the planned meeting “outrageous” and “clearly propaganda”.
“I thought it was tone deaf and crazy to present this as some sort of positive opportunity. A lot of people, myself included, have friends and family or themselves come from countries that are not in Nato, that have suffered under wars that Nato has joined and propagated,” he said.
He thinks the meetings are an attempt by Nato to “get some of its messaging out there in film and TV”.
“I think there’s fearmongering throughout Europe at the moment that our defences are down,” he said. “I see it in an Irish context, where there’s been a push through some of the media and government to present Nato in a positive light and align ourselves more closely with them. I think the Irish people, for the most part, don’t want anything to do with wars on foreign lands.”
O’Gorman said other screenwriters invited to the meeting were “pretty offended that art would be used in a way that was supporting war” and felt they were being asked to “contribute towards propaganda for Nato”.
Faisal A Qureshi, a screenwriter and producer who has worked in the industry for more than 20 years, applied to attend the meeting “to see what it would be like first-hand” but had to pull out over a scheduling conflict.
He said the “risk for any creative who dips into this unattributable world of intelligence or military briefings is that they can get seduced into thinking they now have some secret knowledge. That there exists a world of greys where morality is stretched and human right abuses are acceptable when done for the greater good”.
Qureshi questions whether a creative would sufficiently “challenge or interrogate” information passed along to them in such meetings.
“They’ve just been given something that has the veneer of truth given to it by an authority that rarely deals with the public and there is a sense of privilege about getting that access,” he said.
Supporters of Nato have advocated for greater relations with the arts. The Centre for European Reform thinktank released a report earlier this year calling on governments to engage with cultural leaders, including screenwriters and film producers, to build public support for greater defence spending and to “better tell the story of why these investments in defence are needed”.
In 2024, eight screenwriters, including a writer and executive producer on the sitcom Friends, were invited to Nato’s headquarters in Brussels by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, to learn about security policy.
The group, which also included a writer on the long-running crime procedural Law and Order, and a producer on the comedy detective drama High Potential, met the alliance’s then-general secretary, Jens Stoltenberg, during the trip.
A Nato official said: “The mentioned initiative is the fourth in a series of sessions for writers of fiction in the entertainment industry (including screenwriters, showrunners and authors).
“It follows from interest expressed by members of the industry to know more about what Nato is about and how it works. These events include engagement with representatives of Nato, civil society and the thinktank community.”
A WGGB spokesperson said: “As a trade union representing screenwriters, we receive invitations from third-party organisations about events that may be of professional use or interest to our members. These interactions do not necessarily represent an endorsement of these organisations.
“The invitation we passed on from Nato to our screenwriter members was to an event offering a two-way conversation where attending writers can ask their own questions, talk freely and take whatever they feel is useful from the session. Our members are free thinkers – a valuable and vital skill that they bring to their craft.”
