The Croatian Audiovisual Centre (HAVC), German production company MOOVIE GmbH and Croatian production service company Pakt Media have announced that German director Uli Edel (aka Ulrich Edel), best known for The Baader-Meinhof Complex [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], has started shooting the TV film The Master Butcher's Singing Club in the town of Kijevo in the Dalmatian hinterland.

The film is the first project to benefit from the increased, 30% cash rebate for productions in regions of special interest. These include the Šibenik-Knin, Sisak-Moslavina and Zagreb counties, where the production will move to next.

The movie is based on the historical novel by Louise Erdrich about German immigrants in the USA between the two world wars, and a whole American town from the period was built in Odransko Polje, near the city of Sisak, for shooting purposes.

"For this particular project, we were looking at several other countries across two continents. Ultimately, we decided on Croatia, with its winning combination of spectacular locations, excellent film professionals and well-established production incentive scheme," says the film's producer, Lutz Weidlich. "The recently introduced 30% incentive for filming in underdeveloped areas enticed us to explore locations beyond well-known filming routes, and we were very fortunate to have found such pristine locations that form such an important part of our story, and which would not have been on our radar without this commendable financial enticement."

The film stars Jonas Nay, Aylin Tezel, Leonie Benesch and Thorsten Merten. A total of 54 days will be spent filming in Croatia, with some 150 Croatian film professionals along with a number of trainees working on the project, and a total of 620 extras.

"We have been running an incentive programme for audiovisual works since 2012 in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture, when we introduced a 20% cash rebate. With the new audiovisual law that has been in effect since July 2018, the rebate has been increased to 25% and, in regions of special national interest, to 30%," Tanja Ladovic Blazevic, the Filming in Croatia programme coordinator at HAVC, told Cineuropa. "With this added value, we aim to encourage filmmakers to discover new locations, and in this way support the development of expenditure, employment and, consequently, film tourism in these regions."