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INDUSTRY Spain

Film Protection Fund budget to drop by 20% in 2013

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- Another setback for Spanish film production, a sector already struggling to survive in difficult financial times

Despite Spanish cinema’s current exceptional popularity at the box office, with I Want You [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
(read more) during the first half of this year, now Tad, the Lost Explorer [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
(read more), and Lo imposible [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Juan Antonio Bayona
film profile
]
(read more) next week, the Spanish film industry’s precarious situation continues unsolved. After the crushing reduction of public aid to the sector by a third (read more), the increase in VAT on cinema tickets by three points (read more) and the lack of any specification about tax relief (read more), the government’s new signals, starting with a new budget cut to the Film Protection Fund, are not much more comforting.

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According to the government’s draft State General Budgets for 2013, the budget of the Film Protection Fund, managed by the Film and Audiovisual Arts Institute (ICAA), is to drop by 20.1% to €39.13 million. It will be the third year in a row of cuts to a fund that in 2010 peaked at €89.39 million.

At the moment, the major part of ICAA aids are via amortisation, based on a film's earnings after its commercialisation, according to its earnings in cinemas and via VoD, as well as its participation in festivals. Producers receive them up to two years after the film’s release. As such, in 2013 subsidies for films released in 2011 will be handed out. According to calculations by producer federation FAPAE, they amount to €50 million, a debt difficult to imagine being covered with the assigned budget for 2013.

This difficult moment for cinema in Spain is leading different organisms to seek out different models. On one side, according to newspaper ABC, Susana de la Sierra, in charge of the ICAA, at a meeting with the directors of European national film agencies (EFAD) in San Sebastian, spoke of a a new aid concession system in the production phase. Producers however waited no time to make clear that debts accumulated with the previous model should be settled first.

On the other side, PROA and FAPAE producers are to suggest a model to the government according to which filmmaking would fund itself, as happens in other European countries, through its income and the so-called “audiovisual cent” (a quantity raised from all audiovisual content, including advertising, then directed to cinema). This way, cinema would acquire greater autonomy and stability and, much more importantly, free itself of state budgets and lose its image of a subsidised sector.

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(Translated from Spanish)

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