Significant opportunities will open up if India and Spain can strengthen and improve cooperation in the film and television industries, a panel session held at Film Bazaar on Sunday demonstrated.
“If you explain the incentives, people will flock to you.” [to Spain] I will produce it,” said top Indian producer Nikhil Advani. He cited similar examples from Estonia and the Middle East, where Indian films are made with subsidies and location incentives. “Yash Raj Films has even gone to Spain and used it as a filming location and not for incentives,” he added.
On this point, Advani echoed the opinion of Juan Manuel Gimérans Rubio, head of the Spanish Film Commission. “Our first task is to raise awareness [of the opportunities]” he admitted. “There are more obvious partners.”
In fact, the two countries signed a bilateral co-production agreement in 2012, but the last time this agreement was used was in the film Mudras, a story about dancers from different generations, produced by Anna Saura and Bobby Bedi. There is only one movie called “. Currently in post-production.
“I was surprised that my film was the first co-production between the two countries,” said Saura. “Everything was easy and professional. The production plans and bureaucracy in both countries were similar.”
IAS’s Neerja Sekhar, Special Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, explained that the treaty had been left unused for 10 years, with India not introducing the incentive system until 2022. [mutual] distribution and incentives,” she said.
Spain has a 30% location production incentive, regional incentives in some parts of the country including the Canary Islands, and other incentives for animation.
Camilo Vázquez Bello, deputy director of promotion and international relations at ICAA in Spain, said: “We want to strengthen our already good relationship. What to watch next year [for ICAA] It’s Asia. The current bilateral agreement between Spain and India needs to be updated and the legal framework improved. And we need to promote Spanish films to Indian festivals. ” Ten films have been selected for the Indian International Film Festival, which will be held alongside Film Bazaar.
Bedi said it was important to go beyond focusing on incentives and production finance to find stories that told of true cross-border connections. But others believe that Spain is being used as a means of “triangulation”, or as a means of accessing the wider European Union’s soft money system or the broader Spanish-speaking world’s 600 million people. He was keen to point out that there was a possibility that it could be used.
