It’s Cuba! Where else would The Havana International Film Festival’s Opening and Closing Night take place except in The Karl Marx Theater? Opening with music by Cuba’s greatest salsa group, Los Van Van, the 34th edition is still headed by its founder and Fidel Castro’s teacher in Communism, Alfredo Guevara, who dedicated this edition to the new generation of filmmakers which represents the future of cinema. The 10 day festival showcased a broad range of new and not-so-new films from Cuba, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Peru and fellow Caribbean nations, Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica, Curacao and others whose cinema is being aided by their governments and whose youth is creating a new international cinema with the support of Europe and even, sometimes, Asia.
While this edition paid homage to the youth, also present and recalled were the members of the generations from the ‘60s like Aldo Francia, Chileans Miguel Littin, Patricio Guzman, Jorge Sanjines, Fernado Birri, Fernando Solano, Cacho Pallero, Santiago Alvarez, Glauber Roch, Carlos Diegues, Leon Hizsman, Juaquim Pedro, Tomas Guierrez Alea, Mario Handler, Walter Achugar and many others who in the years ‘67 and ‘68 were themselves inspired by such luminaries as Joris Ivens. Together they were the originators of the phenomenon El Cine de America Latina or New Latin American Cinema influenced mainly by Italian neorealism and other movements of social cinema. Its function was to go against U.S. models and to illuminate the troubled realities of Latin America in the hope of restoring cinema of the continent. Its key moment was the meeting of Latin American Cinema 1967 , which had its impetus in the Chilean Aldo Francia , the Cinema Club of Viña del Mar , the Cuban Alfredo Guevara, the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Film (Icaic) and the Argentine Edgardo Pallero.
Illuminaries such as Annette Benning whose film The Kids are All Right was screening there and Hawk Koch, president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, wrote fan letters to Fidel and Raoul and then mixed and caught up with the top critics and journalists of Latin America and festival participants in the gardens of the Hotel Nacional. Miguel Litten and spouse, the parents of Chile’s Christina Littin, one of Chile’s current top producer/ distributors, were often seen there. Their presence reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book Clandestine in Chile about the time when Miguel disguised himself to reenter Pinochet’s Chile from whence he had been exiled. So many stories of exile and return mark the modern history of Latin America.
The first day of the Havana festival was devoted to Eictv, the international film school that Gabriel Garcia Marquez founded in 1986 with his Nobel Prize money on land donated by Cuba. Today it is headed by Rafael Rosal who in his own country, Guatemala, set up the first infrastructure for a film industry – a film school, a film festival and production facilities.
Eictv has a student body from everywhere in Latin America, Europe and even from North America. Last year as the emissary for Woodbury University in Burbank CA, I brought them their first agreement with a U.S. institution and exchanges between students and staff have already begun, bringing TV documentary filmmaker Rolando Almirante for a second time to teach documentaries.
Eictv’s event at the Festival de Cine Nuevo en Habana is Nuevas Miradas, 12 chosen projects whose producers and directors present themselves to the industry and compete for three awards.
Coincidently with the lateness of this blog which I wrote from the Palm Springs International Film Festival -- some of Eictv’s staff’s and students’ films were among Psff’s 22 Latino projects vying for the Cine Latino Prize being offered by Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara. This fact along shows a new unity of purpose among the Latino countries and their festivals (Cuba, Guadalajara and Palm Springs, which as part of the Coachella Valley, has the largest Latino population in the United States.) Among the 22 candidates for Psff’s Best Iberoamerican film were Clandestine Childhood (Argentina/ Brazil/Spain) by Benjamín Ávila, who was the coordinator of Fiction at Eictv and screenwriter Marcelo Muller also participated in Eictv; La Voz Dormida (España) of the emerging filmmaker Benito Zambrano, and 7 Boxes (Paraguay) co-directed by Juan Carlos Maneglia, a student in many of the workshops of Eictv. Eictv considers this exchange of ideas and talents as globally important.
The winners of Nuevas Miradas should be watched as one or several reach fruition. Last year The Visitor (Chile) won and has since raised the budget for a feature length film debut.
The projects, Un Viejo Traje, Moora Moora directed by Australian Rhiannon Stevens and produced by Chilean Esme Joffre, Tus padres volverán directed by Uruguayan Pablo Martínez and produced by Virginia Hinze, Cocodrilos tomando el sol, Cuerpos Celestes by Mexican director Lorena Padilla and producer Liliana Bravo, Revolución de las polleras by Bolivian director Sergio Estrada and producer Valeria Ponce received recognition and free software from Assimilate.
The documentary, Un Viejo Traje (aka The Old Suit), by Cuban director Damián Saínz (a student of Eictv) and producer Viana González received a $2,000 prize.
Fiction project, Cocodrilos tomando el sol, directed by Colombian Carlos Rojas and the Venezuelan producer Carolina Graterol, received a $1,000 prize and a course in directing at Eictv.
A film package for those interested in Cuban film programming
Ann Cross, a Scottish woman married to a Trinidadian is always in Havana. She programs the best selection of current Cuban features for U.K. distribution. This year she gave me this list of her favorites and many people concurred with her.
Y sin embargo (aka Nevertheless) by Rudy Mora also won the Beijing Film Festival prize which is surprising in that it is about school children challenging the school system, and challenging any systems in China (and perhaps in Cuba as well) is highly problematic. The child actors are exceptional. The type of burlesque comedy is typical of Cuba. Produced and Isa (international sales agent) is the Cuban government film group Icaic.
Irredemediablemente Juntos (aka Irredeemably Together) by Jorge Luis Sanchez Gonzalez is brave and challenging. Purportedly about classical music and Cuban music and the conflict between the two, it is really about race and the synthesis between black and white, Cuban and European Classical is reached in the story.
Cresciendo en la musica is about teaching music to children.
El sangre en la casa, en la escuela y en la calle (aka Blood in the House, in the School and in the Street) is a British-Cuban coproduction about Matanza, a town just outside of Havana where Cuban music roots are.
La piscine (aka The Swimming Pool) by Calvo Machado might not stand alone in the U.S. but would be good in a package.
Binchi by Eduardo Galano is about the 2 classes clashing in prison.
At the top of Ann’s list and on top of many others’ lists is Melaza.
What I saw and liked
It was also a time for me to catch up of Latin American cinema I have missed. My favorite was Chilean film Jueves a Domingo (aka from Thursday to Sunday) by Dominga Sotomayer. This road trip by a young couple and their 7 year old son and 11 year old daughter tells a story through the daughter’s eye of a loving family’s vacation and their father’s decision to move from Santiago to the countryside. We never know what he is getting away from (Pinochet?) but we see what is supposed to be a vacation transforms the family’s wholeness. The loving light touch of Sotomayer reminds me of Eric Rohmer’s four films of the seasons.
Lucie Malloy’s Una Noche was mobbed by the Cuban public wanting to see this film about two young defectors from Cuba; the police were called to break up the crowd and the overflow had a special screening set up. We hear that the young woman star who defected with her costar on the way to the Tribeca Film Festival and who landed up in Las Vegas is now in “exile mode” bewailing how she misses her family. La probrecita!! Yet another exile story. Had she waited a month, travel from Cuba would be legal. Una Noche is now here in Palm Springs as well, competitng for the Cine Latino Prize.
Other films I saw and liked
El Limpiador and Ombras were both without subtitles (as was Pablo Lorrain’s closing night film No) and so I could only watch a part of them. However I did see El Limpiador here in Palm Springs and was impressed with its simplicity and its authenticity and loving heart. A low tech take on a mysterious illness killing people in the Peruvian city of Lima, the film was simple, sometimes funny and in the end very satisfying.
A film which divided the audience neatly between men and women was the Brazilian feature Brecha Silencia (aka Breaching the Silence) about domestic violence from which 3 siblings barely escape. The subject of violence toward women was also the subject of a short which showed in every public screening. Called Ya No, this short Latin American backed PSA brings public awareness to the unacceptable violent behavior of men toward women often found in schools, in dating, and in homes.
Desde de Lucia playing in Palm Springs also takes on the subject of bullying, this time in a bourgeois Mexican school and centering on a teenage girl who has recently lost her mother.
Taken by Storm
The next segment of the festival was taken up with Trinidad + Tobago Film Festival (t+tff). Emilie Upszak, Artistic Director of t+tff, whom I had met in Havana last year through Icaic’s Luis Notario, and Bruce Paddington the founder and exec director of t+tff were in Havana with a delegation of filmmakers and their films. Since I had missed them all during the extraordinary experience I had at t+tff, I got to see Storm Saulter’s Better Mus Come which has been picked up by the new African Diaspora film distributor for U.S. Affrm (African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement).
Storm is Jamaican and took film courses at L.A. Film School, that large private film school on Sunset near Vine, across from the Arclight Theater, where many foreign students go and where many vets go seeking to learn filmmaking. Storm, however, had been making films since he was a kid using super 8mm and at the ripe old age of 27, he has since formed a collective in Jamaica called, the New Caribbean Cinema. His new fiction feature Better Mus Come screened at Trinidad + Tobago film festival and showed here in Havana as well. He will be announcing an international sales agent and a U.S. distributor very soon.
What fun and interesting days and evenings and nights I had with the t+tff folks.
We heard live music, I danced salsa with a Puerto Rican Actor/ Director who dances salsa and has a short in the festival.
Salsa in Havana seems to be losing steam. Reggaeton closes every dance event as the drunken, monotonous final act before going home. However in Jamaica it is transforming itself into Dancehall (what could be more sexual than that except for sex itself?). There is also Rumba, the traditional dance of Afro-Cubans. It is now taking new forms as the newest generation of Cuba takes the stage. Woodbury faculty, in Havana on a hosted tour with the Jose Marti Cultural Institute, led by my friend Cookie Fischer were invited to the top of the Lincoln Hotel on the night the world was to end (remember the Mayan calendar prediction?) and we danced the night away to the live music of Septeto Nacional a 70 year old group. Son was my dance of choice there. For those of you who want to see Cuba before the transition is over, now is the time. You can travel legally from L.A. and Miami, Mexico or anywhere else in the world with a general license. Take advantage of it Now as it is going to get more crowded with tourists. For us film folk, we get a privileged perch, so plan on next December taking in a week of films plus another week or two to see a country whose land and people are unique in Latin America and the Caribbean.
While this edition paid homage to the youth, also present and recalled were the members of the generations from the ‘60s like Aldo Francia, Chileans Miguel Littin, Patricio Guzman, Jorge Sanjines, Fernado Birri, Fernando Solano, Cacho Pallero, Santiago Alvarez, Glauber Roch, Carlos Diegues, Leon Hizsman, Juaquim Pedro, Tomas Guierrez Alea, Mario Handler, Walter Achugar and many others who in the years ‘67 and ‘68 were themselves inspired by such luminaries as Joris Ivens. Together they were the originators of the phenomenon El Cine de America Latina or New Latin American Cinema influenced mainly by Italian neorealism and other movements of social cinema. Its function was to go against U.S. models and to illuminate the troubled realities of Latin America in the hope of restoring cinema of the continent. Its key moment was the meeting of Latin American Cinema 1967 , which had its impetus in the Chilean Aldo Francia , the Cinema Club of Viña del Mar , the Cuban Alfredo Guevara, the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Film (Icaic) and the Argentine Edgardo Pallero.
Illuminaries such as Annette Benning whose film The Kids are All Right was screening there and Hawk Koch, president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, wrote fan letters to Fidel and Raoul and then mixed and caught up with the top critics and journalists of Latin America and festival participants in the gardens of the Hotel Nacional. Miguel Litten and spouse, the parents of Chile’s Christina Littin, one of Chile’s current top producer/ distributors, were often seen there. Their presence reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book Clandestine in Chile about the time when Miguel disguised himself to reenter Pinochet’s Chile from whence he had been exiled. So many stories of exile and return mark the modern history of Latin America.
The first day of the Havana festival was devoted to Eictv, the international film school that Gabriel Garcia Marquez founded in 1986 with his Nobel Prize money on land donated by Cuba. Today it is headed by Rafael Rosal who in his own country, Guatemala, set up the first infrastructure for a film industry – a film school, a film festival and production facilities.
Eictv has a student body from everywhere in Latin America, Europe and even from North America. Last year as the emissary for Woodbury University in Burbank CA, I brought them their first agreement with a U.S. institution and exchanges between students and staff have already begun, bringing TV documentary filmmaker Rolando Almirante for a second time to teach documentaries.
Eictv’s event at the Festival de Cine Nuevo en Habana is Nuevas Miradas, 12 chosen projects whose producers and directors present themselves to the industry and compete for three awards.
Coincidently with the lateness of this blog which I wrote from the Palm Springs International Film Festival -- some of Eictv’s staff’s and students’ films were among Psff’s 22 Latino projects vying for the Cine Latino Prize being offered by Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara. This fact along shows a new unity of purpose among the Latino countries and their festivals (Cuba, Guadalajara and Palm Springs, which as part of the Coachella Valley, has the largest Latino population in the United States.) Among the 22 candidates for Psff’s Best Iberoamerican film were Clandestine Childhood (Argentina/ Brazil/Spain) by Benjamín Ávila, who was the coordinator of Fiction at Eictv and screenwriter Marcelo Muller also participated in Eictv; La Voz Dormida (España) of the emerging filmmaker Benito Zambrano, and 7 Boxes (Paraguay) co-directed by Juan Carlos Maneglia, a student in many of the workshops of Eictv. Eictv considers this exchange of ideas and talents as globally important.
The winners of Nuevas Miradas should be watched as one or several reach fruition. Last year The Visitor (Chile) won and has since raised the budget for a feature length film debut.
The projects, Un Viejo Traje, Moora Moora directed by Australian Rhiannon Stevens and produced by Chilean Esme Joffre, Tus padres volverán directed by Uruguayan Pablo Martínez and produced by Virginia Hinze, Cocodrilos tomando el sol, Cuerpos Celestes by Mexican director Lorena Padilla and producer Liliana Bravo, Revolución de las polleras by Bolivian director Sergio Estrada and producer Valeria Ponce received recognition and free software from Assimilate.
The documentary, Un Viejo Traje (aka The Old Suit), by Cuban director Damián Saínz (a student of Eictv) and producer Viana González received a $2,000 prize.
Fiction project, Cocodrilos tomando el sol, directed by Colombian Carlos Rojas and the Venezuelan producer Carolina Graterol, received a $1,000 prize and a course in directing at Eictv.
A film package for those interested in Cuban film programming
Ann Cross, a Scottish woman married to a Trinidadian is always in Havana. She programs the best selection of current Cuban features for U.K. distribution. This year she gave me this list of her favorites and many people concurred with her.
Y sin embargo (aka Nevertheless) by Rudy Mora also won the Beijing Film Festival prize which is surprising in that it is about school children challenging the school system, and challenging any systems in China (and perhaps in Cuba as well) is highly problematic. The child actors are exceptional. The type of burlesque comedy is typical of Cuba. Produced and Isa (international sales agent) is the Cuban government film group Icaic.
Irredemediablemente Juntos (aka Irredeemably Together) by Jorge Luis Sanchez Gonzalez is brave and challenging. Purportedly about classical music and Cuban music and the conflict between the two, it is really about race and the synthesis between black and white, Cuban and European Classical is reached in the story.
Cresciendo en la musica is about teaching music to children.
El sangre en la casa, en la escuela y en la calle (aka Blood in the House, in the School and in the Street) is a British-Cuban coproduction about Matanza, a town just outside of Havana where Cuban music roots are.
La piscine (aka The Swimming Pool) by Calvo Machado might not stand alone in the U.S. but would be good in a package.
Binchi by Eduardo Galano is about the 2 classes clashing in prison.
At the top of Ann’s list and on top of many others’ lists is Melaza.
What I saw and liked
It was also a time for me to catch up of Latin American cinema I have missed. My favorite was Chilean film Jueves a Domingo (aka from Thursday to Sunday) by Dominga Sotomayer. This road trip by a young couple and their 7 year old son and 11 year old daughter tells a story through the daughter’s eye of a loving family’s vacation and their father’s decision to move from Santiago to the countryside. We never know what he is getting away from (Pinochet?) but we see what is supposed to be a vacation transforms the family’s wholeness. The loving light touch of Sotomayer reminds me of Eric Rohmer’s four films of the seasons.
Lucie Malloy’s Una Noche was mobbed by the Cuban public wanting to see this film about two young defectors from Cuba; the police were called to break up the crowd and the overflow had a special screening set up. We hear that the young woman star who defected with her costar on the way to the Tribeca Film Festival and who landed up in Las Vegas is now in “exile mode” bewailing how she misses her family. La probrecita!! Yet another exile story. Had she waited a month, travel from Cuba would be legal. Una Noche is now here in Palm Springs as well, competitng for the Cine Latino Prize.
Other films I saw and liked
El Limpiador and Ombras were both without subtitles (as was Pablo Lorrain’s closing night film No) and so I could only watch a part of them. However I did see El Limpiador here in Palm Springs and was impressed with its simplicity and its authenticity and loving heart. A low tech take on a mysterious illness killing people in the Peruvian city of Lima, the film was simple, sometimes funny and in the end very satisfying.
A film which divided the audience neatly between men and women was the Brazilian feature Brecha Silencia (aka Breaching the Silence) about domestic violence from which 3 siblings barely escape. The subject of violence toward women was also the subject of a short which showed in every public screening. Called Ya No, this short Latin American backed PSA brings public awareness to the unacceptable violent behavior of men toward women often found in schools, in dating, and in homes.
Desde de Lucia playing in Palm Springs also takes on the subject of bullying, this time in a bourgeois Mexican school and centering on a teenage girl who has recently lost her mother.
Taken by Storm
The next segment of the festival was taken up with Trinidad + Tobago Film Festival (t+tff). Emilie Upszak, Artistic Director of t+tff, whom I had met in Havana last year through Icaic’s Luis Notario, and Bruce Paddington the founder and exec director of t+tff were in Havana with a delegation of filmmakers and their films. Since I had missed them all during the extraordinary experience I had at t+tff, I got to see Storm Saulter’s Better Mus Come which has been picked up by the new African Diaspora film distributor for U.S. Affrm (African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement).
Storm is Jamaican and took film courses at L.A. Film School, that large private film school on Sunset near Vine, across from the Arclight Theater, where many foreign students go and where many vets go seeking to learn filmmaking. Storm, however, had been making films since he was a kid using super 8mm and at the ripe old age of 27, he has since formed a collective in Jamaica called, the New Caribbean Cinema. His new fiction feature Better Mus Come screened at Trinidad + Tobago film festival and showed here in Havana as well. He will be announcing an international sales agent and a U.S. distributor very soon.
What fun and interesting days and evenings and nights I had with the t+tff folks.
We heard live music, I danced salsa with a Puerto Rican Actor/ Director who dances salsa and has a short in the festival.
Salsa in Havana seems to be losing steam. Reggaeton closes every dance event as the drunken, monotonous final act before going home. However in Jamaica it is transforming itself into Dancehall (what could be more sexual than that except for sex itself?). There is also Rumba, the traditional dance of Afro-Cubans. It is now taking new forms as the newest generation of Cuba takes the stage. Woodbury faculty, in Havana on a hosted tour with the Jose Marti Cultural Institute, led by my friend Cookie Fischer were invited to the top of the Lincoln Hotel on the night the world was to end (remember the Mayan calendar prediction?) and we danced the night away to the live music of Septeto Nacional a 70 year old group. Son was my dance of choice there. For those of you who want to see Cuba before the transition is over, now is the time. You can travel legally from L.A. and Miami, Mexico or anywhere else in the world with a general license. Take advantage of it Now as it is going to get more crowded with tourists. For us film folk, we get a privileged perch, so plan on next December taking in a week of films plus another week or two to see a country whose land and people are unique in Latin America and the Caribbean.
- 3/15/2013
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
Film In The Dominican Republic
Here in Guadalajara where we are participating in the Industry events, we spoke at length with Ellis Perez, the Director of DGCine, the government cinema industry organization for the Dominican Republic. Their new law on international and domestic production is so favorable that whereas for the last 15 years, there has been an average of 2 productions a year, in 2012 there will be 12-15 productions completed.
Six months ago priority #1 was how to get films to shoot in the Dominican Republic. Now the #1 priority is how to train Dr youth for industry jobs – mainly in production, especially crew, to provide the basics for international producers going there to shoot.
They are looking for serious small filmmakers to make the $1-3 million films there to use their local people.
Indomina, the same company as the new U.S. distribution and international sales company whose acquisitions VP Rob Williams recently acquired the Sundance titles Luv (Isa: Hollywood Studios International), Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap (Isa: Indomina) and The Imposter (Isa: Protagonist) (and parenthetically an offshoot of the sugar company Domino) in partnership with Pinewood Studios in the U.K. is one of two organizations involved in the training And is one of two companies building a studio with soundstages there.
In Cuba this December, Perez and Rafael Rosal Paz, the new Director General of Eictv (Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV, the international film school founded by Gabriel Garcia Marques with his Nobel Prize money) made the first agreement of its kind to certify the training. Eictv will help with training by sending 4 of its professors to Dr to train 24 high level students in an intensive 3 week program in shooting, sound, lighting, etc. This will take place in April and again in the summer to prepare professionals for work on Dr productions in the year 2013.
The Dr markets for production are diversified. At least 3 Spanish productions will shoot there in the coming 12 months. Now prepping is The Life of Julio Iglesias (the singer who lives in Dr). It will shoot in 6 weeks using Indomina as the local producer.
In addition 3 to 4 French movies will be completed soon. The first was completed January 2012 by producer Sergio Gobbi (Dracula 3D) who is completing his second film there.
Studio 37 from Paris is doing film on Pablo Escobar in April. Studio 37 is related to the telecom Orange which is based in Paris but has operations in Dr as well.
Another production, The Truth, now in post is a film produced by Andy Garcia starring Eva Longoria and Forrest Whittaker and directed by Damian Lee from Canada who may return with a second film this year.
An additional 4 – 5 films from North America, to be produced by Indomina and 4 -5 Dominican films will round out the 12-15 feature productions for the year.
The new law which is enticing all these productions provides support for Dominican local production as well as for foreign productions.
For Dr local movies, a 25% income tax return is provided to local businesses for investment in movies. For example, a company that owes $5 million in taxes can invest $1.5 million (25%) in a film rather than paying the same in taxes.
The Dr President, Leonel Fernandez, sees this as a way to increase production, generate new jobs, and open the door to opportunities to young Dominican talents of all sorts entering the movie industry. It will also bring in foreign investment as well as promote tourism by making Dr a destination. It is already #1 in tourism among the Caribbean nations with 4 million visitors a year who generate $4 billion income to the Dr.
For foreign film production, for 25% of the local spend in the Dr, with a minimum spend of $500,000, whether or not the entire production or only part of it is done in the Dr the government will provide a transferable tax credit certificate which is buyable by local Dr banks and financial institutions, including Indomina and Palmera Pictures which is owned by Capcanna, a tourist company. In other words, while the government will not give 25% in cash, that amount can be paid to the producer in a buyout.
And in addition to this 25% transferable tax credit certificate, there will be an exemption from paying the normal Vat of 16% usually charged for most items and services for films. (Some items will not be exempt)
Like Indomina, Dr real estate investor Cap Cana is also building a studio there which will be completed by the end of 2013. The two studios will be the first studios built in the Caribbean. Cap Cana also participates in the Dr Global Film Festival (whose programming consultant is our own Nicole Guillemet), hosting “Movies Under the Stars”.
I asked if all these wonderful incentives, plus Dr’s lower infrastructure prices (hotels, etc) were subject to changes in the government. Ellis allowed for the possibility and states he will be ready to leave this government appointed post on August 16 when the new government takes office (after the May election), but it seems doubtful to him that this will occur. Of the two candidates for President, the incumbent has the leading edge. If President Fernandez wins re-election, the status quo will prevail. His opposition was President two terms ago and Ellis Perez was his Minister of Tourism. Furthermore, both candidates favor the current law. Ellis himself is not political, belongs to no party and was appointed to this post in June 2011. While he is prepared to leave August 16 if need by, he really is aiming to stay for the next five years.
Here in Guadalajara where we are participating in the Industry events, we spoke at length with Ellis Perez, the Director of DGCine, the government cinema industry organization for the Dominican Republic. Their new law on international and domestic production is so favorable that whereas for the last 15 years, there has been an average of 2 productions a year, in 2012 there will be 12-15 productions completed.
Six months ago priority #1 was how to get films to shoot in the Dominican Republic. Now the #1 priority is how to train Dr youth for industry jobs – mainly in production, especially crew, to provide the basics for international producers going there to shoot.
They are looking for serious small filmmakers to make the $1-3 million films there to use their local people.
Indomina, the same company as the new U.S. distribution and international sales company whose acquisitions VP Rob Williams recently acquired the Sundance titles Luv (Isa: Hollywood Studios International), Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap (Isa: Indomina) and The Imposter (Isa: Protagonist) (and parenthetically an offshoot of the sugar company Domino) in partnership with Pinewood Studios in the U.K. is one of two organizations involved in the training And is one of two companies building a studio with soundstages there.
In Cuba this December, Perez and Rafael Rosal Paz, the new Director General of Eictv (Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV, the international film school founded by Gabriel Garcia Marques with his Nobel Prize money) made the first agreement of its kind to certify the training. Eictv will help with training by sending 4 of its professors to Dr to train 24 high level students in an intensive 3 week program in shooting, sound, lighting, etc. This will take place in April and again in the summer to prepare professionals for work on Dr productions in the year 2013.
The Dr markets for production are diversified. At least 3 Spanish productions will shoot there in the coming 12 months. Now prepping is The Life of Julio Iglesias (the singer who lives in Dr). It will shoot in 6 weeks using Indomina as the local producer.
In addition 3 to 4 French movies will be completed soon. The first was completed January 2012 by producer Sergio Gobbi (Dracula 3D) who is completing his second film there.
Studio 37 from Paris is doing film on Pablo Escobar in April. Studio 37 is related to the telecom Orange which is based in Paris but has operations in Dr as well.
Another production, The Truth, now in post is a film produced by Andy Garcia starring Eva Longoria and Forrest Whittaker and directed by Damian Lee from Canada who may return with a second film this year.
An additional 4 – 5 films from North America, to be produced by Indomina and 4 -5 Dominican films will round out the 12-15 feature productions for the year.
The new law which is enticing all these productions provides support for Dominican local production as well as for foreign productions.
For Dr local movies, a 25% income tax return is provided to local businesses for investment in movies. For example, a company that owes $5 million in taxes can invest $1.5 million (25%) in a film rather than paying the same in taxes.
The Dr President, Leonel Fernandez, sees this as a way to increase production, generate new jobs, and open the door to opportunities to young Dominican talents of all sorts entering the movie industry. It will also bring in foreign investment as well as promote tourism by making Dr a destination. It is already #1 in tourism among the Caribbean nations with 4 million visitors a year who generate $4 billion income to the Dr.
For foreign film production, for 25% of the local spend in the Dr, with a minimum spend of $500,000, whether or not the entire production or only part of it is done in the Dr the government will provide a transferable tax credit certificate which is buyable by local Dr banks and financial institutions, including Indomina and Palmera Pictures which is owned by Capcanna, a tourist company. In other words, while the government will not give 25% in cash, that amount can be paid to the producer in a buyout.
And in addition to this 25% transferable tax credit certificate, there will be an exemption from paying the normal Vat of 16% usually charged for most items and services for films. (Some items will not be exempt)
Like Indomina, Dr real estate investor Cap Cana is also building a studio there which will be completed by the end of 2013. The two studios will be the first studios built in the Caribbean. Cap Cana also participates in the Dr Global Film Festival (whose programming consultant is our own Nicole Guillemet), hosting “Movies Under the Stars”.
I asked if all these wonderful incentives, plus Dr’s lower infrastructure prices (hotels, etc) were subject to changes in the government. Ellis allowed for the possibility and states he will be ready to leave this government appointed post on August 16 when the new government takes office (after the May election), but it seems doubtful to him that this will occur. Of the two candidates for President, the incumbent has the leading edge. If President Fernandez wins re-election, the status quo will prevail. His opposition was President two terms ago and Ellis Perez was his Minister of Tourism. Furthermore, both candidates favor the current law. Ellis himself is not political, belongs to no party and was appointed to this post in June 2011. While he is prepared to leave August 16 if need by, he really is aiming to stay for the next five years.
- 3/5/2012
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
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