Spanish Film Biz Embraces Co-Productions
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Loading... - Alice Harrice
- 02 Jun 2022
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Spain’s Cannes presence this year offers testimony to its developing co-production scene, as well as economic concerns driving the search for international partners and the ambitions of a highly cosmopolitan generation of cineastes that is driving art cinema production in Spain.
Four Spanish features have made this year’s Cannes cut: Albert Serra’s competition entry “Pacifiction”; Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s “The Beasts,” in Premiere; José Luis López Linares’ Cannes Classics title “Goya, Carriere and the Ghost of Buñuel”; and Directors’ Fortnight contender “El Agua,” by Elena López Riera.
All four are international co-productions. Also at Cannes, a Spanish Producers Network showcase, backed by ICEX Trade and Investment and ICAA Film Institute, will highlight eight potential overseas co-production projects.
Spain’s burgeoning co-pro scene is one reaction to the challenges of its domestic market. Bowing April 29, Carla Simón’s Berlin Golden Bear winner “Alcarràs” has become an event movie, scoring a superb 60,000 tickets sale over its first weekend, nabbing the best average per-print revenues of any Spanish release this year. Most arthouse movies in Spain sink without a trace, however. So Spain’s indie filmmakers need a second country to make films of any ambition.
“Co-production opens up options for bigger budgets, often between $2.64 million and $3.16 million, which is what we should have for indie cinema in Spain, so that the auteurs are not conditioned by financing,” says Alex Lafuente, co-founder of indie production-distribution company Bteam Pictures.
Other factors are pushing filmmakers to look abroad.
“We’ve been working for years for international visibility, thinking of international collaboration from the very beginning,” Lafuente says. “This is generating the presence of a lot of Spanish films at international festivals and developing an ability to take them outside our borders.”
Plus, the newest generation of Spanish filmmakers – who are highly cosmopolitan, passionately collaborative and overseas-facing, many having studied abroad – largely don’t want to make films just anchored in one country.
“We need to co-produce so that our film can be at festivals, so that international sales agents and distributors are committed to taking it to other countries,” says “Alcarràs” producer María Zamora, Elastica Films co-founder.
Co-producing can help get complex projects off the ground. “Co-production forums attract me a lot. I strongly believe in the universal: That stories, however local, can reach many places,” says Zamora, who met Kino Produzioni producer Giovanni Pompili at the TorinoFilmLab. He later boarded “Alcarràs” as a co-producer, allowing the film to tap an Italian fund for minority co-productions.
Projects presented at international development and writing workshops also generate early buzz and allow producers to receive feedback.
As arthouse audiences in Spain spend increasing time with auteur-created high-end TV, film producers are looking for foreign equity to finance titles. Read More…
