Cinema, the mobilization of the sector: «We need certain rules and resources»

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The answer was there. So much so that the Adriano cinema in Rome had to open five rooms to accommodate those who responded to the appeal launched by the world of cinema and audiovisuals to “take stock of the situation in the sector and ask for greater investments”.

There were 23 participating acronyms, belonging to various sectors of the cinema industry, from producers to actors and workers. “They want there to still be a tomorrow” is the slogan of the day intended to raise the alarm on the cinema industry and the audiovisual sector which, it has been reiterated, “is stopping”. The cause? Remodulation of financing and uncertainty regarding the rules, to summarize at best. Uncertainty especially regarding the tax credit, a review of which was announced a year ago, but has not yet reached checkers. «The law that regulates the sector – explains Andrea Occhipinti of Lucky Red – is eight years old. We have been suggesting interventions to avoid abuse for some time. What we want to do today is give our point of view as an industry. That there is particular attention to smaller entities and that there is no growth achieved only by large groups or by the large reality of platforms.”

A day, the one desired by the 23 acronyms, in which there were no disorganized tones, it must be said, but in which very precise requests to politics were preceded by numbers reeled off to underline, first of all, the value of the sector: 9 thousand companies, with over 65 thousand employed directly and 114 thousand indirectly. «Every euro invested in the sector generates 3.54», Occhipinti himself pointed out.

Yet the mechanism failed. It is undeniable that the tax credit has led to distortions and the organizers themselves admit it: «Too many films from abroad and too many productions, so it needs to be remodulated». Finally, the request for certainty also concerns the maintenance of the level of public investment on automatic contributions, those assigned to independent producers on the basis of commercial and artistic success, with the obligation to reinvest in new cinematographic works and, for selective contributions, that priority be given to smaller and not high-budget films.

«We are happy – is the comment of the undersecretary Lucia Borgonzoni – to have read that the audiovisual sector today reiterated the requests that we have already shared in the past months and that we are putting into practice, starting from the division that has already been approved» and which precedes the launch of the implementing decrees on which, assures the Undersecretary of Culture, Lucia Borgonzoni, from «tomorrow morning, the minister Gennaro Sangiuliano and I will be at work, together with the Director of Cinema of the Mic, Nicola Borrelli, in order to be able to sign these decrees as early as next week.” As for the “stopping” of the sector, the undersecretary replies: «Precisely in order not to block the sector, last January we opened a window to be able to submit new financing applications with the old rules».