The Balearic Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sports, Jaume Bauzà, has highlighted the “very high” room for improvement in the Balearics as an audiovisual destination and stressed that an “institutional commitment” is necessary. The minister made the comments after the meeting held today with representatives of the audiovisual sector and said that the Balearics “has all the necessary elements to lead the ranking of preferred destinations for national and international filming”.
The minister explained that the meeting aimed to propose a joint work plan to facilitate the relationship between the film industry and public institutions with the aim of promoting the Balearics as an audiovisual destination. In this way, the foundations have been laid for the creation of an inter-institutional dialogue table aimed at responding to the needs of the sector.
The director of the Institute of Cultural Industries of the Balearic Islands (ICIB), Diana de la Cuadra, acknowledged that the audiovisual filming sector has its “peculiarities” and if it is to be promoted “we have to adapt to its needs. This does not mean that the administration should adapt unconditionally, but that it should do so with clear rules of the game, which the sector is capable of complying with,” she said.
For his part, the director of the producers’ association The Base, Chencho Coll, defended the need for the administrations to understand that the film industry is strategic and generates very important investments, which “contributes to a large volume of business and many quality jobs”.
At the same time, he stressed the importance of the Illes Balears Film Commission, the Balearic Film Commission, as a “valid” interlocutor and public body that is “respected” internally by the other institutions, and stressed the need to coordinate in order to “avoid discrediting the industry in the face of certain decisions that historically have not helped the image of the Balearics as a safe and reliable destination for audiovisual productions”.
The attendees agreed to create an interdepartmental round table, which will be led by the IBFC and will hold regular meetings. The objectives set out for the first meeting of this working group are to define and standardise the typology of audiovisual productions and the proportional requirements for each category.
The aim is also to establish, as far as possible, the deadlines and procedures for filming authorisation applications and to study the possibility of creating a system of pre-authorisations or provisional authorisations, following the example of the Canary Islands.
The IBFC will request and compile all existing protocols and analyse them in order to find common points and draw up guides to facilitate the procedures. De la Cuadra insisted that the IBFC offers itself as a “point of connection” and “support” between the industry, the network of island Film Commissioners (Mallorca, Menorca and Ibiza), the Local Film Offices and the institutions with competencies in the field of audiovisual filming.
