Bid to attract 'big' film productions
Valencia also hopes the filmmaking industry can be used to entice more tourists to the region
A FILM commission is to be set up by the regional government in order to bring together all the different municipal and provincial film offices, so that it can coordinate efforts to attract big movie and television productions.
The CV Film commission will also make it quicker to obtain permits to film in the Valencia region, and will promote it as a location, announced regional secretary for tourism Francesc Colomer.
He noted that the region has already been a movie set before, and said he was proud the area is ‘fertile and capable of attracting shoots’.
Efforts to attract movie-related tourism should continue, he assured, ‘so that we reach the world via screens, because the screen is an extraordinary global communication tool’.
The project will also be linked to the Spain Film Commission (SFC), ‘so that we can arrive on time for any date with the cinema’.
Director of the society for
digital transformation projects (SPTD), Antonio Rodes reminded that the Ciudad de la Luz film studios in Alicante were authorised by the EU to resume their activity in July 2022.
“This is a very important asset for the Valencian economy,” he said.
“They are the best studios in Europe.”
Screen tourism
The regional government also hopes the filmmaking industry can be used to attract tourism, by capitalising on ‘the growing interest in visiting places where movies have been made, and especially series that have reached a large audience’, Sr Colomer explained.
Promoting these locations in this way is ‘a significant opportunity’, he assured.
Successful examples of screen tourism in Spain include Western movie locations, such as in Almería, and most recently locations used for the series Game of Thrones, including Peñiscola in Castellón.
Game of Thrones has over 20 million likes on Facebook, 6M followers on Twitter and 3.5M on Instagram, with a reach of 199 countries.
The Spain Film Commission has been analysing the relationship between filmmaking and tourism, and instigating various initiatives since it was established.
According to TCI research, in 2017 there were 80M tourists who travelled to visit locations of movies, series or even adverts, which is almost as many international tourists as the total who visited Spain the same year.
Since the current challenge of the tourism industry is to develop new products that are different from traditional attractions, screen tourism represents ‘a formidable option’ to diversify the offer and attract people out of season, according to SFC.