The Consell de Mallorca, included in a joint project with the Consell d’Eivissa and the Consell de Menorca, has received a grant from the ICAA (Ministry of Culture) of 250,000€ of European Funds to organize residencies for the creation and development of audiovisual projects in 2022 and 2023. The project, called Illes de Ficció, will focus efforts to create fiction series and feature films. The majority of this support will go directly to the Consell de Mallorca.
Illes de Ficció – Residències de creació audiovisual de les Illes Balears is conceived as an extension of the international screenwriters’ residency The Write Retreat that has been held annually in Mallorca since 2018 and that in each edition welcomes a dozen screenwriters from around the world, accompanied and directed by high-level specialists.
One of Palma Pictures’ shooting in Mallorca. Photo: Palma Pictures.
In addition to giving continuity to The Write Retreat, the project proposes to articulate other initiatives already in operation, aimed at audiovisual creation and facilitating access to the market, reinforcing their scope and complementing them with actions that allow participants to achieve a higher level of training and interaction with the most relevant actors in the industry and the market.
Illes de Ficció is a collaboration between the island councils of Mallorca, Eivissa and Menorca, through their respective Film Commissions, with the support of the regional television station IB3TV, and the associations APAIB (producers), ACIB (filmmakers and screenwriters) and CIMA (women in film).
The project will organize a program of two residencies each year (2022 and 2023), each lasting eight weeks. They will take place in Mallorca, Eivissa and Menorca, and will be supported and co-financed by the island councils of each island, through the respective Film Commissions, which will coordinate and organize the activities to be held. Each residency will have ten participants and one will specialize in fiction series and the other in fiction feature films.
A digital platform will interconnect the participants and experts involved in the project, will manage all the materials created in the residencies and will serve as a permanent point of contact between the authors and those interested in producing, financing and distributing the projects, which may be during the celebration of the events or when they have already ended. The residency will end with a Market Day, which will include a pitching session, where each participant will present his or her project.
Each year, one of the two residencies will lead to a winning project, which will receive a development grant from the Mallorca Film Commission, with which the project can be further developed during the following six months.
The residency to be held in Mallorca will be dedicated to fiction series, while the one in Eivissa will focus on fiction feature films, and each will have the support of its island council. The final Market Days will take place in Menorca, also with the support of the island’s consell insular.
This initiative is part of the Consell de Mallorca’s bid to turn the island into an international film center. The goal is to attract professionals of the sector and turn Mallorca into both a filming hub and a point of creation and development of projects.
It should be recalled that a grant of 2.1 million € has already been approved for the Green Film Shooting project, which will begin to be developed in the coming weeks, to implement comprehensive measures of environmental sustainability in the audiovisual sector, which integrates an international training center for audiovisual producers and technicians and the implementation of calls that allow audiovisual production service companies in Mallorca to be equipped with sustainable filming resources.
This grant is part of the program of promotion, modernization and digitization of the audiovisual sector, and proposes measures to promote initiatives aimed at increasing the professionalization of the creation and development phases of audiovisual projects without limits in terms of formats.
These aids will also promote that the opportunities of digitalization processes are fully exploited, that international co-production is increased, that the incorporation of more women and young people to the sector’s activity is accelerated in order to bridge the gender and generational gap and that a sustainable development model is integrated to the audiovisual activity.
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