Already benefitting from a movie co-production agreement, Italy and Argentina will extend the pact to TV, the countries’ film authorities announced at Cannes.
Argentina’s state-owned Incaa Film Institute already operates a TV fund in a country with the biggest digital terrestial TV rollout in Latin America.
In a remarkable commitment to public service TV content, Incaa fully financed 220 fiction and docu series in 2011, all destined for Argentina’s burgeoning roster of public DTT channels.
Now Argentine-Italian TV co-productions will benefit from part of its coin, Incaa president Liliana Mazure said at Cannes.
To Argentina’s benefit, Argentina TV co-productions with Italy qualify for European broadcast quotas.
The two countries first signed a film co-production deal in 2007, ratified by their parliaments in 2011, allowing funding for the development of Argentine pics with Italian co-producers attached.
A bevy of standout titles — Daniel Burman’s “The Empty Nest” and Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprats’ “The Artist” and “The Man Next Door,” and Gianfranco Quattrini’s “Toxic Jungle” — have benefitted from the agreement.
