Italian Film & TV Tax Credit Plans Submitted

Plans for a number of revisions to the Italian film and TV tax credit have been submitted to the culture ministry after months of uncertainty.

Nicola Borrelli, the General Director of Cinema and Audiovisual at the Italian Ministry of Culture, revealed the news at the AVPSummit this morning in south Italy.

Borrelli said the submission still includes a 40% tax credit for some Italian movies and TV series, but for projects to qualify for the full rate there will be more stringent rules around eligibility.

These rules will include updates around crew incentives, which could require that an Italian writer or director needs to be attached, while there will be a “minimum limit of expense on the Italian territory,” he said. Filming will need to take place for at least one day in Italy in order to qualify.

In this way, the Italian government, run by right-wing PM Giorgia Meloni, will claw back some resources while prioritizing Italian productions, Borrelli said. Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano said back in October that public spending on the tax credit had ballooned from $494M (€423M) in 2019 to $907M (€841M) in 2022, and that it needed reining in.

“We have decided to apply the changes not because we want to reduce the amount of money but because we want to avoid the waste of useful resources,” said Borrelli. “Sometimes journalists say our resources have not been used properly, while on the contrary we have reached the goals we had,” he claimed.

He said there will be “a few tweaks” from the original credit, which has seen a huge boom in projects shooting in Italy, but “the main elements are already known.”

Plans have been submitted to the ministry and more information will likely be published in a few weeks time, prior to the summer break.

Borrelli said Meloni’s government is reorganizing a number of similar schemes across numerous industries. There had been fears raised with Deadline by sources at this week’s AVPSummit that tax credits would be heavily watered down following Meloni’s strong performance in the European elections, while some had expected answers as late as October.

The move follows months of uncertainty and many Italian productions had stopped shooting while they waited to see the level of tax credit they could attract. The issue has been impacting both local productions and also international projects looking to shoot in Italy, which had been handed a boon by the success of HBO’s The White Lotus – filmed in Sicily.

Italian film and TV orgs held an emergency press conference in Rome several weeks back to discuss the damage being done to their sectors by the uncertainty. The meeting gathered the members of 14 professional bodies including filmmakers’ org 100 Autori, producer groups Anica and AGICI, Cartoon Italia and the actors’ association Unita. 

Borrelli was speaking at the AVPSummit alongside funders from the UK and France.