Last night, the 8th Belize International Film Festival opened yesterday, and 7News attempted to provide you the viewers with a preview of those films which have been submitted.
We contacted the personnel in charge at Institute of Creative Arts, those who are responsible for the festival, but they were apparently unavailable.
We did get a call back today, and invited to a workshop being facilitated by one the filmmakers. He told us that Belize may be able to present independent filmmakers with incentives to shoot movies in the country.
Here's how he explained why:
Brent Toombs – President, BAVIA
"We are having our anual Audio Visual Symposium in conjunction with the Belize INternational Film Festival. The idea is to try to bring the local stake holders, producers, people who are interested in the film industry of Belize as well as the visiting film makers who are here. To bring together in a room to start talking about some of the issues of the industry itself. So today we're basically , we're looking at two aspects - the finance, the money matters behind making films. So this morning's sessions was about film insentives and about what other countries in different territories do to try to track film production. So we're looking at specifically how Sutherland, who is a a film maker from Canada, he shot a movie that is set in Jamaica but he actually filmed it in Trinidad and the reason for that is that Trinidad and Tobago offers a 35% rebate. So he spent about a million dollars in Trinidad and he got like $350,000 of that back. So we're looking at that, it's not a fiscal model that could make sense for Belize - are we ready for that? Is it something that we have to have in order to develop this industry."
Sudz Sutherland – Director, "Home Again"
"Home Again is a story of three deportees who were born in Jamaica but immigrated as children to the US then Canada and so once there they were followed by the law and got deported as adults to an island that they don't know is Jamaica. So Jamaica is standing in for plays all over the world but we want to show Jamaica but we couldn't. It's a small independent film because there was budget shortfall and we were looking for a place to shoot that looked just like Jamaica and we found Trinidad. Trinidad has a tax insentive and it was 35% and we spent over a million dollars and that plugged our budget sortfall and we got almost $350,000 back and this is the kind of thing that attracted us to Trinidad. We wouldn't have shot without it because we had a budget shortfall and wanted to maximize our investment. So we're actually doing this more than ever, it used to be only studios that did this kind of thing and now independent companies and producers are actually able to do it. We're here to talk about it as a possibility as a future for Belize because it would be like a boost to the industry here."
The film festival's highlights take place on next week Monday, July 15th, 2013 at the House of Culture.
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