28/03/2014 - The ICA has published a calendar including new public grants, the first since Filomena Serras Pereira took charge as head of the institution

The Cinema and Audiovisual Institute of Portugal (ICA) yesterday announced the schedule for 25 grants created for the public support of independent cinema and audiovisual productions for 2014. The dates should have been released at the end of 2013, but their release was postponed in anticipation of the passing of a new cinema law at the beginning of the year (news).

With a total value of €14.9 million, the ICA has decided to give €10.28 million to cinema production, €2.944 million for audiovisual and multimedia pieces of work, and the remaining €1.727 to training programmes in schools, support programmes for the international promotion of Portuguese films and the organisation of festivals and co-production initiatives with Brazil.  

This year, support will continue going to feature length animation films (€1million), new funds for writing and development have been opened up (€800,000), as well as €400,000, which will be destined to pieces of work already filmed and going through the editing process.

New grants were mostly well received by the industry, which nevertheless showed disappointment at the disappearance of complementary support designed for the completion of cinema productions. In previous years, the programme was destined towards two feature length films whose directors had at least eight films on their resumes, a category in which names such as Manoel de Oliveira, António-Pedro Vasconcelos and José Fonseca e Costa fall into.

These are the first grants launched by the institution since the nomination of its new director Filomena Serras Pereira (news).

(Translated from Spanish)