17/09/2003

Things are going well for Spanish cinema. The positive news has come in a study done by Spain’s Institute for Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts (the ICAA) which has conducted a survey covering the period 1992-2002. The results have shown a proportionate increase for the national product in respect to American films, the thorn in the side of many European film industries, and have also pointed to an annual rise in audiences for Spanish films, with an average growth of 2.27%, compared with an average rise of 1.57% for foreign films.
Over this ten year period, more than 20 Spanish films have registered audience figures over 1m, with the overall figure coming in at a total audience of 53m for the period covering 1993 and 2001. Spanish works have also taken an unusually high share of the market, namely 12.2%, and in 1999 that figure was 33.2% with the data for 2001 showing a 31.5% share.

This improvement has also had positive repercussions in many other parts of the film industry in Spain. The ICAA itself has doubled its funding, going from €14m in 1992 to €31m in 2002; and that’s without even mentioning the national production which has shown a considerable increase in the number films being made, registering a rise of 33%.
The costs of production have also doubled, going from an average of €967,000 per film in 1992 to more than €2m in 2002, but there’s also an increase of companies which produce at least one film a year: from 74 between 1996-2000, to 108 in the two-year timescale covering 2000-2002.
There are also excellent results for the cinema operators, with the number of screens in Spain increasing from 1,793 in 1993 to more than 4,000 in 2002: a rise of 125.5% in just 10 years.

(Translated from Italian)