“Latvia launches competition to attract foreign funding for film industry and other sectors”

The purpose of the competition is to attract foreign funding to the Latvian film industry and other sectors, supporting the shooting of foreign feature films, animations and documentaries, as well as television films in Latvia, where the final deadline for submitting the film shooting report for receiving co-financing in 2023 is until November 15 of this year.

The rules of the contest state that LIAA co-financing can be combined with other types of public financing for the film project, if the total public financing for the film project does not exceed 50% of the total eligible costs of the film project in Latvia.

It is planned that the acceptance of project submissions will take place from May 2 to June 12.

According to Jānis Kovalevskis, the representative of LIAA’s Communication and Information Department, the state budget for the competition “Foreign Films in Latvia” was originally planned for funding in the amount of 177,800 euros. According to the conditions of the competition, applications must be announced twice a year. Therefore, in the first call in January, a tender was announced for 100 thousand euros, but currently – for 77,800 euros.

He noted that the demand from filmmakers significantly exceeds the mentioned amount of funding, as seven projects were approved in the first round of the competition, the requested co-financing of which amounts to 1.9 million euros. The range of requests was from 60 to 800 thousand euros per project, therefore a request for additional funds for the implementation of this program has been prepared.

The representative of the Communication and Information Department of LIAA emphasized that this support program would bring four euros back to the Latvian economy for every euro spent, and from the point of view of budget revenues, it is fiscally neutral, therefore it is planned to request additional funds for the second call.

Riga and other Latvian cities are attractive to foreign filmmakers because of the relatively low service costs. TVNET has already reported that in February of this year, an ambitious event of the South Korean company “Hive Media Corp.” was held in Riga. shooting of the Korean historical film “Harbin”, in which the film studio “Film Angels Studio” and the French company “Keystone Films” were involved from the Latvian side.