Global setback for Spanish film

Spanish cinema has suffered a new setback, this time from outside sources. In 2010 nationally produced films earned 90 million euros abroad, compared with 144 million euros in 2009. It is another negative figure for the industry, and another thing to complain about for people who, like director Fernando Trueba, feel Spanish cinema only appears in the media when there is bad news.

Despite the fall, however, Spanish cinema continues to earn more outside Spain than inside - where homegrown movies took 80.27 million euros in 2010. In the 19 countries for which Rentrak, the main global box-office auditor, has data, there were 222 releases of 91 Spanish titles (some of them were repeated in several countries), which marks an increase of 18 percent. The drop in box-office receipts has been enormous, though: 37.5 percent, a difference that can be attributed to the effect of Planet 51, says Pedro Pérez, president of the FAPAE, the association of audiovisual producers, which released the figures. "That film alone made 50 million euros in 2009," he notes.

"We must win back the media, as we only appear in it because of bad news"

The statistics were unveiled at this week's Madrid de cine event, a three-day publicity push for Spanish cinema involving international journalists, distributors and sales agents. Trueba is the patron of this year's edition and talked alongside Pérez and Gonzalo Salazar-Simpson, president of the State Cinema Association (AEC), about Spanish cinema's difficult future. Salazar-Simpson warned of the need to find foreign financing as nobody is betting on Spain because of tax incentives in other countries (including the US), while Trueba warned of the need to become more independent from the TV companies, pointing out the dramatic relationship between the two here, which is very different from in the rest of Europe.

"We don't know how to sell Spanish cinema," says the Chico & Rita director. "We must win back the media, as we only appear in it because of bad news.

"I'm not setting out a way to win back the public. As a creator, I only think about writing a good script. Chasing the audience is as impossible as running after youth. I've always envied the chauvinism of the French. If you read its film press, they make five masterpieces every month. Here we suffer from attacks by certain parts of the media, and that 'help' we don't need, as it was already going badly for us without it."

On the subject of the small screen, he says: "On TV you only see idiots, criminals and slanderers, never poets or philosophers. We're creating a sick society because we see the good ones as stupid and the bad as intelligent."

"The producers aren't muscling up, they are fragmenting more and more and losing their momentum," says Salazar-Simpson. "We survive off individual pushes."

The biggest Spanish film at the foreign box office in 2010 was Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, followed by The Secret in Their Eyes, Planet 51 and Buried. Only the last one was a wholly Spanish production.