Onboard Diary

ICAA and the Spanish Cinema Grants

ICAA and the Spanish Cinema Grants

This isn't a post of regret. Nobody should expect us to shed a single tear, neither a complaint or even a dissatisfaction face.

Just as we expected, we haven't been given the Culture Office Grant (in spite of people's claims ).

Our store was 2 out of 10, which means that the distinguished members of the board have valued with a bit more above 0 our funding plan, our artistic dossier, the film script, our shooting plan, our cast, our crew and the 900 people who are already behind this project.

We are still curious about knowing whether our project was so disastrous, so coarse, so unoriginal and so badly set out as to deserve 2 points or there's some kind of political interest behind it.

It is true that O Apostolo has been given the 100% of the points, which we are tremendously happy for, since at least this proves that a project which is partly funded by crowdfunding can also have a place in these grants.

Now all that's left is wondering what will the guys from O Apostolo with their half million euros. Will they give up crowdfunding? How will they manage to distribute the film among so many people with the restrictions implied by a State grant? We are waiting impatiently to see if they decide to give a coup de main.

On our behalf, once the grants have been made public, we want to tell what we planned to do if they would give it to us:

1) Sharing the theories of Carlos Sánchez-Almeida; if according to the Spanish legislation a film "producer" is that person who gives capital, in the case of a film it should be the Spanish citizens. It is because of this that we were going to license our film under public domain.

2) In a measure which could have been branded as certainly populist, we had planned to devote a 10% of the grant to the production of DVDs of the film, once finished, for its free delivery in the whole country.

Since nothing of this has happened, we have nothing else to do but to chin up a little, thinking that it might not be that our project is so so bad, but that it's a bit too soon for certain people or certain organizations to understand it as something viable and that in a little time, thousands of people who may support it would prove them wrong. That Cosmonaut is the craziest and riskiest initiative to be brewed in this country for a long time and that it's made with so much care that it deserves an opportunity (specifically, the €150,000 opportunity which we demanded from ICAA, a 1% of the total budget which had been given out in grants for new film makers or experimental films).

Congratulations to the winners. Let's hope we can see great films next year (if possible, for free).

Nicolás Alcalá and Cosmonaut's team.

PS: There's something which we consider unforgivable and bad behaviour on behalf of this Office. And this is that, one more year, a grant's been denied to Cesar Velasco Broca, one of our country's bravest directors, acknowledged all around the world but here; who has submitted his full-length film project under three different forms already and in any possible way. This year he was only asking for €200,000. It's absolutely ridiculous that they're still determined not to see.