The new Slovenian law on film incentives introduces a cash rebate scheme amounting to 25% of qualified spend for foreign producers filming in Slovenia. Qualified spend includes all the taxable production costs (hotels, logistics, rentals, services, food, accounting and legal services, etc) incurred in Slovenia. Most kinds of film and TV projects: feature films, animation, documentaries, TV series, etc are eligible. Excluded are commercials, sitcoms and pornography. The scheme has an estimated budget of 1m EUR per year. If the scheme proves to be successful, this budget may increase. All the bidding projects need to pass a ‘cultural test’, as required in the EU for similar EU film incentive schemes.

“The new law creates a more competitive environment for foreign productions in Slovenia, due to the fact that all neighbouring countries already have the incentives.

It will bring new job oportunities to Slovenian film professionals and finally, it will prove the film sector can also enrich other sectors in Slovenia. Hopefully, this can be an extra argument to stop the decrease of the budget of the Slovenian Film Center and start its increase,” the acting directof of the Slovenian Film Center Nerina Kocjančič told FNE.

While the passage of the new amendment was in general hailed as a positive step some questions remained.“There are some questions arising, among them regarding the distriubtion of the funds based on the ‘cultural test’. The Slovenian film producers also wish for an indepth discussion with the Slovenian Ministry of Culture abouth the financial sheme,” Miha Černec, the President of the Slovenian Producers Association told FNE.