Austria’s FISAplus production incentive programme, which has recently supported projects including Cliffhanger 2,  has been relaunched with an annual budget of €80m to support international film, TV and streaming service productions as well as Austrian TV and streaming projects shooting at home.

The programme had been originally launched in January 2023 and had ploughed some €180m into projects in the first two years of operations by offering up non-repayable grants of up to 30% on the Austrian spend plus the possibility of being awarded an additional 5% green filming bonus and gender gap financing lump sum of €25,000.

However, FISAplus did not have a yearly cap on the support it could pay out and eventually proved to be a victim of its own resounding success at attracting international producers to shoot at locations in Austria.

Faced with the need to introduce austerity measures across the board to tackle the country’s budget deficit, Austria’s new government put the brakes on FISAplus at the beginning of this year, with the result Austria suddenly became less attractive as a shooting location for international productions.

With the relaunch this week, FISAplus now has a yearly cap set at €80m, with at least 30% of these funds being reserved for investment in international service productions.

In other changes to the previous guidelines, applications for the incentive should not be submitted any earlier than 10 months before the start of filming, and producers applying for a grant of more than €1.5m will be obliged to have a personal consultation with staff at the Film in Austria film commission.

As in its first two years of operations, the incentive programme will still be able to put up to € 5m into a single film project or a maximum of €7.5m in a TV series. Jean-Francois Richet’s Cliffhanger reboot and the second series of Hulu’s Nicole Kidman drama Nine Perfect Strangers both received the maximum payouts. 

Producer Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu, chairman of the Austrian economic chamber for the film and music industry, described the relaunch as “a clear signal for the film industry and an important step to restoring confidence in Austria as a film hub”.

The incentive programme has been reinstated by Austria’s Federal Ministry of Labour and Economy.

• Labina Mitevska reflects on why she believes the world needs her sister Teona Strugar Mitevska’s Venice title ‘Mother’