A €300,000 ‘gender incentive’ and a €500,000 ‘intern incentive’ have been launched by the Bavarian film fund FFF Bayern to support gender equality and help address skills shortages in the German film industry.
The new incentives, the first of their kind in Germany, were unveiled by Judith Gerlach, state minister for digital affairs, at Filmfest München this week.
For the gender incentive, a conditionally repayable interest-free loan of up to €30,000 will be available to production companies for at story or development stage if the project has women in at least two of the three positions of producer, director and screenwriter. The applicant must also have a cinema or television project supported with production funding from FFF Bayern in the last three years where two of these three key positions were also held by women.
The first applications can be made to FFF Bayern in its next open call for general funding submissions between September 25 and October 9.
The €500,000 intern incentive aims to attract new blood into the industry to help tackle the skills shortage. Production companies who take on at least one intern for a project will be able to apply for a lump sum of € 2,000 as monthly payment for the intern, with the maximum amount per production set at €10,000.
This latest initiative comes shortly after the staging of the first Film Academy Day, organised by FFF Bayern’s Film Commission and the Bavaria Film Studios this March, which brought 600 school children, young people and lateral entrants to the studio lot on the outskirts of Munich to find about the range of training and career opportunities for working in the film industry.
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