After two and a half years of debate and hard work, the ENA, National Audiovisual Space -espacioaudiovisualnacional.org/ - is preparing to present to the Argentine Congress the draft of a new law to promote national audiovisual activity. If approved, this reform would update the successful Law 17.741 for the promotion of national cinematographic activity, sanctioned in May 1968 to update the technological change of the time that involved the transmission of films on television. The National Audiovisual Space was created in 2020, by the organizations APIMA (Association of Independent Producers of Audiovisual Media) - www.apima.com.ar -, ARGENTORES (General Society of Authors of Argentina) - www.argentores.org.ar -, DAC (Argentine Film Directors) - www.dac.org.ar - and PCI (Independent Cinema Project) - www.pcicine.com -, for the preparation of this draft.
“The objective is to achieve a collective work that is nourished by everything positive that the current Film Law has, plus what we have learned during 27 years in which we have faced operational problems for its application and technological dilemmas paradigm that poses new forms of communication and global marketing”, develops a statement from the EAN on its official site.
The main axes of the reform of the law address the updating of audiovisual law to the digital world, especially in the field referred to the currently predominant mode of dissemination, which are streaming content platforms. In the tax reform approved by the Argentine Congress in 2017, these platforms were included in the Value Added Tax. However, the funds collected through this tax were not redirected to the Cinematographic Development Fund, which should be constituted with the commercialization of audiovisual works, as is done with the collection of VAT from cinemas or television. One of the objectives of this bill is to correct this irregularity in distribution. "There is no reason that justifies that the same criterion is not applied, when the commercialization of those same Audiovisual Works is carried out through digital platforms (OTTs), which is currently happening to the detriment of our production," explains the official site of the EAN in the presentation of the draft.
The reinvestment in the national film industry of a tax that has already been settled would mean the end of an anomaly in the Argentine legal system that unfairly harms audiovisual production.
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