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Senator, research study want local filmdom to learn lessons from the popular film industry

HONG KONG: The Bollywood song-and-dance routine, which has won the hearts and minds of countless moviegoers around the world, is being cited in the Philippines as a shining example of a curative for the country's ailing film industry.

The bump-and-grind routines and all that running around trees that so typically characterise Bollywood blockbusters may be what it takes to administer the kiss of life to the Filipino film industry that's being taxed to death, in the estimation of Senate president and Nacionalista Party leader Manny Villar.

"Why don't we have films that feature dances and songs, just like Indian movies?" Villar asks. After all, "Filipinos are great dancers and singers."

But beyond the glitz and the glamour of songs and dances, Villar acknowledges that it's important to study how Bollywood came to be a global success, and perhaps learn lessons from it. In the Philippines, for instance, the film industry faces a string of taxes that render it unviable to make films in the first place. Villar notes that the return on investment for Indian films is substantially high.

A research study, titled Can the Philippines follow Bollywood? and conducted by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, says that low production costs and high revenues ensure that Indian films offer high return on investment. It cites Monsoon Wedding, the Mira Nair film which earned $30 million worldwide on an investment of just $1.5 million, as an example. "Film production in the US is a hundredfold costlier than that in India, where an average film costs less than $500,000 to produce," it says.

The study further cites the Indian experience of the government providing tax incentives for investors and theatre-owners to upgrade their cinemas to go digital as a model worthy of emulation. "With the advent of digital technology and the identification of Bollywood as a priority export sector, the government reduced the basic import duties on certain digital studio equipment, benefiting the content producers and other media companies in India," the study notes.

"The government also initiated various tax incentives to investors investing in multiplexes in the rural areas. Bank and institutional funding was made available to single-screen owners to upgrade their existing theatres to multiplexes." Over 100 cinema halls had been converted into digital theatres in recent years, it added.

Senator Villar has, therefore, filed a bill in Senate, which seeks to reduce the amusement tax on local films from 30% to 10% of gross receipts from ticket sales. Simultaneously, the bill proposes a 25% amusement tax on foreign films for two years, in order to give the local film industry a fighting chance to compete against the hugely popular foreign films.