I&B Ministry organizes roundtable at SCO film festival

The aim of the session was to facilitate engagement between the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Indian industry stakeholders, filmmakers and jury members of the film festival to explore possible avenues of collaboration between India and the SCO countries.

“During the session, SCO member nations were urged to promote talent exchange and explore co-production agreements with India and avail benefits of the existing Indian film incentives through joint ventures,” the I&B Ministry said.

As there are relatively strong film industries in India and the participating countries, there is a lot of potential to promote India as a destination for film industries of other nations.

“India currently has bilateral audio-visual co-production agreements with China and Russia. There is active consideration for co-production agreements with member countries such as Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, and dialogue states such as Turkey. There is also close co-operation between the film industries of India, Nepal and Sri Lanka although there are no bilateral agreements. Over the past six years there has been one Indo-Chinese co-production and one Indo-Russian co-production,” the ministry added.

A number of films for the SCO countries such as China (5), Iran (2), Kazakhstan (1), Nepal (1), Russia (2), Sri Lanka (1) and Turkey (1) have been granted permission to shoot in India. The objective of the roundtable was to share experiences and provide insights and suggestions for improving the overall ecosystem and outreach in terms of incentives for foreign production and official co-productions announced by the Government of India.

The roundtable was organized under the aegis of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the National Film Development Corporation, and the Film Facilitation Office, Invest India. The session was chaired by Neerja Sekhar, Additional Secretary, I&B Ministry.