Seven Days In Paris is first beneficiary of French tax rebate

Even as Sharmila Tagore featured on the jury, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Hrithik Roshan scorched the Red Carpet and Indian filmmakers hawked their wares at Cannes, the French government that devised a new French tax rebate to attract foreign filmmakers has netted its first big success with Bollywood - Studio 18’s Seven Days In Paris. “It is a romcom and we start the shoot by June-end or early July,” reveals director Sanjay Gadhvi about his film starring Katrina Kaif and Imran Khan. The film will benefit from the new French tax rebate. Under the new law, which still needs final approval from Brussels, foreign filmmakers can recoup upto 20 per cent of their production budget in France, up to a maximum of four million Euros.

Franck Priot, deputy head of Film France, a state-financed body that works to draw international film productions, said that Seven Day In Paris was the first to sign up for the rebates, passed into law in December. The tax scheme aims to bring France into line with European rivals, including Britain, Germany and Hungary, which have all launched similar initiatives to attract international filmmakers to shoot in their countries.

The European Commission is currently examining the French scheme and is expected to announce a decision on which films can qualify by the end of next month, Film France’s managing director Patrick Lamassoure said. Production teams can already submit applications to benefit from the rebate when it comes into force. However, several other projects already under way when the law was adopted have upped their production budgets as a result of it, Lamassoure said. They include the BBC’s hit series Merlin, being filmed in a chateau in northern France — and the US production firm Lionsgate with Five Killers, an action comedy starring Ashton Kutcher, which was part-filmed in Nice.