The film commission and territorial promotion

Tourism and cinema have lived in an intimate relationship since the beginning of the latter. So much so, that it would not be possible to list all the tourist destinations that certain films have made fashionable. Not only renowned cities like Paris, Rome, or New York that are well-known film sets, but more remote places that have acquired unexpected (or expected) fame from a specific appearance. Some well-known examples of this phenomenon could be Maya Bay in the Phi Phi Islands of Thailand from The Beach (Macdonald, 2000), New Zealand after The Lord of the Rings (Jackson, 2001), or platform 9 and ¾ of the Harry Potter saga (Columbus, 2001) at King's Cross tube station in London. More recent is the case of the different scenarios around the world of the Game of Thrones series (Benioff and Weiss, 2011-2019) which in Spain has led to a notable increase in tourism in San Juan de Gaztelugatxe.

During the last decades, the ease of traveling due to cheaper means of transport, together with a certain cinematographic fetishism and the renewed passion for series, arising from platforms such as Netflix or HBO, has been a shock to a certain type of tourism associated with audiovisual consumption and spectacular landscapes. The big screen and the small screen, besides entertaining, have a great capacity for emotional and immersive connection with viewers, which can be translated into purchase and consumption impulses. In this sense, the desire to share the symbolic and physical space of certain audiovisual products can be a powerful engine for activating tourism, especially when it comes to less traveled and remote destinations that also offer the extraordinary attraction of being exclusive places.

In this synergy between the audiovisual and tourism fields, the film commissions are entities that can become highly relevant and tip the balance in the choice between some places or others depending on their positioning and development strategy. The film commissions are, in their definition, entities that are created from a triple point of view: to provide specialized services in audiovisual matters, with a vocation for public service, and as territorial promotion agencies (González-Bennet & Nieto-Malpica, 2013). Their strategic objectives consist of attracting the greatest number of shoots to a specific territory and providing the necessary services for this with local professionals. Normally they also function as specialized directories and facilitators in access to certain spaces. They are entities that are born linked to the administration, although their management can be public or private. For this reason, they are defined as a public service, because they are designed to generate activity in their field of action (Sarabia and Sánchez, 2019).

Ideally, the idea of establishing a film commission or film office arises from the conjuncture of several issues. On the one hand, the territory has places of interest, whether urban or natural, that there is an audiovisual business fabric, and, on the other hand, there is the operational capacity to host this type of project (Malpica, Rodríguez, Hermida, & Sempere, 2019). Here, once again, the audiovisual business and the tourist business go hand in hand, since this operational capacity also refers to the accommodation and maintenance facilities derived from any filming of a certain magnitude. If this capacity exists, it can also be a relevant enclave for tourism development. In this way, new segments of the public are captured and the local business is stimulated through film tourism (Osácar, 2016 as cited in Sarabia and Sánchez, 2019).

This relationship works in both directions, that is to say: places that are already efficiently exploited, such as, for example, classic destinations such as Madrid, Lisbon, or London, offer suitable settings since they are recognizable, accessible, and attractive to spectators and audiovisual professionals, in this case, they can see the tourist strategy proposed before the hosting of important filming being reinforced. In the opposite sense, places that are not so intensively exploited, but with a certain capacity for tourism development, can be enhanced by arousing interest from the appearance in a certain series or film. In this case, it is the audiovisual production that forces the development of a broader tourism business strategy. In this way, the film commissions have a strategic role that could be very decisive since capturing filming can bring with it the possibility of laying a pillar on a tourism development strategy greater than that proposed without this additional promotion, as can happen with music or film festivals, for example. The film commissions are organized in geographically grouped networks, such as the European Film Commission Network, within which is the Spain Film Commission, which carries out its activity through the "Shooting in Spain" ¹ platform and which currently groups 31 ² offices throughout the entire country.

Audiovisual co-production as a strategic alliance

Audiovisual co-production consists of the resulting collaboration agreement between different entities to create an audiovisual project. One of the main requirements is that the members of the agreement are from different countries, from there the agreement can take various single or combined formulas: joint contribution of capital and/or contribution of technical and human resources (Peira, 2016).

Co-production as a usual formula began in the fifties in most European countries. The aim is to put into practice a competitive strategy to confront US hegemony, share risks and costs, and increase the size of the potential market for films by uniting the audiences of the involved nationalities. In this way, co-productions respond to the need to find more advantageous financing systems resulting from the union of economic resources, tax incentives, and the association of production companies (Kanzler and Simone, 2019, p. 7). This possibility is key when it comes to countries with limited resources or limited markets. For example, in the European case, the potential audience of a given country is very low compared to the real and effective capacity of other markets, such as Canada, even if only in terms of population. It would be out of this equation to mention the US market since its characteristics in this field exceed any comparison. Therefore, it is interesting to establish this type of collaboration to try to expand the number of viewers through cultural or geographical connections (Gómez et al., 2013).

Initially, the co-production agreements had to cooperate in the artistic field of the audiovisual project, but the relaxation of the requirements of the formula to take advantage of the benefits of the system allows collaborations to have only an economic nature or to collaborate in all fields of production. However, there are also drawbacks such as linguistic segmentation that makes productions more expensive, or the necessary artistic and cultural homogenization to make audiovisual products more commercial and cross-border (Pardo, 2007).

The Galician-Portuguese co-production

The audiovisual collaboration between Spain and Portugal has its origin at the beginning of the last century. The first works were produced without a joint strategy whose search tries to meet the needs of the shooting more than as an international project. Before the Spanish Civil War, some interesting films were made, both for the economic aspect (large-scale productions given the capacity of both countries at that time) and for the diffusion of some of these films, such as Bocage / Las tres gracias (Leitão, 1936) which, with modest audiences in Spain and Portugal, finds a great following in Brazil (Peira, 2016).

During the Franco era and similarly, in the Portuguese Salazarism, several co-productions were produced until 1949. Many of these films, such as the one by Inés de Castro (Leitão de Barros, 1944) have a clear propaganda vocation to illustrate the Iberian agreement. However, despite the similarities between the two dictatorships, the reservations of both countries prevent collaborations from being very numerous and they are not maintained over time. The potential market that the Spanish-Portuguese production could invoke between the Peninsula and Latin America does not seem to be very relevant and the experience with the Spanish and Portuguese audiences translates into a lack of interest in each other (Sempere, 2012).

As of the transition, ties with the neighboring country are strengthened and a collaboration agreement for audiovisual projects materializes, which dates back to 1989. As collected through the Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts (ICAA by its acronym in Spanish), Spain and Portugal made 64 co-productions between 1978 and 2009 (Ciller and Beceiro, 2013). A very low number for the thirty-one years of the mentioned period, especially if this figure is compared with the rest of the European countries with which Spain has bilateral agreements and taking into account that most of these collaborations fall within the latest decades.

One of the important steps to consolidate this bilateral audiovisual relationship is the Agreement on cinematographic relations between the Kingdom of Spain and the Republic of Portugal dating from 1990 (BOE, 1990).

In the new century, Spanish-Portuguese relations in economic and commercial matters proliferate extraordinarily and between 2000 and 2009 alone, more than thirty co-productions have been made between Spain and Portugal (Gómez et al., 2009).

Some of these co-productions are made between Portugal and Galicia. At the end of the 20^th century and the beginning of the 21^st, commercial relations intensified, and to define this issue in the audiovisual field, the Galician Audiovisual Law of September 1999 emerged, which includes the consideration of the audiovisual sector as strategic. In this way, the Galicia-Northern Portugal Euroregion is taking shape as a preferred territory for exchange and co-production (Ledo, 2003).

In 2006, De Profundis (Casal, 2006) by Miguelanxo Prado, a co-production belonging to the animation genre, premiered. In 2010 the film Assalto ao Santa María, a Portuguese film with Galician participation, was made. Also in this same year, the co-production between Galicia and Portugal " Onde está a felicidade?" was filmed(Amorós and Comesaña, 2013; Gómez et al., 2009).

The Euroregion's most recent works include the successful series Vidago Palace (Oliveira and Coira, 2017), the first co-production between public television in Galicia and Portugal (Íñiguez, 2017), the results of which encouraged the continuation of the co-production system until reaching to Auga Seca (Nogueira, 2020). Also, the series Verão M (Carvalho and Sequeira, 2018) of Portuguese production and with the participation of RTVG, which broadcast it on its second channel (Grela, 2018). In 2020, the stop motion project O Meu Avó (Online, 2020) by Caretos Film A.I.E. was made, which is a co-production between Portugal, Galicia, and France.