The image made the rounds on social media. Visiting Ouarzazate on the set of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 2 on June 14, Mehdi Bensaid, Morocco’s Minister of Culture, posed for a smiley photo in a suit and tie, surrounded by extras dressed in Roman armour, helmets and shields. While a week earlier, an accidental explosion injured six people during a sequence of stunts, an incident widely commented on in the Anglo-Saxon press, the photo was accompanied by a deliberately reassuring comment on Instagram of the minister. He said that “the incident will not affect the international cinematographic destination that is Ouarzazate”.
With a budget of 200 million dollars (184 million euros), Gladiator 2 is the best-funded feature film for foreign film productions in Morocco in 2023. The second part of the film at the five Oscars, part of the shooting of which was took place in Ouarzazate in 1999, should generate on the spot some 300 million dirhams of income (27.6 million euros), or a third of the billion dirhams (92 million euros) of receipts of 2022 by cinematographic works and foreign audiovisual media, according to the Moroccan Cinematographic Center (CCM).
A boon as the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic have almost halved the budgets invested in Morocco by international productions, from 800 million dirhams (73.5 million euros) in 2019 to 440 million (€40.4 million) in 2021.
The increase in reimbursement
After a 130% increase in 2022, these revenues could double and reach 2 billion dirhams (184 million euros) in 2023, “the year of all records”, predicted in March Khalid Saidi, secretary general of the CCM, dismissed from his post in May, at the Moroccan news site Médias 24. A forecast which could however be revised downwards due to the strike of American screenwriters which began on May 1.
The increase in the “cash rebate” (reimbursement) decided in March 2022 has however produced its effects. The system now offers international producers the possibility of reimbursing 30% – compared to 20% from 2018 to 2022 – of their expenses incurred in Morocco on condition that they spend at least ten million dirhams (920,000 euros) excluding taxes on site and shoot a minimum of 18 days.
“It’s a good measure, but it came late”, tempers Jean-David Lefebvre, director of the Abel Aflam company and executive producer in Morocco of the feature films Ni le ciel ni la terre by Clément Cogitore and Des hommes et des hommes. gods of Xavier Beauvois). “The principle of cash rebate was introduced in Morocco in 2018. In the Canary Islands, it has existed since 2014 at a rate of 40%. In the United Arab Emirates, it has been at 30% since 2012. We are just making up for lost time. »
“The annual envelope dedicated to reimbursement is capped at 100 million dirhams [9.2 million euros], which is too little,” notes Karim Debbagh, founder of Kasbah Films and executive producer of The Wheel of Time, a Amazon series that generated 170 million dirhams (15.6 million euros) in revenue in the kingdom in 2022.
“A diversity of landscapes and sites”
“Morocco has been a land of cinema for a century: we have technicians with recognized skills, a well-established system for customs clearance and filming authorizations. All this cannot be improvised. But it can be difficult to win over producers who are financial-first and who see the UAE or Saudi Arabia as markets where money is not an issue. Scheduled for Morocco in 2022, the filming of Desert Warrior and Kandahar finally took place in Neom, Tabouk and Al-Ula, in Saudi Arabia.
Khadija Alami nevertheless wants to be reassuring. “I’m not worried,” says the founder of K Films, member of the Academy of Oscars and executive producer in Morocco of the series Homeland. “We have such a diversity of landscapes and sites that a director can shoot films here that are supposed to take place in Algiers, Cairo, Baghdad, Tehran, Kabul, even in the south of France. This palette of exterior decors cannot be found in the Gulf countries. »
Above all, she insists, censorship poses serious problems, as was the case this year with the Lioness series by Taylor Sheridan: “Filming was to take place in the United Arab Emirates, but the authorities demanded to validate all the scripts before, which is impossible because these are written progressively. The production did not want to take any risks, because the two heroines of the film have a homosexual relationship. She finally opted for Morocco where the rules are much clearer. Except for the red lines of territorial integrity, the image of the king and religion, or even pornography which is prohibited, everything is possible. »