Written by on Apr 17, 2014. Posted in Incentive News

Malta increases filming rebate and incentivises productions with local settings

Malta has increased its filming rebate to 25% and will incentivise productions to film the country as itself. The Mediterranean island nation wants to attract more shoots like Captain Phillips, but producers may be eligible for an additional 2% rebate for stories set in Malta.

The filming incentive has now been extended to TV series and transmedia projects, and it also applies to post-production work completed locally up to EUR150,000 per project. In addition, the country has launched a co-production fund. All these changes are subject to final EU approval.

Malta is already a hugely popular double for Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries. In recent years Malta has been filmed by features ranging from Troy and Munich through to The Da Vinci Code, The Devil’s Double and Brad Pitt’s zombie drama World War Z, which used the country as a stand-in for Israel.

More recently Tom Hanks and filmmaker Paul Greengrass doubled Maltese waters for the Indian Ocean for their true-life modern piracy drama Captain Phillips. The production team in fact spent the best part of a month filming at sea to recreate the events of the infamous 2009 hijacking.

Malta offers a skilled crew base and popular facilities in the Mediterranean Film Studios, which include the two largest water tanks in the world.

The country plans to further boost its production industry with the incentive increase and Maltese authorities want to attract more productions looking to tell Malta-set stories.

(Main page Captain Phillips photo: Jason Boland/Columbia Pictures)