A €100M ($112M) fund for TV and film projects shooting in Italy launched today at the MIA Market.
Raj Singh‘s Media Capital Technologies and Italy’s RP1 Holding have team to create the One Media Capital Fund, which will be used to back productions and help finance distribution.
It was announced at the European Investment Hub, which launched at this year’s MIA Market in Rome, Italy.
Mauro Martani, CEO of RP1 Holding, and Raj Singh, CEO of MCT Credit Solutions, unveiled the fund during a conference panel titled ‘New Capital, New Opportunities’ that also featured Stephen Saltzman, Partner & Head of the International Entertainment Group at FieldFisher, who is also investing.
The idea is to support the industry by offering companies financing tools geared towards production that are “complementary to traditional bank lending” and to create a system that efficiently capitalizes producers and frees up resource elsewhere. Adding this to European soft money sources will, in theory, attract more content makers to use Italy as a production base and maybe even get more Italian stories on screen.
RP1 Group companies – Start One Media Funding, +One and PayOne – devised the idea through their work on on audiovisual production, industry consulting and the management of incentive schemes, including film tax credits.
The fund launched to a backdrop of calls from the European Commissioners and other major figures in the European production financing sector for more inward investment to help the continent’s producers compete against the primarily American global players.
Meanwhile, Italy’s Directorate-General for Cinema and Audiovisual Media of the Italian Ministry of Culture and France’s CNC officially announced a joint Italian-French group of experts, who will dedicate their time to European policy for the film and audiovisual sectors.
The group was set up under a Cooperation Programme signed by the two countries’ Ministries of Culture in Antibes, France on June 25.