Colombia Is Thriving, But Locals Worry About Tariffs

Yahoo

15-05-2025

For ​​Juan Pablo Solano and his production company Jaguar Bite, making movies like the Paul Walter Hauser starrer The Luckiest Man in America, directed by Bogotá native Samir Oliveros, or TV series like the Don Cheadle-directed The Big Cigar in Colombia is a way of life. However, proposed U.S. tariffs on audiovisual content could drastically affect the industry that helped cultivate his career.
'Jaguar Bite lives through the international productions that come into the country. Eighty to 90 percent of them are from the U.S.,' he says of his company, founded in 2018. 'When I heard about the tariffs, I thought about those movies that probably won't be made anymore. We make certain films that in the U.S. would be impossible to make because the cost doesn't allow them to exist — independent films that need to find alternatives on where to shoot.'
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One such film is 2023's The Long Game with Dennis Quaid, shot in Texas and Colombia. It's based on a true story about a group of Mexican-American youths in the 1950s who were golf caddies at an all-white country club in Del Rio, Texas — where they were not allowed to play — and became the 1957 state champions playing for their all-Latino school team.
'Making that movie here and in the U.S. allowed it to hit the needed budget to come out in theaters, and later on, on Netflix. These movies would disappear because I don't see how you can make them in the U.S,' he says.
Solano has Proimágenes Colombia and the local incentives to thank for productions like The Long Game. The non-profit promotes Colombian cinema internationally and acts as the National Film Commission to attract international producers to film in the country. Proimágenes, founded in 1998, administers The Film Development Fund (FDC), which began in 2003 and provides financial incentives and cash rebates to productions.
Colombia offers two types of film incentives. The FFC (Colombia Film Fund, established in 2013) is a cash rebate equivalent to 40 percent of the audiovisual services expenses and 20 percent of the logistical services expenses (hotel, food and transportation) available to films produced or postproduced in Colombia. The FFC's resources are allocated each year in the national Colombian budget.
The most popular is the CINA, Certificates of Audiovisual Investment in Colombia (established in 2020), which are tax credits equivalent to 35 percent of the expenses of foreign audiovisual production, including films, series, reality shows, video clips, video games and commercials for audiovisual services and logistical services contracted with Colombian individuals or legal entities. The CINA is transferable to Colombian income-tax filers and functions as an income tax discount.
Silvia Echeverri, head of the Colombian Film Commission at Proimágenes Colombia, has worked alongside director Claudia Triana since the beginning. She says that before 1998, only one or two films were produced in Colombia yearly, and there was no governmental support. 'The incentive system has been very successful and has put Colombia on the international map.'
Solano credits the incentives and Proimágenes' work over the years for helping him build a career. 'When the 814 film law was created in 2003, many people started working in filmmaking. Our first films came from the benefit of that incentive. I went to Argentina to attend film school. Then I went to the U.K. to do a master's in business, thanks also to some benefits of that film incentive law that paid a good portion of my scholarship.'
Part of Echeverri's job for the past 27 years has been attracting productions to the country through a promotion plan that includes visiting Los Angeles annually to meet with studio and independent production companies to educate them on the incentive program.
'We tell them about our crews, we tell them about our incentives, about our locations and all the ways the Film Commission works with the Ministry of Culture to support the audiovisual productions,' Echeverri says.
The Commission also visits content markets in Miami, Cancun, Gamescom — as the incentive also covers video games — and co-organizes the Bogotá Audiovisual Market (BAM). They also hosts familiarization trips to showcase the country's best asset, its landscape diversity.
'We bring executives from different companies around the world to visit Colombia, and we take them to Bogotá, Medellin, Cartagena … they also experience Colombia's infrastructure. We have a coast on the Pacific and a coast on the Atlantic Ocean, and there are many different altitudes with different climates all year long,' Echeverri says. 'Bogotá is a city that's 2,600 meters above sea level, so the trees you see are pine and eucalyptus, and it's a very cold weather city. But if you travel for an hour or 45 minutes to the outskirts, it's completely different scenery, a vibrant green, jungle-like location.'
Proimágenes Colombia shows off the rental houses and production companies. 'Now, we have all the equipment needed for a production offered by those rental houses. And the post-production and VFX in the country have also grown. We have a studio partially owned by a company in Canada called Folks,' Echeverri says. She points out that you can also be incentivized if you shoot elsewhere but do post-production in Colombia.
Narcos kicked off the Colombian content boom in 2015, and while the show could not qualify for the tax credit at that time because it didn't exist for TV, Colombia was very much part of the series' fabric. (The first two episodes did receive an incentive as a film.)
'I had been an independent producer and someone who has shot in a lot of countries around the world,' says producer Carol Trussell (True Blood, Roswell). 'I went to work as head of production for Gaumont and they were producing Narcos. I decided to go down and look at Colombia. I came back and said to Netflix, 'I think this is where we should shoot the project.' And that was agreed, and we were there for three years. It was a great experience.'
Solano created Jaguar Bite with several film industry colleagues to strengthen the services for international productions coming to Colombia. 'We started with Running with the Devil starring Nicolas Cage and Laurence Fishburne. Since then, we haven't stopped. We are fortunate to work with independent producers from the U.S. and around the globe, as well as the studios.'
Jaguar Bite finds locations with Colombia standing in for countries such as Vietnam, Brazil, Uganda, Mexico and Cuba; gears up a full bilingual crew; and manages the incentive application, which Solano calls one of the most reliable in the region.
'We request the necessary documents, complete the application and submit it,' he says. 'We submit all the accounting and what the film commission needs after an audit company checks that we've made the payments according to law and what the incentive requires. The Colombian incentives are reliable, and they are the ones people trust. It has never failed.'
Jaguar Bite is also developing Spanish-language content for streamers and employs 35 people in Colombia and two in Mexico City. Paramount and Netflix also have offices in Colombia and are creating original programming.
'Several production companies in Colombia have started offering their services worldwide and creating their own content. We have won prizes and have been recognized in major festivals,' Echeverri says. 'We have a Colombian film on the official selection at Cannes that we're very proud of, Un Poeta,' The Poet.
The film commission touts 100 Years of Solitude, which Netflix produced with Colombian company Dynamo, as its biggest success to date.
Recent projects filmed in Colombia include the feature Shadow Force, with Omar Sy and Kerry Washington, from Lionsgate and Dynamo (made with a CINA in 2022) and the horror film Rosario from Jaguar Bite, which made use of the FFC in 2023.
Of course, all this could change with the looming threat of tariffs, but Solano says they are business as usual for now. 'We're waiting to see what's happening, how this could be implemented and what it would mean. There is very little information. Certain movies cannot be shot in the U.S. Some will travel because of the locations and the cultural aspects needed from different places. Right now, we are looking at how we strengthen our benefits for local production so that we are not too dependent on international production.'
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