Portuguese Filmmakers Protest Local EU Legislation They Claim Gives Streaming Giants Unfair Edge

A group of Portuguese filmmakers took to the streets on Tuesday to protest new local film and TV legislation being voted on in parliament, which they claim will give foreign streaming giants an unfair advantage within the country’s film landscape.

Portugal is among the first countries in Europe to implement the European Union’s recently approved Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMS), which obligates foreign streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to invest a portion of their revenue into local productions. Now that Brussels has approved the AVMS, parliaments across Europe must transpose it into law by 2021.

A crowd of several hundred people comprising Portuguese producers, directors, actors and film students staged the protest after writing an open letter to the government. In the document, they complained that under the proposed new rules, foreign streaming giants won’t be paying a tax on their subscription revenues and also won’t be forced to contribute to the country’s national film fund, called the ICA, which they consider to be the heart of Portugal’s film financing system.

The ICA is currently suffering due to the pandemic’s toll on the local economy. Forcing streamers to contribute would have been “an historic opportunity to improve and strengthen ICA with more funding,” they said in the letter.

“We can’t erase our national film system and hand over to these giant platforms all the power to kill our way of making films,” Portuguese director Marta Mateus tells Variety.

There is clearly fear that the new legislation will impact Portugal’s local production ecosystem. “We can’t have them telling us how to produce our work, and control our work,” Mateus adds.

The Portuguese protests have wide support within the country’s film community, including prominent producer Paulo Branco (“Cosmopolis”), directors Pedro Costa (“Vitalina Varela”) and Teresa Villaverde (“Colo”) and actor/director Maria De Madeiros (“Pulp Fiction”).