The Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, announced this Thursday a package of measures for “reconstruction and cultural reactivation” in the areas affected by the recent dana. The aid, still without financial figures, will be directed mainly to the publishing and film sector, with the performing arts, visual arts and music also contemplated. Urtasun has announced that “they will start with the most immediate emergencies”, but that they will continue “until the sector can recover.” Among the measures, the ministry will make the obligations of the beneficiaries of current aid more flexible and will incorporate in the following calls an additional priority criterion for being an affected area.
The first step of the Ministry, according to Urtasun, is to prepare a diagnosis and a first accurate assessment of damages. For this reason, before announcing “in the coming days” more specific data on the new help lines, Culture has created a mailbox to communicate with local cultural institutions that allows them to “carry out a mapping of impacts and needs” in order to “ “design, once the diagnosis is made, aid for affected libraries, auditoriums or theaters.”
According to the first analysis of Culture, in the words of the minister, still “very preliminary”, 11 bookstores, 12 libraries and 32 movie theaters have been detected affected by the effects of dana. For now, for the book sector, the Ministry is providing legal and technical advice to access the grant funds from the already existing aid calls in which those affected by the catastrophe will be prioritized, and which will include a section to allow the reprinting of the editorial collection of the publishers, so that the book chain is not interrupted. Likewise, in next year’s calls for modernization of bookstores and modernization of libraries, the reconstruction of those affected will be added.
For cinema, another of the most affected sectors and on which the Ministry has focused, direct aid will be established for exhibition halls, facilitating their reopening and “protecting their stability and future viability.” And there will be an extension of deadlines to communicate the start of filming of the projects benefiting from aid for the production of feature films and short films in 2022, 2023 and 2024.
Although with less precision, measures have also been announced for the performing arts. The National Institute of Performing Arts and Music (INAEM) will make the obligations of the beneficiaries of the current aid more flexible, and will incorporate in the next call for competitive participation an additional priority criterion for being an affected area. The ‘Platea’ program, for the circulation of performing arts shows in spaces of local entities, will allow theaters and companies located in the province of Valencia to change the performances scheduled until December 31, 2025.
Before this Thursday’s announcement, the Ministry of Urtasun had already launched the National Emergency and Risk Management Plan in Cultural Heritage a week ago, focused on evacuating cultural assets, assessing their damage, carrying out the first emergency tasks and make a medium and long-term heritage recovery plan. All this is in addition to the aid announced this Tuesday by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, which includes the benefit for cessation of activity for the self-employed, which has taken into account the intermittency of cultural and cultural workers. aid to local entities for the reconstruction of infrastructure that also includes cultural facilities.