Crisis at the ICAA

Susana de la Sierra resigns as general director of the ICAA (Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts) due to her disagreements with the Ministry of Finance.

The until now general director of the ICAA (Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts), Susana de la Sierra, has presented her irrevocable resignation from her position to the Minister of Education, Culture and Sports, José Ignacio Wert, and the Secretary of State for Culture, José María Lassalle.

Sierra had shown on numerous occasions his disagreements with the Ministry of Finance due to the reduction in his department's budgets, the non-payment of amortizations owed to producers since 2012 and the refusal to apply a tax exemption above 18-20% (the sector asks for 25% and 30%) and reduce the cultural VAT from 21%.
After the Minister of Finance, Cristóbal Montoro, recently announced that tax exemptions for film production were going to remain at 20%, and that the Government had no intention of reinstating the reduced VAT for cultural industries, Susana de la Sierra did not hesitate and proposed her resignation.

When De la Sierra took charge of the general direction of the ICAA, the budget for the Cinema Fund was 49 million, a figure that has been reduced to 33.7 million in this year. This budget, well below the 770 million in France or 120 in the United Kingdom, has prevented the legal payment of debts for amortization aid for films released in 2012. In total there are 40 million euros that the Treasury today owes to the producers.

Last Tuesday, heads of the 14 federations that make up the network of cultural entrepreneurs sent a harsh letter to President Mariano Rajoy in which they warned him that the cultural VAT was causing irreparable damage to the industrial fabric.

Susana de la Sierra Morón was born in Santander (1975), she has a daughter, she has a degree in Law from the University of Cantabria, a Master's degree in German and Comparative Law from the University of Bayreuth, Germany (La Caixa-DAAD Scholarship), a Doctor in Legal Sciences from the European University Institute of Florence (Scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs).

She is currently a full professor of Administrative Law, specializing in cinema and culture, at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, in Toledo.

A specialist in Cultural Law, particularly cinema and its taxation, she has been a visiting professor at the universities of Oxford and Columbia, New York (Fulbright scholarship), where she completed her research on the regulation of cinematography in comparative law.