Argentine film-maker and Mar del Plata festival chief Miguel Pereira has postponed principal photography on his next feature, The Man Who Came To A Village, for six months, citing last month's changes to the UK tax rules as being the catalyst for the decision. The film's financial package is to be restructured and the budget scaled back.

Pereira was due to begin shooting the film, which was co-written by Pereira and Oscar-winner Christopher Hampton and executive produced by another Oscar winner Robert Duvall, next week.

But he has been forced to shift the start date back to September after the film's financing structure crumbled following the UK tax bombshell, the recent crisis in film funding in Italy and the subsequent decision of the French partner to bow out.

The project was initially put together as a Euros 4m co-production between Douglas Cummins' Axiom Films in the UK, Pereira's Capa Blanca Films in Argentina and Spain's ABS Productions, with additional backing from France's Salud Films, and an unnamed Italian company also expressing an interest in boarding. Now the film is more likely to be an Argentine-Spanish co-production between Capa Blanca and ABS, with a more modest investment likely to come from Axiom. The budget is likely to be pruned. However stars Leonardo Sbaraglia and Maria Botto are still on board and Pereira is confident the film will survive the set back.

Pereira doubles as festival director of Argentina's Mar del Plata, which kicked off on March 11 and wrapped March 20. Following the festival, Pereira is taking a select band of the festival's guests, including Ken Russell, Alan Rickman and Bob Rafelson, to the location of his film, Jujuy, in the north of Argentina. The trip is backed by Argentina's tourist board and is part of an ongoing effort to persuade foreign filmmakers to shoot in the country.

Pereira's film is about an international drug smuggler, disguised as a priest, who flies into a small town in Latin America to conduct a deal, which, according to Pereira, works as a metaphor for globalisation, which is perhaps ironic given the problems the film-maker has experienced putting together his own multi-national operation.

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