INCAA president Carlos Pirovano is understood to have ordered the closure of multiple departments at Argentina’s cash-strapped national film and TV body INCAA amid the country’s arts funding crisis.
Earlier in March it emerged Pirovano had suspended INCAA funding for four months to stabilise the body’s finances after the government of Argentina’s far-right president Javier Milei claimed it had run up a $4m deficit.
The newsletter Otros Cines run by Argentinian journalist Diego Batlle, whose brother Nicolas resigned as INCAA president last December in protest over Milei’s election victory, reported that Pirovano ordered the closures on March 19 as part of a “readjustment of the organizational structure” of INCAA.
Among the units earmarked for closure in the next several months are the press and communication deputy management, the audiovisual observatory, and the gender and diversity coordination.
The dispatch unit and institutional transparency unit also face the chop, while Pirovano’s office will assume the work of the department of administrative assistance and management of the advisory council.
Corresponding executive positions are also being eliminated. Other senior permanent workers from the various departments facing the chop will either be reassigned to new sectors or offered voluntary retirement.
Screen understands the legal affairs management unit is being established to carry out the work that previously fell under the auspices of legal affairs management and the dispatch unit.
Attorney María Laura Elliff has been brought on for six months as legal affairs manager.
Pirovano is mulling a proposal to co-host with Uruguay the annual Ventana Sur market straddling late November and early December.
Milei, a former economist, has allowed the peso to devalue by 50% and proposed broad cost-cutting to salvage the country’s soaring inflation rates and high national debt.
In spite of all this, the Buenos Aires Herald has reported that the 25th Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival (BAFICI) will go ahead.
Organised by Buenos Aires Culture Ministry and running April 17 to 28, BAFICI will feature some 260 films in 13 venues across the city and opens with Lucía Seles’ School Privada Alfonsina Storni.
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