Soccer legend Pelé kneeling to tie his boots in the seconds before kickoff at the 1970 World Cup and the Puma brand on show is a legendary image; less well known is that it was engineered by a Canary Islander.
Hans Henningsen, widely cited as a father of modern sports marketing, is now the subject of a documentary, “The Puma King,” from Las Palmas- and Tenerife-based Videre. And its exactly the kind of title that the Canary Islands have brought to Sunny Side of the Doc to sell, a homegrown story with wide appeal.
“It’s like living on a goldmine of stories for documentaries that’s still pending development,” Pablo Hernández, president of the Canary Islands Special Zone (ZEC), tells Variety, as the archipelago makes documentary the latest front in a 17-year drive to diversify a tourism economy into screen production. “If you come and set up here to manage the IP, you’re going to have an amazing amount of stories.”
Having built recognized industries in live action, animation, VFX and video games on one of Europe’s most aggressive incentive packages, the islands, with some exceptions, have spent barely three years drilling into non-fiction.
“The opportunity is no longer simply to come and film in the Canary Islands,” says producer Oscar Fernández of Videre and sister company Mediareport. “It’s to build projects from the Canary Islands.”
A few years ago, Hernández notes, almost nothing carried a budget beyond a few hundred thousand euros; today several Canary Islands documentaries run into the millions, landing on HBO, Amazon Prime Video, Movistar+, ESPN and Disney+, with sales as far afield as Switzerland and Sweden. Pilar Guerrero, whose Videoreport Canarias is a joint venture between Secuoya Studio and Izen, says the sector “has experienced exponential growth over the last five years.”
Doc budgets can sit well under that headroom as compared to narrative film, but Hernández is untroubled. “Documentaries make more with less budget, and it’s more organic,” he says. “Of course the tax incentives are an enormous boost for documentaries, on top of the natural conditions and content for documentaries. It includes 45%-54% rebate, and a 4% corporate income tax that increases profits 30%-40%.”
What’s being made spans the genres global buyers are chasing. History, traditionally popular for public broadcasters, is one: Las Hormigas Negras’ doc-series “Insulae: Crónica de nuestra historia,” now in its second season on Canarias Play, re-reads the islands part in Atlantic history. “We want to show that local history can also be universal storytelling,” producer Luis Luque explains.
Nature and science run alongside, via Videoreport’s “The Last Volcano,” on La Palma’s 2021 eruption, and “The Last Great Colony,” on the Atlantic monk seal.
Disaster sits close: Macaronesia’s “Line of Defense” reconstructs the catastrophic 2023 Tenerife wildfire. “It is a story about the people who stood between destruction and survival,” says director Emilio Alonso.
Sports arrives through Wakai, the sports-doc label of WAP Media Group, whose FC Barcelona Femení feature “Dream, Play, Win” marked its first ESPN deal and went out worldwide on ESPN and Disney+. “It gave us the chance to tell the story of a cultural movement,” says director Paula Fernández Crespo. Crime is next: beyond “The Puma King,” Videre is developing “The Sensei’s Web,” on the so-called Karate Case, one of Europe’s largest sexual-abuse scandals.
And the auteur tradition predates all of it: David Baute‘s Tinglado Film took “Black Butterflies” to the Goya for best animated film and follows it with Super 8-shot “Benigno,” premiering in Shanghai. “Benigno is not only the portrait of a man facing the end of life,” Baute tells Variety. “It is also the portrait of a disappearing world.”
In terms of future doc potential Hernández points to the science research base unusually deep for the islands’ size: the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, among the first places to register the Big Bang’s signature; ocean platforms where whale communication was decoded; island-to-island quantum teleportation by laser; the NASA station on Gran Canaria. Then the history — the islands “several times almost British”; Nelson, who failed to take Santa Cruz de Tenerife and was released on his word never to return; San Cristóbal de La Laguna, the wall-less UNESCO grid system later echoed across an Americas that Canarian settlers helped populate, founding San Antonio, Texas. “Those stories are there waiting for people to tell them,” Hernández says. “A lot of them could be epic biopics.”
A smaller sector currently than fiction both live action and animation, similar obstacles remain. “The challenge is not lack of talent, but lack of consistent industrial infrastructure,” says Las Hormigas Negras, naming too the perception of the islands as “a beautiful filming location, but not always as a place capable of generating strong editorial projects.” DOCanarias, the Tenerife festival that has trained filmmakers for two decades, cautions that fiscal incentives stay “newer and still less accessible for many independent documentary producers.”
Producers did point to a deepening talent pool in cinematography, archive-based storytelling, sound and post production, increasingly fluent in international standards. A telling example came this year when powerhouse Spanish producer Buendía Estudios, now running an estimated 90% of its national output through the Canary Islands, partnered with the islands’ vocational schools, mentoring four teams of students through full productions that yielded two shorts and two making-of films, free to the students and overseen by working professionals.
The goal in terms of the sector seems to be matching homegrown stories to “the global value chains of documentary” while keeping their identity. Given the growth of other sectors and the consistency of the backing it seems the growth of documentary is a when not if scenario.
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