The government delegate, Pedro Blanco, stood out from the beginning of the shooting of Saint Simon the government's support for the Galician audiovisual sector in its consolidation process. Pedro Blanco went to San Simón Island, where he will also be the location of most of a film produced by Miramemira, from Santiago de Compostela, and Morelli Producciones, from Madrid.
Pedro Blanco stressed the importance at a cultural and economic level of Spanish cinema for the whole society, and in which Galicia is already beginning to emerge as an important pole. In this sense, the delegate defended projects such as that of San Simón, “which besides being a fantastic example of the cinema made and worked here, dignifies the memory of the victims of the Franco dictatorship and honors those who were repressed for their barbarity”.
The film takes us to the Spanish Civil War, specifically to the island of San Simón, which became a concentration camp where hundreds of prisoners were mistreated and executed by the Franco regime. The film tells the stories of the people who suffered this repression.
The delegate was accompanied by the director, Miguel A. Delgado; of the producer, Andrea Vázquez; of the mayor of Redonda, Digna Rivas, and of other authorities, historians and relatives of victims.
Aid to the sector
Miramemira, a Galician producer who participates in this work, received 554,832 euros from the ICAA for the production of long films and short films since 2020. The film of St. Simon reached 378,250 euros in the call of 2022 of the ICAA through a specific company for its realization.
In the last three years the Government granted more than 7 million euros to Galician producers, 3.25 in 2023. To this amount must be added 159,000 euros more for 5 short films also produced by Galician companies.
The audiovisual and film sector is one of the levers of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR). In fact, the Spanish Government is one of the few at European level that considered the culture sector as one of the axes of economic recovery after the pandemic, reserving a budget of more than 500 million euros for its dynamization. For this government, culture is a state policy.