What a 60% rebate can't buy

On May 15, at Cannes, Saudi Arabia's Film Commission raised its production rebate to 60%.

It was 40% before, set at the same festival in 2022.

Sixty percent is the highest film incentive in the world right now. European national rebates typically cap at 25-40%. Saudi Arabia just doubled the distance.

The number is not the whole story, but it is a real commitment. Shoot in the Kingdom and the state gives you back up to 60% of what you spend there. Abdullah bin Nasser Al-Qahtani, who runs the Film Commission, put it plainly: "We want to be not just the most generous incentive, but also the most agile one." They streamlined the disbursement process and tied in the Cultural Development Fund for financing. Generous and fast. That is the pitch.

And it works. A country that banned cinema for 35 years, until late 2017, just hosted Chasing Red, the first full Hollywood feature shot entirely on its soil. Vision 2030 names creative industries as a pillar of the plan to live on something other than oil, and the money is following the words.

So the production side is being solved. Crews, soundstages, permits, locations, cash back. All of it is being built, and built fast.

That is the surface story. The deeper one is what a rebate actually does.

A rebate is a magnet. It pulls production toward a place. It does not make the work good. It rewards spending, not craft. Read Al-Qahtani's line again: generous and agile. Both words describe throughput. Neither describes whether the film is any good, or whether it understands the place it was shot in.

Here is what nobody can subsidize. Infrastructure becomes a commodity. The moment a country has crews, stages and a 60% rebate, it competes with everyone who has crews, stages and a rebate, and the competition is on price. What does not commoditize is direction. Taste. Someone who can look at Saudi Arabia and see what is actually there, instead of importing a postcard.

That gap is not theoretical. People working inside the Saudi industry say it out loud: the production capacity is strong, and creative direction that reads the culture is where the real work still is. The 60% closes the cost gap. It does nothing for the other one.

At FALCA, we are paying attention to this, and not from a desk. We are having meetings in Riyadh in June. Not to chase the rebate, the rebate chases itself. We are going for the position that the incentive cannot fill: an outside house that travels well, treats a place as a place and not a backdrop, and brings direction, not just a crew rate.