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2013 November 6 - 12 [POLITICS]

8% sales tax will have negative impact on filmmaking: film director

Winner of the 1999 Academy Award of Japan in film directing and scriptwriting, Furuhata Yasuo told Akahata on November 5 that he is concerned that the planned increase in the consumption tax rate from the current 5% to 8% would hurt the film industry. The following is an excerpt of his interview:

The higher tax rate will increase the prices and costs of all necessary goods, including transportation, required for film production. The total budget available would be the same as before, but the money we actually can use within the budget would be cut by 3%. We would have to cut overall labor costs.

The movie, Shonen H (Boy H), which was released in August contains some scenes of major air-raids in Kobe City. I shot the scenes with firefighters present. Because of the tight budget, I could not hire as many staff as I wanted. So, I needed a lot of hours to spend on shooting. With only five or six set-carpenters, we had to repeatedly build and clear the ruins and also had to go back and forth between the studio and location sites.

Knowing our desperate financial situation, location facility operators offered us some discounts for usage charges. Our experience and collaborators’ good intent make filmmaking possible, but the higher consumption tax rate will make it difficult for them to continue to offer a discount.

The tax hike would not directly or immediately lead to a decrease in the quality of films, but would eventually have a negative impact.

No matter how much effort we make to restrain production cost, the general public will not be able to go to theaters to see movies as much as before if the price of daily necessities increases because, after all, going to the movies is not essential to life.

I think it is rather necessary to reduce the tax rate in regard to food and other things that people need as part of their cultural life.