Discrimination in new Film and Television Production Incentive Guidelines
New SA film producer incentive guidelines are discriminatory
by Lauren Kohn, Department of Public Law, UCT
To say that the right to equality is seminal in our constitutional dispensation is perhaps to state the obvious. Or so one would think. And yet, in July this year the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) took a strikingly retrogressive step in publishing discriminatory new programme guidelines for the various Film and Television Production Incentives. In particular, the guidelines endorse a deliberate policy choice to exclude permanent residents from the scheme, in breach of the right to equality.
Under the 2006 guidelines, “qualifying South African production expenditure” was defined to include spend on “producers, writers, directors as well as the technicians and other production personnel” who “are citizens or permanent residents of South Africa”.