After wrapping a three-week shoot in Greece earlier this year, Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Zendaya and the rest of the star-studded cast of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” shipped out for Sicily, the next stop for Universal’s globe-trotting, blockbuster adaptation of Homer’s ancient epic.
Anxious Greek film industry professionals hope other international productions aren’t also readying to set sail.
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One year after the Greek government announced an overhaul of its screen sector with the launch of a new industry organization, Creative Greece, sources say the system is still in disarray, with a backlog of payments owed to dozens of productions totaling north of €100 million ($112 million).
“There are clients that have loans. Banks are waiting for their money,” says Kostas Kefalas, head of production at heavyweight Faliro House, which serviced the “Odyssey” shoot in Greece. “[Foreign producers] are becoming skeptical. There are more questions being raised.”
Creative Greece (known by the Greek acronym EKKOMED) was designed to streamline the operations of the country’s screen industries. Instead, sources say they’re contending with ever more bureaucratic hurdles and searching for clarity over when they — and their international partners — will be paid.
“We knew it was going to be a very complicated thing, but things are going from bad to worse,” says Giorgos Karnavas of production outfit Heretic, which co-produced the upcoming drama “The Birthday Party,” starring Willem Dafoe.
Karnavas echoes the concerns of others who worry that the industry is frittering away the “trust capital” it’s spent years establishing with foreign producers. “What it takes a lot of time to build can easily go away, and we are now facing the consequences of a poorly managed transition by the administration and the ministries,” he says.
Last year at the Venice Film Festival, Greek officials took to the Lido with great fanfare to celebrate the world premiere of Pablo Larrain’s “Maria,” starring Angelina Jolie as Greek opera diva Maria Callas, one of the most celebrated cultural figures in modern Greece.
Yet this week, Variety has learned, the producers of “Maria” penned a blistering letter to the Greek ministry of finance and EKKOMED, demanding answers about roughly €350,000 ($392,000) in unpaid rebate claims dating back to the film’s autumn 2023 shoot in Greece. Of the four countries to host and provide incentives to the production, the Mediterranean nation is the only one yet to make good on its rebate payment.
Speaking to Variety during the Cannes Film Festival, Leonidas Christopoulos, CEO of Creative Greece, concedes that there have been bureaucratic challenges since the organization’s launch. He also admits that the money paid out by EKKOMED in the past year was “less than we expected.”
However, Christopoulos says the organization is on track to restart payments by early June, adding that “most of the backlog will be serviced by the end of the year.”
On the surface, Greece’s 40% cash rebate has been a great success. Since launching in 2018, the incentive scheme has put the country on the production map, helping it lure dozens of high-profile international productions, including Nolan’s “Odyssey,” Amazon Prime Video’s big-budget Biblical drama series “House of David” and Uberto Pasolini’s Homer-inspired drama “The Return,” starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes.
Characterizing the struggles of the past year as a “transition phase,” Christopoulos insists the revamped system will eventually help to create a “very stable landscape for financing for the next five years.”
To its credit, the Greek government has shown flexibility as it tries to clear the bureaucratic logjam; last May, it pressed pause on the incentive scheme until Oct. 1 as it tried to clear up a backlog of unpaid claims and applications awaiting approval. Earlier this year, after failing to meet its own October deadline for the rebate’s relaunch, the government passed a measure allowing producers to claim expenses accrued in the final months of 2024 and the start of 2025.
That allowed “The Odyssey” and Romain Gavras’ English-language debut, “Sacrifice” — starring Chris Evans, Anya Taylor-Joy and Salma Hayek — to retroactively recoup millions in production and pre-production costs. Says Christopoulos: “When something is the fault of the administration, we need to be as supportive [as possible] to the people who trusted us.”
Despite their frustration, Greek producers remain hopeful that the system will soon be back on track, with Faliro House’s Kefalas insisting he’s “optimistic exactly because the [political] will is there.”
“We need to take care of the hiccups,” he says, “because people do want to shoot in Greece.”
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