Regional authority is investing €1.5m in the project but has stipulations about featuring ‘identifiable locations’ on screen and the film premiering at an international film festival
The Madrid regional government is hoping to harness the power of film tourism by investing €1.5m (£1.3m) in a new Woody Allen movie that will be shot in and around the Spanish capital and which will be contractually obliged to feature the word “Madrid” in its title.
Regional authorities are confident the 89-year-old film-maker’s next project could do for Madrid what Roman Holiday did for Rome tourism in the early 1950s, and what Sex and the City and Emily in Paris have more recently done to increase visitor numbers to New York and the French capital.
Allen’s last two films have been made with financial backing from European sources: Rifkin’s Festival, which was shot in the northern Spanish city of San Sebastián and released in 2020, and Coup de Chance, which was filmed in Paris and released in 2023.
The director, who recently published his debut novel, is believed to have struggled to source large-scale financing for his films amid the resurfacing in 2014 of an accusation that he sexually abused his daughter Dylan Farrow in 1992.
