Tat Cuts Bangkok Film Festival Budget

[george]

TAT cuts Bangkok Film Festival budget

BANGKOK: -- The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) has further scaled down its sponsorship for the Bangkok International Film Festival (BKK IFF) this year to just 25 million baht (US$702,500) from last year's 80 million baht to save budget for tactical marketing.

The BKK IFF 2008, to be held from September 23 to 30, is estimated to cost 80 to 100 million baht to organise.

The move came as no surprise as TAT had been reducing its contributions to the film festival over the past two years. The NTO began staging the event in 2003 with 175 million baht. The sum went up to 200 million baht in 2004 and 350 million baht in 2005, but was brought down to 90 million baht in 2006.

In addition, TAT will no longer run the event, but will remain a key sponsor in spite of its smaller contributions. All preparations and operations of this year's BKK IFF will be taken over by the Federation of National Film Association of Thailand.

TAT governor, Ms Phornsiri Manoharn, was repeatedly quoted as saying that TAT preferred to spend its budget on tactical promotions overseas to stimulate more arrivals from emerging and high-spending segments, particularly from markets such as China, India and the Middle East.

The aim of the film festival is to promote Thailand as an Asian hub of film-shooting location and production in order to boost receipts from film-production companies.

-- TTG Asia 2008-07-31