The Ministry of Culture expands the funds of the Cine Senior program to ensure its continuity till June | Culture | EUROtoday

The Council of Ministers, on the proposal of the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, authorized this Tuesday a 3 million euro enhance – in comparison with the preliminary 8.5 – for the funds of Senior Cinema, the low cost program that enables these over 65 years of age to attend the cinema on Tuesdays for 2 euros. This is the pressing processing of a modification of the royal decree that regulates this system retroactively from February 1 of this yr. The measure comes, says the press launch issued by the ministry, “in view of the increase in the number of viewers within the framework of the program”, and to “guarantee its continuity until the month of June, as planned.”

This yr’s is the third version of a program that the present Government carried out in 2023 and which presents as a novelty the extension of its period for the primary time to 12 months. This yr, nonetheless, it misplaced 30% of its funds in comparison with the earlier yr: from 12 to eight.5 million euros. For weeks, among the 397 cinemas all through Spain that hosted the initiative introduced that that they had consumed the help funds. “The Cine Senior program has come to an end. The funds assigned by the Ministry of Culture and the ICAA have been exhausted,” revealed in X, for instance, Multicines Zamora on January 28. Other venues adopted, such because the Lys in Valencia, the Palafox in Zaragoza and the Golem in Madrid. The Madrid Embajadores cinema anticipated the issue final yr: “The subsidy is based on the capacity of the theaters. Surely, just as happened last year, there will be cinemas that do not manage to spend all the aid they are entitled to, and cinemas like us where it runs out long before the program ends,” Javier López, supervisor of the cinema, instructed EL PAÍS in December.

The initiative started in July 2023 with the goal of returning to the theaters one of many audiences that had given up the behavior essentially the most after the pandemic. “Therefore, when we adopt this measure we are also adopting a measure to support a key sector and the economy of our country,” justified Urtasun in 2024.

Since its creation it has not stopped rising. According to knowledge from the Federation of Spanish Cinemas (FECE), in the course of the second version, which befell between May and December 2024, a complete of 1,689,115 senior spectators attended film theaters for 35 weeks, 764,391 greater than within the 2023 version: a rise of 83%. In this third version, in the course of the first 28 weeks, 1,579,923 spectators have already been reached, which factors to an approximate enhance of 73 % within the variety of attendees in comparison with the 2024 version, if the development continues till the tip of the interval.