Most UK producers know their own co-production system reasonably well — the bilateral treaties, what BFI certification requires, how AVEC works. That's not the gap. The gap is what happens on the other side of the border, once a project is structured as an official UK-Italy or UK-Italy-Belgium co-production. Few UK producers have had a reason to learn it. That's exactly why most never consider it.
The UK side, briefly
A quick baseline, not because it's unfamiliar, but to show where it connects: under the UK-Italy bilateral co-production treaty, a qualifying film can be certified as a national film in both countries at once. That's the mechanism. What's less well known is what it unlocks financially — because it means a producer isn't choosing between UK tax relief and Italian tax relief. Structured correctly, a single film can draw on both.
The Italian tax credit — the part most UK producers haven't priced in
Italy's audio-visual tax credit is one of the most generous in Europe, and it's been getting more generous, not less. For foreign producers spending in Italy, the "executive producer" credit — accessed through an Italian executive producer or service company — provides up to 40% back on qualifying Italian expenditure. It requires a cultural eligibility test and a minimum Italian spend threshold, and a 2024 reform made the cultural scoring more granular, weighting the credit toward productions with genuine Italian or European creative content rather than pure service work.
Combined with a UK co-production credit on the same film, that's two national tax incentives on one budget — not a workaround, the system's intended design.
It isn't only Rome and Milan
Below the national tax credit sits a layer most UK producers have never had to map: regional film funds. Sardinia's regional fund, for instance, backed Hoxtonlab's own Echoes of Tomorrow directly. Sicily has its own regional commitments. These funds stack again on top of the national credit, and they come with their own regional spend and crew requirements — requirements that are second nature to a producer based in Italy, and invisible to one who has never had to work with them.
Why now
On 9 December 2025, the British Film Commission and the Italian Film Commissions signed a new Memorandum of Understanding specifically to make this kind of co-production easier — shared funding routes, crew and facility access, closer coordination between the two systems. The infrastructure for UK-Italy co-production is being actively built out right now, on both sides.
What a three-country structure actually takes
On Hoxtonlab's own Caravaggio a Siracusa, an Italy-UK-Belgium co-production, the UK side went through the BFI's interim co-production application — resolving questions of cast and crew residency, third-country activity, and even the nationality of the editor, all to protect the UK's cultural points score. None of it is exotic. All of it is exactly the kind of detail that's routine for a producer who does this regularly, and a genuine blocker for one who's never had to.
The real barrier isn't the system
Most small, well-positioned UK production companies aren't avoiding Italian or Mediterranean co-production because they've weighed it and passed. They're avoiding it because nobody inside the company has had a reason to learn a second country's tax credit rules, regional fund calendars, or certification paperwork — and without that push, the default is to stay inside a UK funding system that everyone already knows is smaller than it used to be. The system on the Italian side isn't harder. It's just unfamiliar, and unfamiliar tends to get deprioritised. That's the gap Hoxtonlab exists to close.