Film in Mauritius

Mauritius on Screen

Mauritius is best-known around the world for its relaxed, sometimes even luxurious lifestyle, one that effortlessly combines modernity with cultural tradition and work with leisure. Modern facilities and amenities are available at a reasonable cost here: good accommodation, healthcare, and medical facilities, educational offers, together with great shopping, recreation, and sports.

In 2020, through a combination of targeted schemes, Mauritius is able to offer major opportunities to global partners and investors, those who share the Mauritian vision of intelligent, innovative, and sustainable cities of tomorrow. The island has transformed itself over just a few decades into a broad-based, diversified, innovation-driven knowledge economy, already playing a vital role in the modernization of the Indian Ocean and Southern African regions.

Since 2013 the government has offered its user-friendly Film Rebate Scheme, initially set at 30% but increased to 40% in 2016. Geographically, Mauritius is strategically placed between Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, with excellent transport links. Today the island attracts more than 20 major feature film shoots per year.

Mauritius has identified Film/Screen Media as a government-level strategic activity, which can grow to become a key pillar of a fast-modernizing local economy. To date, the local industry has attracted over Rs5 billion (USD 125 Million) in foreign investment for filmmaking, earned by what is still a “cottage industry” scale of activity. A core group of Mauritian infrastructure suppliers has emerged; technical rental/ facilities, hotels, and hospitality, vehicle hire; but the challenge of genuinely industrializing the ecosystem for screen work remains.

Thanks to the Rebate system, the legendary glorious weather, and unique locations, the growing interest in Mauritian filming is being sustained even under the current pressures of global COVID19 restrictions. But the critical lack of a matching skills capacity on the island holds progress back. At present only one, occasionally two, full-scale productions can shoot in Mauritius at any one time using local crews.

Mauritius has the political will, the inventiveness, and the dynamism required to provide an innovative screen arts educational centre for its region, and to progressively contribute new energies and ideas to the wider film skills communities working across Africa and Asia. IFSM has been formed to answer this call.