Greece’s Culture Ministry is moving to create a new super agency, dubbed Creative Greece, to help promote the country’s creative industries and to further the development of audiovisual productions.

A new draft law, to be voted on within the next few weeks, will merge the National Centre of Audiovisual Media and Communication (EKOME) – which is responsible for administering Greece’s incentive programs for audiovisual productions − with the Greek Film Centre and the Hellenic Copyright Organisation to form the new super agency.

The move comes amid broader efforts to establish Greece as a film location. In recent years, the highly successful incentive program for film and TV production has transformed the audiovisual industry in Greece, attracting major international productions and foreign investment. It has also prompted plans by a U.S.-Bulgarian consortium to invest €50 million in sound stages and post-production facilities in Thessaloniki and Athens. And it comes amid new promotion efforts to raise Greece’s profile abroad: last month EKOME and Enterprise Greece partnered to showcase Greece for the first time ever at the annual American Film Market, the world’s leading film industry exhibition.

“Our primary goal is to increase the international reach of contemporary Greek culture,” Christos
Dimas, deputy minister of culture, explained in a recent interview. Speaking to the Eleftheros Typos newspaper, he added that ”the new agency will be responsible for drawing up a national strategy for film and television productions, for copyrights, but also for financing.”

Concurrently, the Culture Ministry is also advancing plans to create a new school for performance arts, to boost support for the literary arts, and to establish a new creativity hub in the historic Akropol theater in central Athens.