The image of soccer legend Pele kneeling to tie his boots seconds before kick-off at the 1970 World Cup and the Puma brand on display is a legendary image. What many people don’t know is that it was designed by residents of the Canary Islands.
Widely cited as the father of modern sports marketing, Hans Henningsen is the subject of the documentary The Puma King by Las Palmas and Tenerife-based Videle. And that’s exactly the kind of title the Canary Islands brought to Sunny Side of the Dock for sale: a homegrown story that appeals to a wide range of people.
“It’s like living in a treasure trove of documentary stories that are still pending development,” Pablo Hernández, director of the Special Constituency of the Canary Islands (ZEC), told Variety, as the islands make documentaries the latest frontier in a 17-year effort to diversify their tourism economy into film production. “If you come here and set it up to manage your IP, you’ll get an incredible amount of stories.”
The archipelago, which has built a prominent industry in live-action, animation, VFX and video games based on one of the most aggressive incentive packages in Europe, has, with a few exceptions, spent just three years developing non-fiction.
“It’s no longer just an opportunity to come to the Canary Islands and film,” says Oscar Fernandez, a producer at Videle and sister company Media Report. “It’s about building a project from the Canary Islands.”
A few years ago, Hernández points out, there were very few budgets exceeding a few hundred thousand euros. Several Canary Island documentaries are now selling in the millions, distributed on HBO, Amazon Prime Video, Movistar+, ESPN, Disney+, and as far away as Switzerland and Sweden. Pilar Guerrero, who runs Videoreport Canarias, a joint venture between Secuoya Studio and Izen, says the sector has “experienced exponential growth over the past five years.”
Compared to feature films, documentary budgets are well below the margins, but Hernández doesn’t have a problem with that. “Documentaries give you more bang for your buck with less money and are more natural,” he says. “Of course, in addition to the natural conditions and content for documentaries, tax incentives are a huge boost for documentaries, including a 45% to 54% rebate and a 4% corporate tax that increases profits by 30% to 40%.”
The products produced span the genres sought after by buyers around the world. History, traditionally popular on public broadcasters, is one of them. Las Hormigas Negras’ docu-series Islands: A History of History, now in its second season on Canarias Play, retreads the islands’ part in Atlantic history. “We want to show that local history can also be a universal story,” explains producer Luis Luque.
The video reports ‘The Last Volcano’ about the 2021 eruption of La Palma, and ‘The Last Great Colony’ about the Atlantic monk seal, juxtapose nature and science.
Disaster is on the horizon: Macaronesia’s “defense line” recreates the devastating Tenerife wildfires of 2023. Director Emilio Alonso says, “This is the story of people who stood between destruction and survival.”
Sports is distributed through WAP Media Group’s sports documentation label, Wakai. The label’s FC Barcelona Femeni feature “Dream, Play, Win” became its first ESPN deal and was distributed worldwide on ESPN and Disney+. “It gave us the opportunity to tell the story of a cultural movement,” says director Paula Fernández Crespo. Next is crime. Beyond “Puma King,” Bidere is developing “Sensei’s Web,” about one of Europe’s biggest sexual abuse scandals, the so-called karate scandal.
And this writer’s tradition precedes all of that. David Bote’s Tingrad Films named Black Butterfly Best Animated Film for Goya, followed by the super-8 shot Benigno, which premiered in Shanghai. “Benigno is not just a portrait of a man facing the end of his life,” Bothe told Variety. “It is also a portrait of a disappearing world.”
As for potential future PhDs, Hernández points to the island’s unusually deep scientific research base for its size. The Canarias Astronomical Institute was one of the first places to register the signature of the Big Bang. The ocean platform where whale communications were decoded. Quantum teleportation from island to island using lasers. NASA station on Gran Canaria. And history – the islands are “several times closer to England.” Nelson failed to capture Santa Cruz de Tenerife and was released on the promise never to return. San Cristobal de la Laguna’s wallless UNESCO grid system later reverberated throughout the Americas, where Canary Islanders helped settle and founded San Antonio, Texas. “These stories are just waiting for people to tell them,” Hernandez says. “Many of them could become epic biopics.”
Currently, both live-action and animation are smaller fields than fiction, but similar obstacles remain. “The challenge is not a lack of talent, but a lack of a coherent industrial infrastructure,” says Las Hormigas Negras, adding that while the islands are “a beautiful filming location, they are not always places that can produce strong editorial projects.” Tenerife’s film festival DOCanarias, which has been training filmmakers for 20 years, warns that financial incentives are still “new and still inaccessible to many independent documentary makers.”
Producers noted that the talent pool in cinematography, archive-based storytelling, sound and post-production is deepening and becoming increasingly fluent in international standards. A notable example is this year, when Buendía Estudios, a leading Spanish producer whose estimated 90% of the country’s production comes from the Canary Islands, partnered with a technical school in the islands to coach four student teams in full production, producing two short films and two making-of films directed by working professionals, free of charge to the students.
The field’s goal appears to be to fit homegrown stories into the “global documentary value chain” while maintaining their identity. Given the consistency of growth and support in other fields, the growth of documentary seems to be a case-by-case scenario.
