While the national government continues to present the labour reform as a modernising shift, the text submitted to Congress reveals a far deeper — and more troubling — conception of the State’s role in culture. In the final articles of the bill, almost hidden under the heading “Repeals,” amendments are introduced to the Film Law (Law 17,741) and the Audiovisual Communication Services Law (Law 26,522) that dismantle the funding system of the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA). Article 195 directly eliminates the resources that feed the Film Promotion Fund, including the 10 percent tax on cinema ticket sales, levies on videograms, and the share of the tax on audiovisual services, without proposing any alternative mechanism. The outcome is unequivocal: INCAA loses its autonomy and its own funding and becomes fully subordinated to the discretionary budget allocations decided by the Ministry of Economy.
Article 196 deepens this hollowing-out by repealing Title V of Law 26,522, which established the levy on the turnover of radio stations, television channels, and cable services. That framework not only sustained national cinema by allocating 25 percent of its revenue to the Film Promotion Fund, but also financed Radio y Televisión Argentina, the National Theatre Institute, the National Music Institute, and community audiovisual projects. The decision exposes a policy that neither reviews, corrects, nor improves existing mechanisms; it simply eliminates them. There is no diagnosis, no public debate, and no cultural planning—only a logic of suppression that reduces cultural policy to a budgetary adjustment and turns the funding of artistic production into an occasional concession of economic power.
Far from being a technical adjustment, the reform reveals an ideological stance that dismisses cultural production as a public policy and replaces it with a doctrine of pure market logic, even in areas where the market has never guaranteed diversity or federal balance. The removal of INCAA’s oversight tools—such as box office audits, mandatory sworn statements, and penalties for fraud—completes a picture of deliberate dismantling. In an industry already weakened by prolonged paralysis, film shoots are declining, funding calls are not opening, and exhibition spaces are deteriorating, while the government advances a policy of non-thinking, devoid of planning or long-term vision, that offers no new model and limits itself to dismantling the existing one. The result is neither efficiency nor modernisation, but a structural regression that leaves Argentine cinema, and much of the cultural system, exposed to precariousness and to the shifting budgetary will of a State that chooses to withdraw without assuming responsibility for the consequences.
