Market In Focus: HKIFF Industry, CAA China Talk Building An Ecosystem For Emerging Filmmakers
05.03.2024 - 11:53
/ deadline.com
Taking place alongside Filmart, the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF) is one of Asia’s oldest and most established project markets, helping a string of award-winning films to get made.
Recent HAF successes include Mongolian drama If Only I Could Hibernate, which was selected for last year’s Cannes Un Certain Regard, and Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s Stonewalling, which won best film at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards and was sold to KimStim for North America.
However, HAF is now just one component in an expanding range of activities organised by HKIFF Industry, the industry platform of Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF). This year, the festival has partnered with CAA China to launch the HKIFF Industry-CAA China Genre Initiative (HCG), which is presenting six selected projects to an industry-wide audience during HAF.
HKIFF Industry director Jacob Wong explains that a genre initiative is a logical next step for a projects market in Asia, where funding structures are much more commercially driven than in Europe. While HAF has had successes, and draws a high level of participation from European producers and festivals, there are sectors of the Asian industry that don’t engage.
“Project markets are an invention of the European industry, which can focus more on cinema over commerce as they have a robust public funding system,” Wong says. “But when transplanted to this part of the world, subsidy cinema doesn’t really exist.”
CAA China’s CEO Mary Gu adds that HCG is designed to support emerging filmmakers, not just in the mainland China market, but also overseas. “HKIFF has long been a source of discovery and with HCG, our shared objective is to provide the next generation of filmmakers in the region with a