Shanghai Film Festival market wraps up

Wednesday saw the three-day film festival market wrap up. Organizers say more than 830 companies and organizations attended this year, up on last year's figures, but there were fewer participants from overseas.

It's the first time that French film producer Carlos Alperin has been to the festival market. He says he came here to introduce foreign films to China and to make Chinese films known in foreign markets. But he says during the three days, he met only six potential customers.

Carlos Alperin, CEO of Galloping Films, said, "It's not a lot, you know, but this is also a small market. Well, I would like to have more buyers obviously."

Alperin says he was also at the Cannes film festival last month. He says the market there is much larger than the one in Shanghai, and he had more opportunities to meet clients.

He said, "The festival lasted for ten days. More than 10,000 people came to this market, to the film market, Cannes. So, I would say that have probably 70, 80 meetings with buyers against maybe 6, 8 here in Shanghai. It's probably 20 times larger. "

Shanghai film festival organizers say about 3,000 professional traders attended this year's market. 42 percent were from overseas -- down from 50 percent last year. And they say there were problems attracting international film companies.

Shen Yang, deputy program director of 16th Shanghai Int'l Film Festival, said, "This time, we had a lot of pressure. There was the Beijing International Film Festival in April, the Hong Kong film festival in March and the Cannes International Film Festival in May. We had to make more efforts to prepare. Fortunately, we invited some big European companies, such as Wild Bunch."

And Chinese participants found that most of the foreigners weren't really that foreign.

Lin Yinbin, PR manager of Hengye Film Distribution Co., said, "Last year, our company sold six to seven films to foreign countries. But almost all of them were Southeast Asian countries. There were no western countries."

Li Zhongwu, manager of Jiahua Culture Spreads Co., said, "Western countries are more interested in Chinese action movies with big stars. It's hard for film companies with limited budgets, because they have to pay more for the stars."

Film industry experts say one of the best approaches to making Chinese films better known around the world is through co-productions. Over the past few years, co-produced films in China have grown by an average of ten percent a year.

But they say the number of co-productions between Chinese and big Hollywood companies is still fewer than expected.

Shen said, "The process of co-producing films is very complicated. The Chinese mainland is now cooperating more with Hong Kong and Taiwan. But we still have a long way to go in cooperating with western countries. "

Shen says differences remain in production techniques and workflow as well as in the cultural backgrounds of the target audience members.