A high-powered panel at the Busan International Film Festival‘s Asian Contents and Film Market pondered the condition of the theatrical market for arthouse films in Asia and Europe post-pandemic.
The two themes that emerged from the discussion were the necessity for films to have an X factor that can be marketed and, second, that restored classics are finding new audiences.
June Lee, content business team lead at Korea’s Watcha said that the company’s acquisition strategy for this year and the next is to either pick up a Hollywood blockbuster or “really arthouse films with elements that could go viral.”
The panel, which was moderated by Katarzyna Siniarska, head of sales at Poland’s New Europe Film Sales, also included Valeska Neu, international sales agent at Germany’s Films Boutique, Kini Kim of France’s The Jokers Films, Felix Tsang, sales and acquisitions manager at Hong Kong’s Golden Scene and Patrick Mao Huang, CEO of Taiwan’s Flash Forward Entertainment.
Some of the theatrical audience for arthouse cinema that had moved to streaming during the pandemic have not returned. Neu said that European films without famous directors or an A-list cast are difficult to sell in Asia. “We have to find things that do not only speak universally but are also like unique little pearls we are all looking for international sales,” Neu said, citing Malaysian Cannes winner “Tiger Stripes” as an example. However, the pearls too can be difficult to sell. “For example, we had a Chinese film this year in Berlin in the competition, ‘The Shadowless Tower’ by Zhang Lu – pure arthouse very, very difficult. So, we can see that these things that used to work, even though he’s a well-established filmmaker, now after the pandemic have become very difficult.”
The silver lining in an otherwise bleak scenario painted by the panelists is the popularity of restored arthouse classics. Huang said that one of his biggest recent successes was the restored version of Lou Ye’s 2000 Rotterdam winner “Suzhou River.” Kim, who headed international sales at CJ Entertainment for several years, spoke about the re-release of Bong Joon Ho’s 2006 film “The Host.” He recalled a sold out Paris screening in February this year followed by a Q&A hosted by Cannes chief Thierry Fremaux. It was attended by an audience in their teens, 20s and 30s. “You will have a platform to watch the film, through Netflix or something like that, but watching it in real, in the cinema, restored properly, is a very vivid experience,” Kim said.
Golden Scene operates a boutique cinema in Hong Kong and Tsang said that the venue has had considerable success programming classic films by Stanley Kwan and Hou Hsiao-Hsien. “One interesting aspect of our audience space is that when we showed these restored films, there are a lot of mainland Chinese students or young people who are living in Hong Kong right now who have never watched these films before. Because, maybe when they were in China, they couldn’t get access to this material,” Tsang said. “‘Lan Yu,’ which is an LGBT film that was made in China actually, but made by a Hong Kong director [Kwan], is restored in beautiful 4K. These restored screenings are actually the most consistent box office for us throughout the months, rather than our other new film acquisitions.”
