Finding the film market in Hong Kong is like opening a set of Chinese nested boxes, a tradition which goes back a thousand years. The biggest casket is the Entertainment Expo, which runs for a month, and contains the Hong Kong Film Festival, and the marketing box, the Filmart, which contains the Asian Film Financing Forum. Ultimately the producer can feel like the one grain of rice which is stored inside the inside of the inside… all of which is now rattling in a financial frenzy.
Hong Kong’s Filmart, the world’s third largest market event, has already announced an 8% increase in attendance. Almost 700 exhibitors and 6,000 visitors are dealing their way through the next four days. [We analyse those trends in more detail here] The true spreadsheet addicts are attending the financing forum HAF, aka the Asian Film Financing Forum, while the Ateliers du Cinéma Européen (ACE) Producers’ Lab is interrogating sixteen projects on offer to the market.
