Joe Ray

February 3, 2005 - Agence France Presse

ROTTERDAM, Feb 3 (AFP) - Imagine being a film producer with a great idea, an out-of-this world script, but very little money to bring your project to life.

Some people might try their luck schlepping through the established film festivals like Cannes, Berlin or think even bigger and go direct to the wheeler-dealer money-makers in Hollywood.

But chances are you’d be lost in the shuffle.

Enter CineMart, the co-production market that’s the business end of this week’s Rotterdam International Film Festival.

  “The first time you go to Cannes, it’s rather difficult to get access to the right people,” said CineMart chief, Ido Abram, referring to the large crowds and the distracting hoopla associated with industry events such as the Marche du Film at the Cannes Film Festival.

“It’s much easier to meet people here,” agreed CineMart attendee Jerome Paillard, the head of the Marche du Film in Cannes.

This year, in the 22nd year of the CineMart, some 48 projects are touting for a combined 103 million euros (134 million US dollars) among some 900 distributors, buyers, directors, with individual projects ranging in budget from around five million euros to as low as under 500,000.

Among the notable directors here searching for financing are Britain’s Peter Greenway (“The Pillow Thief,” and “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”) aiming to raise a total of 4.8 million euros for his current project, “55 Men on Horseback”.

Lisandro Alonso, whose “Los Muertos” was presented at CineMart in 2002, was hoping to stump up a more modest 745,000 euros for his new project, “Liverpool.”

CineMart’s low-key, nobody-wears-suits style has certainly caught the eye of bigger festivals. And although it is not the first or largest market associated with a film festival, co-production is CineMart’s niche and it is held to be the industry standard for this type of event.

This year five days of meetings have been held starting from Sunday and ending on Thursday, where in an informal atmosphere people with the ideas have been connecting one-on-one with the people with the money.

“It’s becoming more and more difficult to finance films,” said Abram explaining why co-produced films are increasingly popular. “People are forced to play on the safe side.”

“Financing sources are timid,” added Paillard. “Except for a rare exception, nobody wants to put up fifty percent of a film’s budget anymore. The more diversity in funding a film has, the better it can do.”

A film that’s a multinational co-production also tends to do better at the global box office than a film with a tie to just one place.

“In the cases where there’s a national link (whether through an actor or location), a film has a lot better chance than an exclusively foreign one,” explained Paillard.

“A Franco-German film will tend to work better in Germany than one that’s just all French.”

To create these cross-cultural links, CineMart’s creators select a group of film projects from around the world that Paillard described as “between blockbusters and art house films,” and invite to the market the people likely to get them going.

“It’s by invitation only,” stressed Abram, “not because we’re arrogant, but so we know who is there and can control the situation and make it easy for people to do business here.”

“You always know that the pre-selection of projects is good,” added producer Christoph Friedel of Germany’s Pandora Film Produktion.

At Rotterdam in 2003, Friedel met many of the people he eventually ended up working with on the award-winning 2004 release, “Whisky.”

This year at CineMart, Friedel is working on getting the last third of the 700,000 euros he needs to fund an Argentinian-German co-production, “The Minder”.

“There are more and more of this kind of co-production market,” said Friedel, “but this is the best.”