!!!!!!!!!!Master’s Thesis !!!

East Asia in Production: Media space, Film Markets & Co-Productions in Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea !!!!!!!!

The University of Tokyo Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies

Information, Technology, and Society in Asia Academic Year 2014 !!!!

SALUVEER, Sten-Kristian

49 -126511 Advisor: Professor YOSHIMI Shunya !!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!©[2014]

Sten-Kristian Saluveer

SOME RIGHTS RESERVED

The thesis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- No Dervivs 4.0 Unported License

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

! !!!!!

!Thesis Abstract

East Asia in Production: Media space, Film Markets & Co-Productions in

Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea

Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies

Information, Technology, and Society in Asia

SALUVEER, Sten-Kristian

49 -126511

Although Asian cinema has attracted widespread attention in academic and critical studies

of auteurs and genres, the research on the production and dissemination, especially festivals

and co-productions of feature films has suffered from a relative lack of attention. Thus, the

goal of this thesis is to theoretically discuss and critically analyze international co-productions

and co-production markets of feature-length films in East Asia: Japan (TIFFCOM Co-Pro

Connection of Tokyo International Film Festival), Hong Kong (HAF of Hong Kong

International Film Festival), and South Korea (APM of Busan International Film Festival, and

NAFF of Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival).

The work sets to provide a coherent overview of four major discourses of co-

productions, the cultural-regulatory, legal, financial, and cultural studies discourse advocated

recently by DeBoer (2014) which sees regional co-productions as technology of assemblage in

complex dialogues with the cultural, financial, and political flows in East Asia. The study

relates these discourses to the larger framework of East Asian media space as advocated by

Iwabuchi and Chua, as well as case studies of four co-production markets.

The results indicate that instead of a coherent regional configuration based on media

consumption and production, the practice and technology of co-productions facilitates the

creation of a cosmopolitan identity that is being produced by film professionals at regional co-

production markets and film festivals. This narrative of future, simultaneously attests both to

the “local” in East Asia and the “global” in the transnational film festival circuit.

!

!!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The four year long research project culminating with this thesis would not have seen the

light of day without the guidance and critique from a vast body of mentors, academic and

business colleagues, and friends and family alike who encouraged and supported me on this

journey to the theoretical, and literally geographical unknown in Asia.

Research assistant Liis Kalvik’s contribution cannot be underestimated as she painstakingly

helped to assemble the database of East Asian co-production projects from a plethora of

digital and print sources. Similarly, Mattie Do and Chris Larsen helped to edit and proofread

the final manuscript.

The research studies in Japan and East Asia along with the writing of the current thesis

were kindly supported by Japanese Embassy in Tallinn and the Monbukagakusho Scholarship

Program of Japanese Government, and The Young Culture Professional Scholarship of

Estonian Ministry of Culture.

Much of this academic inquiry was born from my work experience in programming the

film industry program of Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival with the goal of bringing Asian

and European filmmakers and professionals closer to each other through the festival and its

events. But this thesis could not have been born without the help of many acclaimed film

industry professionals in East Asia, who not only allocated time in their extremely difficult

production schedules, but also allowed me to shed light on their business practices and

knowledge. My foremost gratitude goes to the people who boldly keep the co-productions

markets an film festivals running despite political and financial obstacles: Jay Jeon, Susan Chae

and Seri Park from the Busan International Film Festival’s Asian Project Market; Jacob Wong,

Roger Garcia and Matthew Poon from the Hong Kong International Film Festival’s Hong

Kong Asia Film Financing Forum; Jongsuk Thomas Nam and Jegal Song from the Puchon

Fantastic Film Festival’s Network of Asian Fantastic Films; Mika Morishita, Takenari Maeda,

Kenta Fudesaka, and Shizuka Murakami from Tokyo International Film Festival’s TIFFCOM

Content Market and Tokyo Co-Pro Connection. My gratitude belongs also to the national film

policy and promotion organizations and their managements who granted access and provided

insights to the working mechanisms and principles of film and media policy in Japan and

South Korea: Takashi Nishimura of UNIJAPAN, and Sanghee Han of KOFIC.

I am also indebted to the people who make it happen every day through blood and tears

and relentless belief in the power of cinema—the producers, distributors and sales agents of

East Asian films whose trust and interviews have helped me to explore the previously

uncharted territories: Judy Ahn, Hiromi Aihara, Jeffrey Chan, Brian Chung, Jason and Eiko

Mizuno-Gray, Emico Kawai, Ellen Kim, Heejeon Kim, Jonathan Kim, Kini Kim, Sonya Kim,

Yukie Kito, Shinho Lee, Shinjiro Nishimura, Jean Noh, Jungwan OH, Jin Park, T.J Park,

Raymond Phathanavirangoon, and Lorna Tee - thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I am equally thankful to professors Jason Karlin and Shigeto Sonoda, for the former for

his diverse critique as sub-advisor during the writing process, and the latter for explicating the

value of data-driven driven research, so often undervalued in media studies.

However, my foremost gratitude belongs to the faculty of the Graduate School of

Interdisciplinary Information studies, especially my advisor professor Shunya Yoshimi who

kindly accepted my research student application leading to continuing studies in the University

under his invaluable theoretical rigor and guidance that has continued over the years.

Last but not least, I cannot express enough my deep gratitude and indebtedness towards

my family who has patiently endured the burden and sacrifice of distance and time for the

completion of this academic and personal quest.

!!

! !!! !

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!I want light. I want that light to

flicker on my face in the darkness of the screening room, giving me on average an

hour and a half of faith into the possibility of life. Possibility of love. And faith that

goodness does not have to be justified in any way. !

Taavi Eelmaa & Veiko Õunpuu 60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero manifesto !

TABLE OF CONTENTS !CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 2: TYPOLOGY OF CO-PRODUCTIONS 9

2.1. Discourses of co-production 9

2.2 The cultural-regulatory discourse (the EU art film model) 11

2.3. The legal discourse (the international agreements model) 15

2.4 The financial-business discourse (the creative industries / US model) 20

2.5 The cultural studies discourse: co-production as technology of assemblage 26

2.6 Co-production and narratives of regionalization: futurism, localism, and proximity 28

CHAPTER 3: EAST ASIA, MEDIA SPACE AND REGIONALIZATION 34

3.1 Historical and theoretical context 34

3.2 Dichotomies of East Asian media flows 40

3.3 Decentering-recentering networks, and media capitals 51

CHAPTER 4: METHODOLOGY, RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND OBJECTIVES 57

4.1 Methodology 57

4.2 Object of study 59

4.3 Research questions and hypotheses 62

4.4 Theoretical framework 64

4.5 Limitations of research 66

CHAPTER 5: CO-PRODUCTIONS IN EAST ASIA: 68

FESTIVALS AND MARKETS 68

5.1 Film festival and film markets: from art to symbiosis with industry 68

5.2 Co-production market as cultural interface 73

5.3 The Asian Project Market: building regional film community 80

5.4 The Hong Kong Film Financing Forum: the interface between Hong Kong and mainland China 83

5.5 The Tokyo Co-Pro Connection: negotiating internationalization and globalization 89

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5.6 The Network of Asian Fantastic Films: taking genre global 95

CHAPTER 6. DISCUSSION: PRODUCING EAST ASIA 100

6.1 Structural obstacles 102

6.2 Cultural obstacles 110

6.3 Geopolitical obstacles 112

6.4 (Co-) Producing East Asia as narrative of future 116

CHAPTER 7. CONCLUSION 122

APPENDIX I. INTERVIEWEES 126

APPENDIX 2. INTERVIEW QUESTIONNAIRE 133

BIBLIOGRAPHY 136

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS !FIGURES !

Figure 1. The international pavilions at the Village International of Marche Du Film, the key film industry event taking place during the Cannes Film Festival. 1 !Figure 2. South Korean science fiction thriller Snowpiercer (2013) that increased Korean film exports by 83,7% within a year. 2 !Figure 3. Four major and interdependent discourses of co-production. 9 !!Figure 4. The Hong Kong Filmart film and content market, the main industry event for Chinese language cinema. 34 !Figure 5. South Korean blockbuster The Thieves (2012) shot on location in Hong Kong, Macau, and South Korea. 40 !Figure 6. Indonesian martial arts film The Raid 2: Berandal, directed by Welsh director Gareth Evans, and funded by Los Angeles based production and international sales company XYZ Films was one of the most anticipated films of Sundance Film Festival 2014. 43 !Figure 7. 2013 Asian Film Market and Asian Project Market of Busan International Film Festival. 68 !Figure 8. The author discussing a film project in development with Japanese producers in TIFFCOM CoPro Connection 2013 (formerly TPG). 73 !Figure 9. International screenings of completed projects from Busan, Puchon, Hong Kong, and Tokyo co-production markets 1998 - 2014. 77 !Figure 10. HAF projects by countries 2000 - 2013. 87 !Figure 11. APM, HAF, NAFF & TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection (TPG) Projects by budget 1998- 2013. 89 !Figure 12: TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection (TPG) projects by country 2005—2013 showing clearly the market’s preference of presenting domestic projects. 93 !Figure 13: NAFF projects by country 1998 -2013. 97 !Figure 14. Co-production meetings between filmmakers and financiers at the Network of Asian Fantastic Films (NAFF), Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival. 100 !Figure 15. Thai thriller Headshot (2011), produced with the support of French film sales company Memento Films, participated in Tokyo Project Gathering (TPG) co-production market in 2010. 102 !!

Figure 16. Completion ratio of submitted film projects to APM, HAF & NAFF from 1998—2013. 118 !Figure 17. Countries with more than ten project entries to APM, HAF, NAFF & TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection (TPG) 1998—2013 revealing the cultural geography of East Asian co-productions. 120 !Figure 18. East Asia in production. Filmmakers, financiers, festival programmers and producers in Hong Kong Film Financing Forum 2014. 122 !!TABLES !Table 1: Morawetz et al (2007) typology of co-productions. 20

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!1

!CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION !

! !Figure 1. The international pavilions at the Village International of Marche du Film, the key film industry event taking place during the Cannes Film Festival. Copyright Alexandra Fleurantin. Printed with the permission of Marche du Film. !In 2013, one film set out to challenge the perception of Asian cinema. Set in the near future,

on a train that circles the globe every 360 days, with the last remnants of humankind engaging

in a fight for survival in its confined spaces, Snowpiercer, directed by internationally acclaimed

South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, tore open a variety of questions about the nature of

not only Asian, but global film production as well. To select an appropriate angle from which

one would approach the film—which is based on a French comic book, was scripted and

directed by a South Korean, features an international superstar cast including Chris Evans,

Tilda Swinton, Ian Hurt and Song Kang-Ho, was shot on a sound stage in Czech Republic,

and was sold in various international territories by the US based Weinstein Company— posits

for the researcher a set of diverse methodological questions. Moreover, Snowpiercer’s immense

success in its country of inception, which resulted in a staggering 83,7 percent increase in

!2

Figure 2. South Korean science fiction thriller Snowpiercer (2013) that increased Korean film exports by 83,7% within a year. Copyright & printed with the permission from CJ E&M Pictures. !the export volume for the South Korean film industry, also posits equally fascinating questions

on the economic and cultural potential of a media product produced within a certain locale

(KOFIC 2014).

Theoretical implications aside, Snowpiercer, with all its complexity challenging the notion

of national cinema, is also indicative of larger trends that can be seen as recently shaping the

global entertainment industry. Primarily, viewing the film as representative of East Asian

filmmaking, due to its director and production company’s South Korean origin, it would

certainly testify to the possibility of East Asian cinema’s global impact. While there exists a

vast body of vernacular, academic and industry publications from director, genre and studio

viewpoints, to audience and reception studies, and industry performance comparisons that

argue for the global reach of Asian cinema three other arguments present themselves. First, as

of 2014, East Asian countries—China, Japan and South Korea—rank among the top ten

countries in the world regarding both cinema admissions and total box office revenue, with

South Korea boasting the second highest cinema attendance ratio in the world (Observatory

!3

and Marche 2014) (KOFIC 2014), an economic feat which cannot be underestimated. Second,

East Asian cinema is highly present in the international festival circuit, in terms of filmmakers,

but also in terms of the global prominence of its film festivals. Regarding the former it is

sufficient to say that both art house and commercial filmmakers from the region including

Kim Ki Duk, Park Chan Wook, Hirokazu Koreeda, Naomi Kawase, Takashi Miike, Johnnie

To, Pang Ho Cheung, Jia Zhankge, and of course, Bong Joon Ho, to name a few from the vast

body of filmmakers, have become staples in the film festival circuit’s key events in Berlin,

Cannes, Venice and Toronto, and have witnessed acclaim both internationally and

domestically. The region’s own film festivals, such as the Busan International Film Festival, the

Hong Kong International Film Festival, the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival, and

the Tokyo International Film Festival, with their associated events catering to the diverse sales,

exhibition and production needs of the international film industry, are equally recognized as

residing in the upper limits of the festival hierarchy.

Finally, East Asian cinema, and its production and dissemination locales and networks,

have become increasingly transnational as the Snowpiercer example highlights. South Korean

blockbusters such as the The Berlin File and Thieves were shot in diverse locations all over the

world from Latvia to Hong Kong and Macau, the Japanese-Indonesian thriller Killers was

scripted and directed by an Indonesian directing duo and was partially financed from the US,

and Hong Kong action films are being scored by French electronic musicians as in the recent

drive and chase bonanza Highway. These connections seem to indicate the prevalence of

translational collaboration as the primary modus operandi of film industries across the world.

Here the concept of “transnational” is favored over “global” due to its potential to account

for both the “local” and the “international”, clearly visible in contemporary East Asian

cinema, while rather ironically entering into the discussion with the “national”. While

preserving their locality, East Asian films, especially independent films are increasingly

financed internationally, and distributed through transnational networks at regional and

international film festivals, and are thus being shaped by local and international flows.

!4

Ulf Hannerz widely cited argument for the precedence of this transition is highly illustrative

of the possibilities offered by this transnational outlook as he argues:

“I am also somewhat uncomfortable with the rather prodigious use of the term globalization to describe just about any process or relationship that somehow crosses state boundaries. In themselves, many such processes and relationships obviously do not at all extend across the world. The term ‘transnational’ is in a way more humble, and often a more adequate label for phenomena which can be of quite variable scale and distribution, even when they do share the characteristic of not being contained within a state” (Hannerz 2002, 6) !

Hannerz furthermore argues that by taking the transnational stance one also recognizes

the impact of a variety of actors and players that evoke change globally, as these can include

“individuals, groups, movements, business enterprises, and in no small part, it is this diversity

of organization that we need to consider” (ibid.). The international film industry can be

certainly viewed from Hannerz’ transnational perspective, as its individuals and groups in the

form of filmmakers and producers enter into transnational connections not only with their

peers but with movements and enterprises at international film festivals where films are

premiered, distribution rights are sold, and agreements for future productions are made.

Evidence, albeit presented briefly, to the transnational nature of film festivals can be

drawn from Europe and East Asia like with the both testifying to the fact that festivals and

their industry offshoots, either in the form of film or collaboration markets, have evolved

from temples of national cinema to transnational sites where art, capital, and power intertwine

—“they bring visitors to cities, revenue to national film industries, and national film cultures

into the world cinema system”(Stringer 2001, 134). As to the sheer power of numbers, the

Busan Film Festival in 2013 screened 299 films from 70 countries to an audience of more

than 200,000, while its premier film industry event, the Asian Film Market, hosted 198

companies from 32 countries (B. I. F. Festival 2014).

In addition to transnationalization of exhibition networks, international film production

and financing has left the national and entered the realm of transnational due to the increasing

prevalence of the practice of co-production. Former film industry executive and prolific

industry researcher Angus Finney has explained that in the broadest understanding “a film

!5

made as a co-production is any type of production that involves more than one producing

party in the financing and production process—whether through official channels or

unofficial… a vital strategy… to harness additional finance and distribution potential beyond

their national support systems” (Finney 2010, 77). Although seemingly basic, co-productions,

whether driven by creative or financial reasons, have become not only a buzzword within the

international media business, but have also become one of the primary means of facilitating

international film production, with the UNESCO 2010 report arguing that in 2009, “most

films from European countries were co-produced” (UNESCO Institute for Statistics).

Furthermore, the increase in the prevalence of co-productions over the past two decades has

also resulted in consolidation between the film festivals and the film business through the

creation of so called co-production markets where film projects meet potential investors,

financiers and collaborators. It could also be argued that the prominence of co-productions,

as the driving force of international film collaboration, has reached unprecedented levels, as

even a quick search of the term “co-production” from one of the major film industry

publications, “Screendaily”, yields in 2,229 results for the year 2014 alone.

This research project was born from the triangulation of the three previously discussed

subjects— co-production, film festivals and East Asia—bound together by the notion of the

increasing role of the transnational connections between them. While co-productions are an

intrinsic element of current film collaboration, surprisingly, only a few theorists such as

Hoskins et al. (1996) and more recently Morawetz et al. (2007) have dared to examine the

phenomenon from an academic perspective, exploring its industrial and financial aspects,

while neglecting the equally crucial cultural or social implications. Similarly, although the late

2000s saw a rapid increase in film festival and production studies, such as those by the Film

Festival Research Group within the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies

(NECS), and work of de Valck et al. (2009) in Amsterdam, many of these studies were written

from the perspective of academics and neglected the voices of the film industry professionals

!6

whose daily work involves commuting across the globe from co-productions markets to

festivals in search of finance, collaboration or film screenings.

Finally, the increase of the international prominence and visibility of East Asian

filmmakers and festivals, such as the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), the Hong

Kong Film Festival (HKIFF), the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival (PiFAN), and

the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF), and their respective co-production markets and

industry programs calls for an inquiry as well. Following Soojeong Ahn’s (2011) pioneering,

“insider” study of the BIFF, the imminent question emerges as to what degree research can

pay respect to the both communities—providing an academic inquiry into the practices of

transnational film industries and festivals, while also providing analysis and observation from

the perspective of cultural studies. In doing so, this four year study brings together a

comprehensive literature review of the differing discourses of co-productions, case studies of

East Asian co-production markets in Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea, statistical data

compiled between 1998- 2013 from the film project submissions to these events, as well as

interviews with some fourteen acclaimed East Asian film professionals. The study situates

these sources into the wider framework of cultural studies by analyzing and juxtaposing them

with the widely noted framework of East Asian identity and media space that is argued to be

based on the shared cultural values and dynamics in the region.

The second chapter will begin with the literature review of various discourses of co-

productions such as the European art film discourse that emerged in 1950s, set against the

potential hegemony of Hollywood, and has since evolved into a pan-EU policy of facilitating

the production of European cinema. The legal treaties discourse is also presented which

foresees the creation of bilateral agreements between countries to increase the potential

audience of a film while ascribing dual nationality, thus making a film eligible for various

national support schemes or incentives. The overview of financial discourse, or the US model

is presented as well, which primarily sees co-productions from the perspective of the

economic benefits that can be obtained from international collaboration, such as tax credits

!7

and incentives, shooting in particular locales, and employing foreign crews. Finally, the chapter

will link these concepts with the academic inquiry into the East Asian context through

DeBoer’s recent conceptualization of co-productions as a “technology of assemblage” that

brings together various flows of people, capital, and power in East Asia. The chapter

concludes by presenting three broad sociocultural narratives rising from co-productions -

futurism, localism and proximity.

The third chapter proceeds with the literature review of the framework of East Asian

media space based on the conceptualizations of Iwabuchi and Chua who advocate for

regional identity based on the consumption of popular culture. Here, pairs of dichotomies

viewed as binding forces for a space of identity are discussed, such as hybridity-glocalization,

cultural proximity and distance, and decentering-recentring flows. The view of regional film

festivals as international locales where flows of culture interact with migration and capital

forming centers of gravity in East Asia according to Curtin’s (2003, 2010) prominent theory

of media capitals is introduced as well.

The fourth chapter describes the methodological approach of this study while outlining

the research questions and hypotheses, and provides an overview of mixed methodological

approaches consisting of institutional ethnography proposed by Smith, expert interviews and

the analysis of statistical data from the submissions of co-production markets.

The fifth chapter will present case studies of major co-production markets and their

host festivals in East Asia including the Asian Project Market (Pusan), the Hong Kong Film

Finacing Forum (Hong Kong), the Network of Asian Fantastic Films (Puchon), and the

TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection. These case studies are situated into the larger discussion of

the consolidation of exhibition and production functions in contemporary film festivals. It is

revealed here how each of the festivals and their industry events are representative of distinct

functions and strategies, ranging from the role of a cultural interface to mainland China, to the

construction of a regional film community, to the negotiation of internationalization in

developing East Asian genre film networks.

!8

The work then proceeds in the sixth chapter to the discussion contrasting and

juxtaposing the case studies and interview results with the theoretical body of co-productions

presented in the second chapter, as well as the East Asian media space framework proposed

by Iwabuchi and Chua. It is argued that in the case of film festivals and co-production

markets, a set of structural, cultural and geopolitical obstacles emerge that challenge and enter

into a negotiation with the theorization of a coherent and media-consumption based identity

in the region.

This thesis concludes with the argument that co-productions can be viewed as a

“technology of assemblage” that provides a sense of transnational and cosmopolitan identity

in the region, produced through film collaboration and experienced at the sites of regional

film festivals and co-production markets. In doing so, the practice of co-productions also

serves as a narrative and hope for future, unrestrained by regional boundaries, capable of

linking East Asia with the rest of the world through film collaboration.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!9

CHAPTER 2: TYPOLOGY OF CO-PRODUCTIONS

!Figure 3. Four major and interdependent discourses of co-production. !2.1. Discourses of co-production

The practice and analysis of the role and impact of co-production has suffered from a

paradoxical and discriminatory status amongst film professionals and academia alike. On one

hand, co-productions have been a steady means of cinematic production and collaboration

since the 1950s both in Europe (Jäckel 2003; Bergfelder 2005a) as well as in Asia (DeBoer

2014), and statistical evidence from Europe seems to indicate that co-produced films tend to

perform better than purely national films in certain contexts, as “European co-productions on

average, i.e. using the median value, generate significantly higher admissions than their entirely

national counterparts” (Kanzler, Newman-Baudais, and Lange 2008, 19) Given that, the

question emerges whether or not there exists a coherent academic or analytical framework to

assess the phenomenon’s social, cultural, and economic impact.

Betz (2001) and Bergfelder (2005) indicate that this fallacy has been rooted in the

permanence of the discourse of the “national” in dealing with the cinema and media

!10

industries since “the issue of co-production has featured in national film histories at best as a

cursory footnote, or as a tolerable exception to the more desirable norm of indigenous and

self-reliant national film production” (Bergfelder 2005b, 323). Betz (2001) also articulates that,

despite the long history of cross-cultural and transnational film collaboration in Europe,

analyses of co-productions

“carry on under the rubric of the nation as if it has been a stable category and geopolitical entity in Europe… [co-production] emerges in this narrative as a forced swerving away from natural national traditions, as an aberrant industrial and economic response that holds little interest for stylistic or aesthetic national histories” (Betz 2001, 7) !

By considering the larger academic and theoretical paradigm of thought that Bergfelder

and Betz underline, it is not surprising that few theorists and commentators have paid

attention to the impact of co-productions, let alone attempted to provide a comprehensive

overview of the associated discourses.

Four interrelated and overlapping discourses can be deducted from academic, policy and

business studies—the cultural discourse (the EU art film model), the legal discourse, financial-

economic discourse (the US model), and analytical-cultural studies discourse. However, it

should be noted that these discourses are a part of a dynamic and interrelated geography of

cultural, political and economic flows. For example, the art film discourse seeks to pool

resources for the co-production of artistically meaningful (European) auteur cinema catered

to festival and high culture audiences. It does so by benefitting from legal, and mostly bilateral,

co-production agreements between countries that usually grant the film in question national

status for it to enjoy various subsidies, incentives, tax breaks, film and equity investment funds,

and so forth. Furthermore, the connection to the financial-economic discourse is established

by the fact that producers often seek partners from the territories that offer most beneficial

conditions to realize the production, or combine several of these beneficial conditions to pool

the maximum resources available. Lastly, the analytical-cultural studies discourse, as recently

proposed by DeBoer (2014), weaves these elements together providing analytical tools to

!11

assess the interplay of the former three discourses in the framework of a “technology of

assemblage”.

The following chapter will present a broad overview of each of the aforementioned

discourses with examples from both the international and the East Asian context. First, by

explaining the broadest, European art film cultural-regulatory discourse that has attained the

position of the primary self-regulatory force and paradigm, considering the production of

festival and art house films within the EU is explained. Closely interconnected is the second,

legal discourse that revolves around bilateral treaties amongst countries that guarantee a

particular film national status in the co-producers territories, thus enabling access to diverse

sets of benefits, such as widely available tax breaks for co-productions. Third, the financial-

business discourse is explained, originating from the US, which principally describes economic

and practical expectations, and incentives that producers seek in the case of co-produced

films. Finally, the academic-analytical discourse is presented which assesses the previous three

discourses within the cultural studies discourse, exploring the connection of the phenomena

to the questions of transnationalism, regionalism, politics and power.

!2.2 The cultural-regulatory discourse (the EU art film model)

The first discourse surrounding co-productions is the cultural-regulatory discourse that

has emerged primarily in Europe, and views co-productions as a significant mechanism for the

preservation and popularization of the culture and values of European nations, and the EU at

large. The discourse is epitomized in the European Convention of Cinematographic Co-

production (hereafter ECC) that entered force in 1992, and has since been ratified by 43

countries including member and non-member states (Europe). The treaty was preceded by the

creation of the EURIMAGES funding body in Strasbourg in 1988 that serves as a de facto

interest-free loan investor for films of European origin. The organization assesses whether a

co-produced film is deemed “European”, and thus eligible for subsidy, by applying a

comprehensive set of criteria. For instance, these include the requirement that the considered

!12

productions must be “co-productions between at least two independent producers, established

in different member states of the Fund”, the production companies must be of European

origin, the film must follow production practices and legislation of their native countries, as

well as conform to the ECC, and the principles of EURIMAGES amongst others (Eurimages

2014). In addition, an elaborate point system is in place that awards a certain number of

points for creative personnel of European origin—from director, cameraman, actors and so

on—requiring 15 points out of the total of 19 for the film to qualify as European (ibid.).

It can be argued that since the ECC treaty has more or less replaced all previous and

bilateral film co-production agreements between the member states in Europe, it is considered

to be a major point of reference, as the authority on regulating cinematic activities and

production within the EU, and globally as well. The larger goal of the treaty at the time of its

inception was to equalize the regulations of cinematic production within the EU, as well as to

provide equal terms of legal partnership between producers of different member states.

Specifically, the treaty aimed to ensure that films produced in partnership between two

countries could be ascribed national status in their producers’ territories with the associated

benefits and incentives. Providing a wide-reaching framework, the ECC “has acted as an

enabling umbrella, which has effectively smoothed out the obstructive bilateral problems

when a multilateral production can take over” (Finney 2010, 77-78; Milla 2011).

In doing so, the treaty stipulates that

“European cinematographic works made as multilateral co-productions and falling within the scope of this Convention shall be entitled to the benefits granted to national films by the legislative and regulatory provisions in force in each of the Parties to this Convention participating in the co-production concerned” (Council). !

Simultaneously, the ECC exemplifies the complex relationship between the national and the

regional within the larger paradigm of the promotion of European culture,

as“cinematographic co-production, an instrument of creation and expression of cultural

diversity on a European scale, should be reinforced” (ibid.).

!

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The commentators have argued, in promoting cultural diversity through cinematographic

co-production, the ECC primarily serves two goals. First, and primarily, the framework

encourages a certain type of art film associated with the European auteur and festival cinema

closely linked with (European) high culture (Betz 2001, 21-23; Bergfelder 2005b, 316-318).

Second, it aims to do so in order to limit the access and influence of American, and

Hollywood industries in the European markets, as the sum of national benefits—within a

context of a particular film production—would serve as a combined force against the impact

of external, especially American, cultural influence (Jäckel 2003, 233-234).

Bergfelder (2005) explains, that in the aforementioned “‘European’ functions less as the

signifier of a specific culture, and more as an abstractly supranational, and quasi-ethical

framework of cultural practice” (Bergfelder 2005b, 317.) The notion of ‘European art cinema’

promotes the wider project of an interconnected European culture, and advertises this project

through traditional Western—and frequently high bourgeois—values” (Bergfelder 2005b,

317). Betz (2001) and Jäckel (2003) have also argued that the development of pan-European

art cinema as art film has long lasting traditions. The paradigm emerged already in the first bi-

lateral cinema agreements during the post-war years, specifically in France and Italy, and

reached its peak in the 1950s and 60s with the bodies of work by canonical filmmakers such as

Fellini, Antonioni and Truffaut, amongst others. In doing so, a new form of pan-European

popular entertainment emerged, since

“the first film co-production treaty had created, within a European framework, opportunities for a genuine form of international cultural—and economic—collaboration to develop. It produced, in the first few years of its implementation, a true—if not completely original—form of popular culture”(Jäckel 2003, 240 2003eb). !

!

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Considering the blossoming of European (co-produced) art cinema in the

1960s and 70s, as

“more than a set of historically isolated moments or the latest adaptation of the European film industries to the geopolitics of the postmodern era, international co-production has been a consistent feature of European cinemas—quality, entertainment, or art—since the beginnings of European cooperation and integration in the immediate postwar period” (Betz 2001, 35). !

What emerges is a complex ideological and sociopolitical formation where the ideology of

national cinema is embedded into the notion of larger paradigm of pan-European (high)

culture entertainment. It involves the fields and practices of production, exhibition,

dissemination, as well as a criticism and commentary: a

“mode of production that is heavily reliant on state subsidies (particularly in Germany and France); a cross-European distribution network built on the marketing of festivals and prizes (Berlin, Venice, Cannes); a mode of exhibition centered on the distinctive arena of the art-house cinema; and, finally, a network of journals and newspapers committed both to the spirit and to the industrial framework of this practice"(Bergfelder 2005b, 318). !

The best contemporary examples of co-productions within the cultural-regulatory

discourse are films by internationally recognized Danish director Lars von Trier. Von Trier’s

films are exemplary of the European art film cultural-legal discourse of co-productions

precisely because they closely follow to the above-mentioned criteria of European cultural

paradigm proposed by Bergfelder. First, the films feature challenging themes and topics

catered to the art house audience and festival circuit—whether exploring darker sides of male

to female relationships in Antichrist, or the history of sexuality in most recent

Nymphomaniac (2013). Second, they utilize multi-national European cast, such as actresses and

actors Emily Watson (UK), Björk (Iceland), Charlotte Gaisnbourgh (France), Stellan

Skaarsgaard (Denmark) or Udo Kier (Germany), and third, they frequently premiere at

Europe’s hallmark festivals such as Berlin or Cannes. Last but not least, the films’ main

production company, Zentropa Entertainment, co-owned by Trier and equally acclaimed

Danish producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen, draws creative and financial resources for the actual

production of the films throughout Europe utilizing the available subsidies and incentives. As

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Finney has remarked, the acclaimed Breaking the Waves (1996) posed “difficult co-financing

challenges within the EU system, with Zentropa as lead producer, supported by four

additional co-producers, and 23 co-financing partners” (Finney 2010, 83). But also the

director’s latest, Nymphomaniac (2013), a production “aimed fair-and-square at the art-house

community that has embraced his previous films … also a remarkable project brimming with

bold and often thoughtful performances” continues the multi-national pan-European

production tradition with its investors and co-producers coming from Denmark, Germany,

France, Belgium and the UK (Adams 2013).

!2.3. The legal discourse (the international agreements model)

The second discourse of co-production is the legal discourse that coordinates co-

production activities through bilateral and multilateral treaties between two or more countries.

The aim of the treaties is to enable the producers to obtain national status for a particular film

in the partner country in order to gain access to various production advantages including,

national subsidies and incentives for using certain locations, the employment of creative and

production talent, and obtain exhibition and distribution support. The legal discourse is

closely interrelated to the to the EU art film discourse discussed in the previous section in that

the vast body of previous bilateral treaties within the EU served as a foundation for the

establishment and ratification of the all-encompassing umbrella of ECC treaty. It also relates

to the concurrent establishment of an EU-wide system of film policy and subsidy bodies such

as the EURIMAGES, and the MEDIA (now Creative Europe) program of the Council of

Europe. However, it should be stressed that the cultural-regulatory and the legal discourses

exist in parallel to, and at a times complementing, the regulation of separate filmmaking

activities. For example, in the case of a film made in partnership with the member state

countries within the EU, the cultural-regulatory discourse will prevail, whereas in the case of a

film project between EU member state and a non-European country the legal discourse will

be applied if an existing co-production agreement is in place (Finney 2010).

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Surprisingly, the history of the legal discourse of bilateral treaties can be traced back to

the post-WWII years when they were established to provide effective measures against the

influx of American films. Rare accounts of the details of pioneering film regulation, and co-

production in Europe are provided by Jäckel (2003) and Bergfelder (2005a, 2005b) with the

former analyzing the emergence of French-Italian partnership, and the latter focusing on the

often overlooked history of West-German co-productions and popular cinema. Both authors

suggest that, although the impact of the treaties cannot be underestimated for their effect on

the development of not only popular genres, but also art house films, and the larger ideology

of pan-European film collaboration, the area has suffered from critical and academic neglect.

A testimony to the popularity of the benefits brought by co-production partnerships is the

fact that a decade later, due to the ratification of the pioneering French-Italian co-production

agreement, other countries such as Spain, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, and Hungary had

established similar treaties, with the UK joining in early 1970s Jäckel 2003; Bergfelder 2005a,

2005b).

Most importantly, and as briefly mentioned above, the role of bilateral treaties was and

remains until today twofold. First, to establish protective measures against the impact of

foreign (mainly US) productions, and second, to expand the market of certain films from its

domestic audience to larger territories. Specifically, the pioneering treaties in Europe were put

into action to increase “the production of ‘quality films’ capable of competing with

Hollywood movies; in the post-war context, it was mostly in budget terms that Italian and

French producers came to define film quality” (Jäckel 2003, 233). That particular strategy in 1

turn enabled the creation of even higher budget, “spectacular” historical and adventure films

that were set to outperform their Hollywood counterparts, examples of which are the lavish

Jäckel (2003) mentions in her comprehensive article on the history of dual nationality of films in Europe that 1

according to the 1949 French-Italian treaty four types of films were considered to be eligible for co-production status: balanced: balanced films with 50% of financial, technical and artistic input from both sides; normal films with 70% of budget from one partners; exceptional films of exceptional artistic value; and children’s films up to 90% of investment (Jäckel 2003). It is interesting to note, that similar categories remain place until the present day where in several national states categorization between excellent / art films, percentage share of the budget, and children’s films remain in the film support agenda.

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Italian historical films from 1950s and 1960s. Consequently, the impact of the treaties was

remarkable in both promoting national productions, as well as ironically co-productions with

Hollywood that the treaties were intended to limit , resulting in a boom of so called “runaway 2

productions” in Europe. By the 1960s, as Bergfelder (2005) notes, the rapid escalation in co-

productions had exceeded the number of national productions, and “the system worked well

because co-producers came from countries with cultural affinities, a similar industrial and

institutional framework, comparable schemes of incentives and markets which could claim,

until the 1980s, a more or less equal potential” (Bergfelder 2005a, 55).

The aspects highlighted by Bergfelder - cultural affinities, economic frameworks,

incentive schemes and access to markets have remained the central features of the legal

discourse of co-productions up to the present day. As Milla (2011) puts forward, in the

current film production and financing context, the primary objective of a bilateral treaty rising

from the legal framework is to “relax” the nationality of a certain production in order for it

attain the benefits provided by countries of origin. Therefore, these treaties are often not

motivated by economic goals, such as the expansion of markets or other financial benefits,

but are frequently based on cultural, historical or linguistic ties or reasons (Milla 2011). The

terms that the treaties regulate include, the definitions of ‘national’ and ‘resident’, rights

sharing, visa and travel permits of associated crews, tax obligation, profit sharing, nationality

of co-financiers, minimum financial and creative contribution, locales for shooting and

production, and the relation to other legal frameworks such as the above mentioned ECC

(ibid). Dhaliwal (2012) adds that bilateral agreements also provide access to additional sources

of financing, reduce risk, enable culturally relevant collaboration, and establish a regulated

relationship between producers. Thus, by regulating a wide area from legal to financial and

creative collaborations, the bilateral treaties form the basis of a larger legal and sociopolitical

discourse that enables, regulates, and often also situates itself towards the creative elements of

A prominent producer of both European and Hollywood co-productions was Carlo Ponti whose acclaimed co-2

productions include Blow up (1966), and Zabriskie point (1970) both by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni.

!18

a cinematic collaboration. (Dhaliwal 2012)

Internationally, Canada and France are considered to be the countries with the highest

number of co-bilateral co-production treaties enacted with the aim of ascribing national status

to the participating producers . Regarding bilateral agreements in East Asia, the best examples 3

are the Canadian-Japanese co-production agreement enacted in 1994, an exclusive treaty Japan

has to date ratified. A comparable agreement between France and South Korea entered force

in 2006, and remains the only agreement France has ratified with an Asian country. While

Japan has taken a conservative course in bilateral agreements, South Korea has, in contrast,

undertaken an active course in legal co-production partnerships with treaties in place and

bilateral agreements with the EU (2005), France (2006), New Zealand (2008), China (2013),

and a tentative agreement with Australia (forthcoming in 2014).

Both the Canadian (Japanese and French) and South Korean agreements take the

assignment of (dual) nationality as the focus of the respective treaties. For example, the

former stipulates that since the producers and creative team of the film should be nationals or

permanent residents of the countries, “the co-production, when shown, is identified as a

“Japan-Canada co-production in accordance with an agreement between co-

producers” (Canada and Japan 1994). The French-South Korean agreement also emphasizes

that “credit titles, trailers, and publicity materials of film co-productions shall state that the

film is a co-production between Korea and France” (Korea and France 2006). However,

additional provisions also clearly outline the benefits provided by the bi-national status,

including access to various subsidies, automatic financial support investment, selective

financial support for production (such as advances on receipts and direct aid), investments

from television and Societies for Financing the Cinema and Audiovisual industry (in the case

of France), and a bypass of screen and broadcasting quotas, selective financial support for

production, investments from the Korean Investment Union, and minimum guarantees from

In Canada the co-production agreements are managed by Telefilm Canada with 53 agreements as of 2014, and 3

in France the treaties are supervised Centre National du Cinema et De L’image Animee (CNC) with 52 bilateral agreements as of 2014.

!19

video or international sales (in the case of South Korea) (Korea and France 2006).

Although, the bilateral treaties serve mainly legal functions, the French-South Korean

agreement highlights the role of the legal discourse of co-productions as an sociocultural and

economic intermediary between the national and the transnational. The treaties serve to

protect the national interest of each particular country, and thus these relationships are forged

with either culturally or economically significant partners. However, the treaties simultaneously

open up possibilities for transnational collaboration enabling producers from eligible countries

to access each other’s national resources, subsidies, as well as pass (media import) barriers such

as screen quotas. In conclusion, the legal discourse of co-productions serves a sociocultural

and economic frame and space for transnational negotiation and border crossing within the

global film industry. In doing so, the agreements eliminate national differences, and can serve

as a global bridge, as “legitimate co-production can serve an important role for the

advancement of global understanding and the liberation of people from oppression, and it

can be an economic cornerstone for both micro and macro levels of the communications

industry’’ (Johnston 1992).

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!

Table 1: Morawetz et al (2007) typology of co-productions.

!2.4 The financial-business discourse (the creative industries / US model)

The third discourse of co-productions concerns the financial and business aspects of

film collaboration, and is mainly associated with the American and Hollywood industries.

Selznick (2008) puts forward that co-productions fluctuate between cultural and economic

interests, and are simultaneously artistically and economically driven, because “international

co-productions can be motivated either by the desire to enhance a nation’s culture or the

Type Characteristics

(A) Co-production driven by creative reasons

—‘‘True Love’’

- Creative elements of film demand cross-border

production (e.g. road movie), or strong benefit

from creative inputs from multiple countries

- Low– to medium budget films, predominantly

European

(B) Co-production driven by search for finance

(industry driven)—‘‘Marriage of Convenience’’

- Film is structured as co-production to pool

financial sources from different countries.

Creative elements are adjusted in order to raise

finance

- Low– to medium budget films

- Single picture financing

(C) Co-production driven by international

capital (capital driven)—‘‘Arranged Marriage’’

Film structured as co-production to exploit

tax credits

- Medium tom– high budget films, aimed at

mainstream international audience, often

studio distribution guarantee

- Films usually part of a slate of films

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interest in making money or both” . If the cultural and legal discourses presented in the 4

previous sections of this chapter are mostly prevalent in the EU context, then in contrast, the

US film industry has abstained from treaties or bilateral agreements and have embarked on a

model of international joint ventures to promote the “free flow of information”(Selznick 5

2008, 4).

The prevalence of the financial discourse in the case of the US industries stems from

the high uncertainty and risk that accompanies blockbuster, especially Hollywood, productions

as several authors such as Lorenzen (2007), and Morawetz et al (2007) have argued. High

development, talent, production and post-production costs of big budget films across the

globe, but especially in case of Hollywood productions, also require a strong reliance on

export strategies for international markets. However, as Lorenzen (2008) has argued, in

actuality the export of films internationally increases uncertainty and risk even more, as

“consumer tastes on diverse global export markets are even more unpredictable than at home,

and liabilities of foreignness in the guise of diverse stylistic and language preferences are

massive” (Lorenzen 2007, 351). Thus, to minimize the risk of investment, big budget

productions actively seek locations that offer cheaper labor costs, or other business or

financial benefits “outsourcing ‘runaway’ production tasks to film clusters that offer

competitive costs” thus “to take advantage of national film-promoting policies and tax

incentives.” (ibid., 352)

In detail, the financial-business discourse of co-productions features two broad courses

of orientation. The first describes primarily the benefits arising from economic collaboration

Lorenzen (2008) focuses primarily on television co-productions in the case of international and US television 4

industries. However, it should be stressed that contemporary television and feature filmmaking processes are often very similar, if different at all. Recent US popular television series such as “Game of Thrones” are utilizing are diverse set of international locations such as Malta, Scotland, Iceland, Ireland and Morocco, and actively taking benefit of their production incentives. Also various Asian television series have been shot in Europe such as NHK’s taiga drama “Yae no Sakura” that was partially shot in Latvia taking advantage of the local tax credit system.

International joint ventures are form of co-productions where the obligations of producers are not determined 5

by international treaties, but agreements between international producers. Selznick (2008) has argued that often these agreements are written from the standpoint of US (major) producers who therefore establish their creative and financial control over the international co-production.

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between co-producers, and the work of Hoskins et al. in Canadian-European context (1993,

1997) has been attributed to widely-cited and canonical status in the research of co-

productions. For example, a 1997 study on Canadian-French co-productions highlighted the

relative importance of economic benefits over creative collaboration as “the most important

benefit for producers in both Canada and Europe is pooling of financial resources—clearly

related to financial goals—but the area of strongest success is creative/artistic

performance” (Hoskins et al. 1997, 135). Further benefits that are brought forward by co-

productions as Hoskins et al. argue in their previous work (1993) include the pooling of

financial resources, access to foreign governments incentives and subsidies, access to a

partner’s market, access to third country markets, learning from partner, risk reduction,

cheaper inputs in the partner’s country, and desired foreign locations. (Hoskins and McFadyen

1993). These benefits can be also viewed in an interconnected relationship with national film

industries (and thus the discourses previously described) as the benefits provided to

international producers seeking suitable conditions for their productions go often hand-in-

hand with policies promoting the development of national or regional film industries.

Examples of these include diverse “soft money” programs and tax breaks set by governments,

but also creation of location promotion organizations such as film commissions that market

their locales internationally, as well as coordinating with international productions in their

native countries.

Highly authoritative and unique work on the financial discourse of co-productions is

done by Morawetz et al (2007) who draw focus on the high risk nature of current film and

media industries, but also interlink it closely to the emergence of various financial incentives

and tax break measures as an indication of the rise of the notion of the “new or creative

economy” in the EU context, and the rise of various “soft money” incentives globally. The

authors argue that since historically the EU has been fragmented and that the countries lack

substantial financial resources in the entertainment industry, the risk distribution strategy is

based on state or EU level subsidies which “enable producers who structure projects as co-

!23

production’s [sic] … ‘stack’ these ‘soft money’ sources together across borders, to leverage

their budgets further” (Morawetz et al. 2007, 427). However, since this strategy led to the

production of questionable quality “Europuddings” or films put together across territories for

the sole purpose of acquiring financing , a change took place from the 6

“protection of natural culture” paradigm into a “build a local industry” strategy that celebrates the film industry “creating ‘clean’ knowledge-intensive jobs and bringing additional benefits to the economy in the form of multiplier effects, audio-visual trade, and spin off benefits in the terms of tourism and image” (ibid., 428). !!

This rapid shift from fostering a national media economy into a paradigm of creative or

cultural industries also had global implications. As Garnham (2005) argues in reference to

Caves (2000), the cultural and creative economies paradigm has emerged in policy and political

decision making bodies as a post-Fordist alternative to account for the change of capitalism in

the contemporary information societies where “the cultural industries are seen as complex

value chains where profit is extracted at key nodes in the chain through control of production

investment and distribution and the key

“‘creative’ labor is exploited not… through the wage bargain, but through contracts determining the distribution of profits to various rights holders.” (Garnham 2005, 20) It furthermore stipulates that in the age where profits in traditional manufacturing sectors have stalled, “creative industries are the key new growth sector of the economy, both nationally and globally, and thus, against a background of manufacturing sector decline, they are the key source of future employment growth and export earnings” (ibid., 25) !

Within the creative economy, sustained financial discourse of film productions

Morawetz et al. distinguish three broad types of co-productions (see Table 1). The first type, a

“true love” co-production, is motivated by the creative elements of film which are reliant on

transnational creative collaboration (Morawetz et al. 2007, 426). The best example of “true

love” collaboration is critically hailed Japanese-UK production Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence

helmed by Nagisa Oshima, the story of the relationship of WWII British POWs and their

Japanese captors, and featured extensive Japanese-British collaboration including the

For extended discussion on “Europuddings” and the film industry dynamics in the EU see Finney (2010).6

!24

involvement of David Bowie and the actor-composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. A more recent

example includes the first Japanese-Indonesian co-production Killers (2014) directed by

Indonesian duo The Mo Brothers. The film was conceived due to co-director Timo Tjahanto’s

long time dream of producing a film in Japan, which attracted the interest of major Japanese

studio Nikkatsu that helped to develop the screenplay and prepare the project. Spanning

locations from Jakarta to Tokyo, the serial killer thriller presented a mixed Japanese-

Indonesian cast and crew, as well as dialogue in three languages. While experiencing some

difficulties in translating different cultural connotations to the lead actors, the film, which

premiered at the reputable Sundance Film Festival, is considered a success for the studio

(Saluveer 2014d).

The second type of co-productions that Morawetz et al. put forward are industry driven

productions or “marriage of convenience” films, driven by the search for international

finance (ibid., 426). As authors note these are low and medium budget films that adjust

creative elements to pool resources for variety of countries for their completion. Most film

projects entering co-production markets in East Asia, can be considered “marriage of

convenience” films since the larger picture that emerges from analyzing film market prospects

reveals that attracting finances to art house films in the region is difficult. Thus the main goal

in co-production markets becomes seeking financiers, co-funders, or sales agents to complete

the production . 7

The third and final type of co-production is driven exclusively by international capital

(ibid., 426). These films are thus predominately high budget, high concept, studio blockbuster

films that aim to exploit various international tax incentives, government support schemes and

so on. Examples here include Hollywood blockbusters Iron Man 3, Looper, Man of Tai Chi, and

Pacific Rim that have all benefitted from major Chinese investments in recent years. The

capital-based collaboration between Chinese and US media industries has led to the creation

of a 1.27 billion USD ChinaWood film and media hub whose goals is “to service the expected

An extended discussion of the project market dynamics is provided in Chapter 5.7

!25

increase in Sino-foreign co-productions—offering financing, production services and

distribution and marketing support” along with an 800 million USD production fund

(Shackleton 2012b).

The creative industries paradigm is also visible elsewhere in East Asian context. For

example, South Korea has in recent years embarked on a combined strategy of promoting the

services of its film industry, and its locations as tourism destinations via the 30% cash rebate

program for “foreign audio-visual works production expenditure incurred for goods and

services in Korea” as long as the “ work promotes tourism and creates revenues” and

“contributes to the Korean film industry” (KOFIC 2014b). Also as revealed to the author, the

South Korean film policy organization KOFIC has been actively promoting the export of the

country’s professional services, principally to China, not only due to cultural affinities, but also

to the over-saturation of the domestic market, as well as a relative lack of professionals who

are currently in high demand in the Chinese entertainment sector (Saluveer 2014k). South

Korean media corporation Showbox/Mediaplex Entertainment distributed sports blockbuster

Mr. Go which featured a Chinese-speaking leading actress in exchange for access to 5 million

USD capital provided by PRC’s leading film and distribution conglomerate Huayi Brothers

that guaranteed the film a “10,000-screen release across China in summer 2013 and wide

releases in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan” (Shackleton 2012a). South Korean post-

production company Dexter, that provided effects for the latter, subsequently also played an

active role in Chinese language films as well, by opening a branch in Beijing to produce special

effects for Tsui Hark’s big budget fantasy epic, and a Chinese-Hong Kong co-production

Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon (Frater 2013).

To conclude this discussion of the financial business discourse of co-productions, it can

be argued that in the globalizing entertainment industry, creative aspects of film collaboration

go hand-in-hand, and are often superseded, if not repressed by financial considerations and

the pooling of international capital and resources, especially in the case of blockbuster

productions. As Morawetz et al. rather critically remark, while various subsidy and incentive

!26

systems are usually set in place with the goal of helping local, regional or national film

industries, in the European context, the “film support policy that was originally intended to

counter Hollywood hegemony was now actively subsidizing foreign productions (co-

productions or US ‘runway’ productions) to create jobs” (Morawetz et al. 2007, 430). Whereas

the big budget collaboration in East Asia has not yet yielded an equally controversial impact,

criticisms have been raised in connection to the various limitations and restrictions brought on

by Hollywood productions that have been attracted to locations for economic incentives, such

as the recent production of Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron which halted the critical

infrastructure in Seoul for several days (Park and Lee 2014).

!2.5 The cultural studies discourse: co-production as technology of assemblage

As demonstrated in the previous sections of this chapter, most academic discourses on

co-production follow legal or economic perspective. In contrast, a rare attempt to propose a

cultural studies based approach bringing together the a theorization on the nature of co-

production activity with the case studies and inquiry of the history and aspects of film

industry practices in Japan, Hong Kong and China has been put forward by the pioneering

work of DeBoer (2014).

DeBoer proposes to view co-productions in East Asia as a technology of assemblage, in

order to account for the phenomenon’s multifaceted nature that embeds processes of capital,

production as well as place, both geographical and imaginary, as

“co-production’s significance also lay in its function as a technology—that is, as a mode of production that potentiated new forms of encounter, expression, and, ultimately, identity for the region” (DeBoer 2014, 220).

The author advocates that in contrast to the European frame of reference, co-

productions in the East Asian context are influenced to a great degree by the (ongoing)

political legacy of Cold War tensions, media capitalism in the wave of post-1990s

globalization of regional film and television production, the associated rapid modernization

!27

of production practices and technology, and lastly the region’s countries’ economic progress

with the desire for capitalist (post) modernity and prosperity (ibid). For DeBoer, the impact of

these elements should not be viewed separately, but as a complex sociocultural interplay in

which co-production activities are negotiated as

“technology of production is only fruitful if our broader understanding of technology itself is adequately dynamic, able to account for the tensions that can exist among the competing locations, histories, imaginaries, and practices that make up cross-border collaborative production” (DeBoer 2014, 112). !

In this regard DeBoer follows closely the arguments of Ahn (2011) that also advocate for a

dynamic and interdisciplinary approach for analyzing film festivals and markets.

The exact need to account for the dynamic nature of transnational film and media

collaboration and its interdependence on flows of capital, culture and location, and power

leads the author to the definition of co-production as a technology of assemblage:

“The assemblages that make up East Asian co-production incorporate a range of differently scaled production practices—film and media imaginaries, promotional and production practices, and industry mandates and aspirations. These practices work to stake out particular and dynamic senses of regional place—senses of the region that are further negotiated across relations of competition among its media capitals… [it] brings to view the ever-changing and sometimes unpredictable assemblages and power relations that can make up regional film and media” (DeBoer 2014, 121). !

It is worthwhile to underline, that DeBoer’s contextualization relies strongly on the

importance of place and regionalization in understanding transnational film and media

practices in East Asia. In doing so, her work also relates to the existing scholarship of the East

Asian media space put forward by Iwabuchi et al., Curtin’s (1997) arguments for media capitals

as well as Appadurai’s classic notion of transnational flows of people, capital, media and

culture. By synthesizing the previous studies of various authors, she puts forward a concept

of techno-regionalization that drives co-productions and media collaboration in the region

instead of audiences or consumers (Iwabuchi), accumulation of capital to locales (Curtin) or

transnational flows (Appadurai) with three emerging narratives of futurism, localism and

proximity.

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!2.6 Co-production and narratives of regionalization: futurism, localism, and proximity

The first narrative of co-productions concerns futurism “as new technologies of Asian

production transcend a regional past fragmented and limited by national boundaries” (DeBoer

2014, 199) Whereas DeBoer puts forward an example of the general desire for transnational

collaboration in East Asia, a more practical example here can be seen in the region’s countries’

attempts to rapidly modernize their filmmaking infrastructures in relation to the major

Hollywood system in order to facilitate greater profits from more advanced means of

production and dissemination. A classic example of media futurism in there region is the

widely documented 1994 “Jurassic Park proposal” of the Advisory Board on Science and

Technology of South Korea, that drew a parallel that the box office of the American

blockbuster was equivalent to the export of 1.5 million Hyundai cars, followed by a suggestion

to consider the development of the media and entertainment sector as a national priority

following the American globalization model (Shim 2005, 242). The following years not only

marked rapid technological advances in production technology, but also modernization in

financing and distribution based on Hollywood standards, including a corporate-driven

domestic market, a heavy dependence of digitalized multiplex cinema exhibition (with the last

in-country projector changed to digital in 2013), as well as a reliance on American blockbuster

formats for domestic success, not to mention recent presidential meetings to urge

international cooperation (H.-W. Lee 2013). Close ties between Korean and US industries have

also sparked attempts by US companies to invest in Korean films—such as Na Hong-Jin’s

2008 thriller The Yellow Sea funded jointly by domestic major ShowBox/Mediaplex and Fox

International Pictures—but also attempts by directors to set foot in Hollywood such as Park

Chan Wook and Kim Jiwoon with their American debuts Stoker staring Nicole Kidman, and

The Last Stand starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (M. Lee 2011). Perhaps the most staggering

example of South-Korea’s ties to Hollywood has come in the form of the recent production

of Marvel’s blockbuster Avengers: Age of Ultron on location in Seoul resulting in a multinational

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memorandum of understanding between Marvel Studios, the Korea Tourism Organization

(KTO), KOFIC, Seoul Film Commission (SFC), Gyeonggi Film Commission (GFC) and

Goyang Industry Promotion Agency (GIPA), but also set terms defining “‘South Korea’ as “a

high-tech, modern country” while avoiding portraying the country in “any negative manner…

all towards cooperating to promote Korea as a tourist destination” (Noh 2014).

An equally strong underlying current of futurist thought can be also seen in the complex

Sino-Hollywood media relations recently sparked by Hollywood’s establishment of studio

branches in Beijing to develop Chinese language content, and also in corresponding trend of

Chinese corporate investment into international English language co-productions such as

Keanu Reeve’s directorial debut The Man of Tai Chi or sci-fi thriller Looper featuring Chinese

actress Xu Qing alongside American stars Joseph Gordon-Lewitt and Bruce Willis (Shackleton

2012b). As Hollywood must approach China on the former’s terms, agreements have been

struck between corporations on both sides. For example, “Shanghai Media Group, China's

second biggest media group, signed a multi-year deal with Walt Disney Studios to co-develop

Disney-branded movies for China and elsewhere, while Huayi Brothers is planning to inject

up to $150 million into former Warner Bros' chief Jeff Robinov's Studio 8” (Coonan 2014).

Finally, China’s futurist ambitions modernize its production structures based on the

Hollywood model can also be witnessed in the high profile takeovers of several major players

in the knowledge and technology intensive post-production sector, as in the buyout of one of

Hollywood’s leading visual effects companies Digital Domain which produced effects for

blockbusters including Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean to name a few. Top level Chinese

executives, such as China Film Co-production Corporation president Zhang Xun have also

publicly encouraged film industry cooperation despite political tensions “so that American and

Chinese movie makers can make movies that will take the breath of the whole world

away” (Shackleton 2012b; Hazelton 2013).

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!To return to DeBoer, the second technoregionalist narrative concerns localism that posits

co-productions vis-a-vis cultural homogenizations in the region

“as debates surrounding co-[sic], on one hand, focus on how they acquiesce to the hegemonies of global culture, which paper over the lived and real or “local” experiences of the region in their collusion with multinational capital” (DeBoer 2014, 204). !

In discussion of the international film industry, aspects of localism could be seen in

somewhat dichotomous attempts to both embrace and curb the influence of multinational

entertainment capital in the region through co-productions. Examples of this dichotomy

include the aforementioned The Yellow Sea in South Korea, or Man of Tai Chi in China, which

combine local talent with international investments, but also fall victim to protectionist

strategies such as screen quotas or import restrictions in place to limit the foreign influence

within their production markets.

Moreover, mainland China and Japan are considered Hollywood’s major markets taking

into account that James Cameron’s Titanic 3D amassed more than 50% of its international box

office from mainland China, or that Disney’s 2014 animated feature film Frozen drew more

than 8 million viewers in Japan within six months. The latter raised concerns whether the

Disney’s success would even surpass the notable 120 million USD financial achievement of

revered animator Hayao Miyazaki’s retirement feature The Wind Rises (Blair 2014; Shackleton

2010). Taking into account the vast potential of the box office numbers in the examples

above, it becomes clear that Hollywood studios are keen to reach East Asian markets through

various localization activities whether in the form of local language production or by

promoting content in a dubbed (thus localized) form. Other localization practices include the

creation of corporate branches or international joint ventures. The goal of “Western

companies such as DreamWorks, Fox, Legendary, Relativity and Village Roadshow [is] to

establish either corporate structures in China or active slates of co-production

projects” (ibid.).

!31

Localism regarding co-productions and film industry development in East Asia can be

also seen from a protectionist point of view, with the aim of protecting local markets from

the influence of foreign films. But as noted previously, these strategies have resulted in

somewhat contradictory outcomes where aspirations for a modernized, Hollywood-esque

industry model go hand-in-hand with a highly-regulated domestic media production and

dissemination system. The regulations are primarily based on the import limitations on foreign

media products, such as in the case of the South Korean screen quota system that was present

in 2000s. Also ongoing Chinese restrictions allow for only 34 foreign titles to be screened per

year including both major studio and art house titles, with hopes of easing restrictions by 2017

in connection with the recent Chinese WTO agreement (Coonan 2014). Despite these

seemingly effective barriers, the dynamics of market capitalism driven futurism and

protectionism are rather fluid. As Gao (2009) explains, the aspirations between Hollywood

and Chinese film policy do not differ to a great degree, as “while paying lip service to the

cultural imperative of local film, the Chinese government actually sets its eyes on the

economic rewards—consolidated, state-owned Chinese film studios serve as another venue to

its ambition of becoming a major economic power in the global market.” (Gao 2009)

The third and final technoregionalist narrative concerns proximity as “the ever-closer

cultural affinity among the East Asian industries… becomes an explanation, and at times a

motivator, for why and how a co-production might be produced and even desired.” (DeBoer

2014, 237) Throughout her work, DeBoer provides various examples of how the proximity

and (imagined) locale of Asia has provided an impetus for co-production and film industry

collaboration in the region. The attraction to collaborate on the basis of perceived cultural

affinity is witnessed by the author both in the cases major and independent productions, with

examples being the 2006 Hong Kong-Chinese big budget martial arts epic Battle of Wits,

originally based on a Japanese manga, or a 2008 Japanese-Taiwanese independent co-

production Tea Fight drawing inspiration from a Sung era Chinese story.

From a broader perspective,cultural proximity, and the related notion of East Asia as an

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produced community or geography is echoed at the sites of film festivals and co-production

markets in the region that aim to channel East Asian content to worldwide professionals and

culturally proximate audiences as well. The produced category of Asian cinema can be

witnessed in all major film festivals in the region: The Hong Kong International Film Festival,

The Tokyo International Film Festival, and Busan International Film Festival, which feature

specialized sections for Asian cinema such as “Pan-Chinese Cinema” (Hong Kong), “Asian

Future” (Tokyo), and “New Currents” (Busan). Especially noteworthy example of an event

constructing Asia as an produced geography is the Asian Film Awards gala established in

2007. The gala spectacle, based on the Academy Awards format, claims to be “the only

platform in the world that brings together the best cinematic talents of Asia, drawing film fans

and professionals from all across the globe”(Asian 2014). In 2014, the gala gained even greater

prominence and forged a sense of even greater regional proximity by having the main

organizer, the Hong Kong Film Festival, to include Busan and Tokyo festivals in the

organization committee in order to “ensure a broader reach across Asia, and reflect the film

industries, trends and audience tastes in the region” (Shackleton 2014).

The notion of a relatively visible East Asian identity developed and maintained in relation

to media production and consumption, rising from the interplay of the narratives of futurism,

localism, and proximity voiced through regional co-productions, can be closely interrelated to

the long lasting, and widely acknowledged discourse of East Asian media space. Advocating

the construction of East Asia through the viewpoint of the reception of various media such

as television dramas or popular music, some studies have also put forward an examination of

the creation of regional identity from the perspective of the industries as well (see Shim2005,

Huang 2011). For example, Chua (2004) has noted that the interplay of various cultural, social,

economical and political factors can indeed be seen as constructing a sense of East Asia, since

“flows of finance, production personnel and consumers across linguistic and national

boundaries in East Asian locations give substance to the concept of East Asia Popular

Culture” (B. H. Chua 2004, 203). Film festivals, and co-production markets become sites of

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cultural economy where the flows Chua mentions congregate and interact, thus have the

potential to interact with the media space through various activities: nurturing recognized

filmmakers through co-production, highlighting regional stars or talents on red carpets and in

their media mix, or showcasing films with popular appeal. Considering that at a publicity level

all of the major regional festivals—Busan, Hong Kong, and Tokyo—brand themselves and

their program selections as part of an Asian filmmaking identity, the applicability of the East

Asian media space framework to the regional film production and exhibition network calls for

further examination. Specifically, and in the context of this study the question of to which

degree the East Asian media space framework is valid in the context of co-production

markets and their host festivals is raised.

The following chapter will present a literature review of this theoretical framework by

examining its historical background, the central dichotomies of hybridity-localization, cultural

proximity—cultural distance, re-entering and de-centering of cultural flows. The chapter also

links these dichotomies with Curtin’s (2003, 2007) framework of media capitals, discussing the

theories link to the present festival network and structure in the region.

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!CHAPTER 3: EAST ASIA, MEDIA SPACE AND REGIONALIZATION !

!

Figure 4. The Hong Kong Filmart film and content market, the main industry event for Chinese language cinema. Copyright & printed with the permission of Hong Kong Film Financing Forum. !3.1 Historical and theoretical context

Although the core notion of the concept of East Asia as a homogenous region has been

contested by some scholars, such as Lee (2011) who remarked on the “the inherent instability

and contingence of the very ‘idea’ of East Asia and its multifaceted cinematic traditions and

cultural imaginations,” other scholars have sought theoretic patterns and discourses applicable

to the whole region since the mid-1990s (V. P. Y. Lee 2011, 5). Surprisingly, the majority of

studies in this field have been carried out by a limited number of theorists. Prominent among

these studies are Koichi Iwabuchi’s pioneering works on the dichotomies of decentralization,

decentralization and cultural proximity, and cultural odorlessness (mukokuseki) (1994, 1998,

2002, 2004, 2008), in the context of popular media flows between Japan, Taiwan and South

Korea. An equally important position has been assumed by Ben-Huat Chua in the context of

!35

the Chinese-speaking territories of the PRC, Singapore and Taiwan. Chua has also critically

theorized about the nature of East Asian popular culture, and the possibility of a pan-Asian

identity of an audience (2004, 2008, 2012). Other scholars, including Shim, Cho, Huang, Ahn,

Tang, Hayashi et al., have closely scrutinized topics within the larger paradigm of East Asian

cultural and media studies, such as the changes in domestic and national context, the increase

of Korean popular contents in East Asia, the Korean wave (hallyu), the reception of television

drama across cultures, as well as the role of institutions, such as film festivals, in creating and

developing a regional cultural identity.

Chua suggested in an early conceptualization (2004) that East Asian popular culture is best

analyzed by the frameworks of production, consumption and distribution— a thought which

has significance in the discussion of regional co-productions and film festivals (B. H. Chua

2004). This chapter will employ a similar structure, based primarily on the discussions by Chua

and Iwabuchi, by first giving an overview of the structural factors behind the emergence of

the notion of East Asian popular culture and audiences as relatively coherent in spatial

formation. It will follow with a discussion of the framework of dichotomies of production

and reception described by Iwabuchi (1998, 2002, 2008, 2010). Finally, the chapter will briefly

touch on the aspects of locale and the role of distribution and exhibition in generating media

capital for regional festival cities, drawing attention to works by Curtin (2007) and

Ahn (2011, 2012). Furthermore, it will examine the three aforementioned discourses: the

complex interplay of production, consumption and distribution in relation to the production

East Asian media landscape and its audiences. As Iwabuchi noted,

“media cultures have connected East Asia in new, dialogic manners: dialogic, not in the sense of actually meeting in person to talk to each other, but in the sense of rethinking one’s own life, society and culture as well as socio-historically constructed relations and perceptions with others” (Iwabuchi 2010, 201). !

First, the historical contexts and reasons that paved the way for the emergence of East Asian

popular culture and audiences to the academic discussion must be examined. Although widely

discussed, a concise agreement between scholars on the definition of East Asian popular

!36

culture has not yet emerged. Instead, academics have elaborated the specific conditions and

contexts in which certain forms of culture have been produced. For example, Erni (2008) is

concerned about the realpolitik of East Asian cultural spaces, “the real spaces and processes in

political channels across various dominant imaginations about “Asia’s” today – nationalist,

regionalist, globalist “Asias” – that attempt to manipulate and control the media.” (Erni and

Chua 2008, 1)

In contrast, Berry and Liscutin (2009) are concerned with the dynamics between hybrid

identities, modernity and globalization that form the regions as “the contemporary NorthEast

Asian postcolonial experience is shaped by regionally informed proliferations of national

cultural identity and national configurations of institutional modernity.” (Berry, Liscutin, and

Mackintosh 2009, 9)

An interesting attempt toward methodological clarity is the early work of Chua who

proposed that the phenomenon stands for “the development, production, exchange, flow and

consumption of popular cultural products between the People’s Republic of China (PRC),

Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore”(B. H. Chua 2004). Chua claims here,

and later elsewhere (see 2008 and 2012 respectively), that due to the intense and short-lived

nature of cultural commodities, theoretical analysis should address all three levels, from

production to consumption, as one entity. The author revisited this argument later, in the

rather canonical “East Asian Popular Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave” (2008), and most

recently in “Structure, Audience and Power in East Asian Popular Culture” (2012). While

Chua’s major arguments have remained similar to his original thesis, the latest elaboration by

the author has also come to include the criticality of transnational cultural flows. Specifically,

Chua draws links between regional film industries and their interdependence from complex

transnational flows, since “the thick and intensifying traffic of finance, production personnel,

products, and consumers across regional, linguistic, and national boundaries lends substance

to the concept of East Asian pop culture as a loosely-integrated network of regional media

industries and related practices which exceed any framing that focuses on a particular location,

!37

as in the case of a national cinema or a particular auteur.” (B. H. Chua 2012, 384)

Chua argues in detail throughout the work that the notion of East Asian popular culture

appeared due to the complex interaction of three broad aspects. First, the attempts of the

PRC, and also Singapore to a lesser degree during later years of Cold War, to establish an

Asian regional identity based on Confucian values vis-a-vis increasing Americanization—still

echoed years later in the dualistic notion that “American liberalism is seen by some as

questioning the conservatism of Asians and therefore, is to be encouraged, while others cast it

as culturally and morally ‘corrosive’ of ‘wholesome’ Asian values” (B. H. Chua 2012, 356).

Second, a key role was also played by technological advancements in communication and

broadcasting technologies such as cable and satellite networks (including the widely

documented and researched impact of Star TV in the region) that suddenly needed a vast

amount of readily available, cheap, localized content capable of being broadcast in a variety 8

of territories and languages. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the post-cold war

liberalization of the media landscape in East Asia acted as the backdrop for enabling the rapid

influx of content across territories (ibid.). Most importantly, that liberalization was driven by

the 1993 lifting of the ban on the importation of Japanese media products to Taiwan, the

1993/1995 “Jurassic Park” strategy to consider media and contents as a major export strategy

in South Korea , and finally, the 1998 abolishment of restrictions on the import of Japanese 9

media to South Korea, although, as anecdotal evidence, Shim and others have noted that there

existed a de facto black market of Japanese content prior to the abolishment of the import

restraints (Shim 2005, 2006).

All these factors were partly caused and driven by the forces of globalization and

transnationalization that dramatically exploded after the end of the Cold War. Globalization in

its various forms—from the manifestation of capitalist production systems to the Western/

See Iwabuchi (1998), Lim (2008), and Shim (2008) for the discussion of television networks in the region.8

Shim (2005, 2006, 2008) has noted that South Korea’s rapid entry to East Asian media landscape was driven by 9

the remark of Presidential Advisory board who put forward that the profits generated by the box office success of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) were equal to the sales of 1.5 million Hyundai cars. This widely cited fact has been evaluated as a crucial milestone in the subsequent rise of the so called “Korean wave”.

!38

American (media) hegemony, to the transnational ambitions of the East Asian nation states—

became and remains a central concept against which the theories and deliberations of East

Asian popular culture and audiences have developed as both an outcome and an opposing

force. For Lim (2008), “media globalization… fosters new conditions for the interplay

between local cultures and global markets in popular media products and services as never

seen before”, whereas Chua (2012) has underlined the centrality of global capitalism in the

region “where economic interest has been realized through the production of culture as

commodity.” (B. H. Chua 2012, 413) (Lim 2008, 33)

Berry et al (2009), have viewed the relationship between the local and global in East Asia

in more positive terms, noting that “the region helps us to approach the key concepts of the

“global” and the “local” not in dichotomous opposition but as an ongoing cultural

negotiation” (Berry, Liscutin, and Mackintosh 2009, 8). Iwabuchi (2008) also agrees that “the

proliferation of modernities in the world does not just construct a milieu in which ‘the Rest’

plays a significant role in media globalization”, whereas Erni posits that within these flows

between the global and the regional “there are many Asias not just in terms of geopolitical

spaces but also in relation to gender and other cultural spaces” (Erni and Chua 2008, 20).

It is also important to acknowledge that engagement with the studies of East Asian

popular culture, and thus advocating for a cultural identity in East Asia has emerged as

counteraction against the Orientalist discourse in area studies that had prevailed until the

mid-1990s. Morley and Robins critically examined, as early as in 1995, the techno-Orientalist

sentiments in the West that had emerged due to the fears of a rapidly rising Asia in the 1980s

(Robins 2002). Dutton (2009) has also associated the emergence of East Asian popular culture

research as an identity building strategy against Western dominant forms of theoretical

analysis “by showing that the difference of non-Western cultures speaks not just to questions

of “local diversity” but to the limits, silences, and occlusions of Western forms of reason that

cannot see much less address the radical differences of the nonWest” (Dutton 2009)

In this light, early theoretical attempts to analyze the popularity of East Asian cultural

!39

flows, and therefore, to argue for a sense of joint regional identity are driven by a pressing

sense of “legitimization” vis-as-vis the West. Iwabuchi in his pioneering and seminal essay

“Marketing “Japan”: Japanese cultural presence under a global gaze” (1998) advocated that the

popularity of Japanese cultural products such as consumer technologies, comics, cartoons and

computer video games depended, at the time, on their “culturally odorless” nature by using 10

“the term 'cultural odour' to focus on the way in which the cultural presence of a country of

origin and images or ideas of its way of life are positively associated with a particular product

in the consumption process” (Iwabuchi 1998, 166). In doing so, Iwabuchi further claimed that

Japan had acted as an intermediary or interface of the West to East Asia since it had absorbed,

hybridized and glocalized a variety of Western cultural forms (ibid). Similar arguments have

been also put forward by other scholars, such as Shim (2006) who noted the presence of

Western elements in another popular wave of East Asian popular culture—the so called

Korean wave or hallyu, that had taken the lead over Japan since the change of the millennia. By

that time, the Korean film industry had extensively remodeled itself following the Hollywood

financing, development and production structure, whereas K-Pop bands adopted Western

song formats and Japanese talent management systems (Shim 2006). The question of how to

assess the impact of transnational flows to regional media production, leads to the next

section of this chapter which presents a discussion on the dichotomies of East Asian media

space.

!

With that argument Iwabuchi posits himself against the culturally technoorientalist sentiments of the period 10

such as the the entry of Sony to Hollywood in early 1990s documented by Morley and Robins (1995).

!40

!3.2 Dichotomies of East Asian media flows

!

Figure 5. South Korean blockbuster The Thieves (2012) shot on location in Hong Kong, Macau, and South Korea. The all-star Korean cast also featured Hong Kong superstar Simon Yam and Malaysian actress-singer Angelica Lee in the leading roles. Copyright & printed with permission from Showbox/Mediaplex. !If the theorization of East Asian cultural identity emerged against the backdrop of increasing

globalization and transnational flows, and the Orientalist discourse prevalent in the mid-1990s,

then the question arises of how theorists have conceptualized the flows of culture and media

within the region. The preeminent position in the study of flows of popular culture in the

region has yet again been undertaken by Chua and Iwabuchi who propose a framework of

conceptual dichotomies that is applicable for the production and reception of East Asian

popular media products. Both authors describe, at the broadest level, the cultural flows

through pairs of concepts:

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hybridity-glocalization, cultural proximity-cultural distance (cultural nostalgia), and finally,

decentralization-recentralization (Chua 2004, 2008, 2012, Iwabuchi 1998, 2002, 2008, 2010).

The first concept, hybridity, accounts for the process by which globally or transnationally

transmitted (media) products are interpreted by local audiences by ascribing everyday

meanings to them, and “meanings are negotiated locally, resulting in the creation products that

are more than mere copies” (Berry, Liscutin, and Mackintosh 2009, 646). Shim (2006) adds

that hybridity can be viewed as a set of “practices of cultural and performative expression…

locals appropriate global goods, conventions and styles, including music, cuisine, cinema,

fashion and so on, and inscribe their everyday meaning into them” (Shim 2006, 27). This

negotiation within the everyday, the interplay of global and local, is observable in the case of

many forms of East Asian popular culture, such as the utilization of inherently Western media

formats and structures for film, television and popular music production. For example, big

budget film productions across the region are increasingly relying on Hollywood-sequel genre

conventions and plots, such as the 2012 Korean heist blockbuster The Thieves which amassed

more than 10 million admissions in its home country, and is widely noted to have parallels

with Steven Sodebergh’s Oceans’ Eleven franchise “with its impressive choreographed set-pieces

and compelling script, together with a smartly chosen ensemble cast that includes a number

of iconic names from across Asia” (Bechervaise 2012). The increasing prominence of gala

screenings with international stars at the region’s media hubs signal the relevance of a

predominantly US media power and hybridization strategies within the region, perhaps the

best example being the red carpet screening of Jack Reacher in Busan where the “the city’s

mayor Hur Nam-shik awarded honorary citizenship to Tom Cruise, Christopher MacQuarrie

and Rosamund Pike” (Noh 2013a).

In connection with the previous argument, hybridity also yields a close connection to the

domestication of US media formats within the region via the notion of “strategic hybridism.”

Huang (2011) argues strategic hybridism to be especially present in case of Japan which has a

long history of reworking and reinterpreting American formats, and then exporting that

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particular form of modernity to other East Asian countries as Yoshimi (2003) has widely

discussed elsewhere.5 Although Iwabuchi and Huang mostly claimed Japan’s central role in

facilitating the hybridization of US media formats “imitated by other Asian countries, like

South Korea” it can be argued here that within the decade after the author’s arguments, the

US media presence within the region, if not the dominance of US films in the box office,

various joint ventures and location use, has gone relatively unchallenged (Huang 2011, 4).

Cho (2011), in considering the context of the export of South Korean media products to

the region, also agrees to the centrality of American pop culture in shaping regional cultural

flows and identity. The author argues that the resulting East Asian cultural identity could

described by “double inscription” that “refers to the current saturation of Asian pop culture

and everyday life in general with American pop culture; in turn, American pop culture is

integrated into the pop culture of economically developed Asian countries” (Cho 2011, 395).

This notion yet again directs attention to the prevalence of hybrid forms of production

practices and formats both in television and feature films within the region, as several

interviewees pointed out that predominantly regional audiences are keen to see local films or

Hollywood films, not Asian films (Saluveer 2014g; Saluveer 2014b). However, as Shim (2005)

notes elsewhere, the adoption of global formats and conventions should not be addressed

exclusively as limiting, since "the postcolonial perspective of hybridity challenges and revises

binary structures of opposition, often found in the relations posited to exist between the

Third and First Worlds, or those of the Marxist and the capitalist; it attempts to open up a

third, in-between space” (Shim 2005, 237). Huang (2011) also sees hybridization in a positive

light arguing for its capacity to resist in the “face of cultural invasion” and, in fact, as a

strategy to encourage local innovation. In this respect, East Asian culture industries might

have developed a competitive advantage by being able to facilitate international formats, while

also preserving distinctly regional contents (Huang 2011, 4).

!

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! Figure 6. Indonesian martial arts film The Raid 2: Berandal, directed by Welsh director Gareth Evans, and funded by Los Angeles based production and international sales company XYZ Films was one of the most anticipated films of Sundance Film Festival 2014. Copyright & printed with the permission of PT Merantau & XYZ Films. !The recent Indonesian martial arts film The Raid (2011), and its sequel The Raid 2: Berandal

(2014), both helmed by Welsh director Gareth Evans, testify to the potential of hybrid forms

of entertainment in achieving success locally and in traveling internationally. Implementing a

relatively straightforward plot of an undercover SWAT team member, played by Indonesian

martial arts champion Iko Uwais, the original film plotted Uwais against a gang of drug

dealers within a housing complex. Surprisingly, the films’ visual energy and high quality action

sequences not only helped to secure the title worldwide distribution by major player Sony

Classics, but also helped facilitate a sales deal for an upcoming Hollywood remake.

Furthermore, the sequel Berandal was one of the most anticipated titles screening at the 2014

edition of the Sundance Film Festival(Grierson 2014).

In addition to the last example, South Korea’s most expensive film to date, Snowpiercer—a

post apocalyptic thriller examining the consequences of a struggle for freedom within the

confines of a train that is home to last remains of humankind briefly introduced in Chapter 1

—can be seen as an example of transnational hybridity between East Asian and international

film industries. Based on the French science fiction novel Le Transperceneige, the English

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language debut of acclaimed Korean director Bong Joon Ho was shot with an international

production crew in the Czech Republic Barrandov Studios and starred international superstars

Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, alongside Korean stars Song Kang Ho and Ah-Sung

Ko in the leads (Noh 2013b). Represented internationally by South Korea’s largest

entertainment corporation, CJ Entertainment, and The Weinstein Company, and despite a

controversy concerning the film’s edit for international audiences (see ibid.) Snowpiercer’s

international cast, crew and shooting locations raise important questions not only about

hybridity but also about the film’s nationality in the current interconnected network of

financing, production and distribution.

The opposing concept to hybridity is the process of “glocalization” or “global

localization”, where transnational or regional players utilize elements of local culture mixed

into marketing “to tailor goods and services to the taste of a particular market… to connect

their commodities with local communities” (Huang 2011, 4). If hybridization mostly lies

within the realm of the the audience and media reception, then in contrast, by employing

glocalization, media producers actively seek to incorporate indigenous elements to their

commodities making them more accessible to specific target markets. Glocalization strategies

might entail employing local pop songs or locales in television dramas or films (see Cho 2012),

filming co-productions using talent spanning territories or even dubbing to mediate and

translate culturally alien concepts to local audiences (Iwabuchi and Chua 2008; Huang 2011).

Regarding dubbing, Iwabuchi (1998) has further claimed that whereas glocalization was

pioneered initially Japanese media companies such as Sony or Studio Ghibli, widely known to

require dubbing into the local languages of distribution territories, the strategy is, by its nature,

not exclusively Japanese, but a global phenomenon since “cultural borrowing, appropriation,

hybridization and indigenization are… common practices in the global cultural

flow” (Iwabuchi 1998, 168). Most recently (2010), the author also argued that globalizing

strategies have expanded to such a degree that they form a network that binds Asia together

with Europe and the US in a complex flows of transnational production.

!45

Examples of this expanding network globalization are most visible in two broad areas in

East Asia: first, by utilizing the region’s various locales as film sets, and second, through the

crossover of regional film stars and directing talent to work in the Western film and media

sector, primarily in Hollywood. Featuring Asian locales in international blockbusters has a

relatively long history. Several films in James Bond franchise shot on location in Hong Kong

and Macau.6 If previously Asian sets were primarily featured for their exotic scenery, then

recent glocalisation strategies have witnessed the shift towards product placement agreements

for East Asian locales and businesses to be featured in major blockbusters for promotional or

tourism inducing purposes. For example, the 2012 US science fiction film Looper featured

mainland PRC as one of its main locations and actress Qing Xu as a significant side-character,

the wife of American lead, Bruce Willis. Similarly, Guillermo Del Toro’s kaiju (giant monster)

movie, Pacific Rim, is primarily set in Hong Kong as it locus operandi, and Marvel’s Avengers: Age

of Ultron was primarily shot in Seoul with the hope that generous tax incentives provided by

various South Korean public sector organizations would yield a marketing effort for the city

and increase international tourism.

Perhaps the clearest example of glocalization’s efforts to simultaneously cater to local

audiences and capitalize on product placement is the recently released action extravaganza

Tranformers: Age of Extinction. The production was set up as US-Chinese co-production to

bypass Chinese foreign film import restrictions and thus, had to feature both mainland

locations and Chinese stars. Paramount studio announced that the Chinese partnership would

help in a “selection of filming sites within China, theatrical promotion and possible

postproduction activities in China as well as casting of Chinese actors and actresses in the

film” (Zakarin 2014). In doing so, the Michael Bay helmed blockbuster was shot in Beijing,

Tianjin and Hong Kong, and the local production partners were reported to have charged 1.6

million USD in exchange for presenting the Chinese Pangu Plaza luxury hotel as one of the

film’s sets in exchange for product placement funding and marketing benefits (Makinen 2014).

Casting Chinese superstar Li Bingbing as one of the side characters also testifies to the

!46

producer’s glocalization efforts to increase the film’s prospects among the mainland Chinese

film audience where the Transformers franchise has previously had substantial box office

success (Tsui 2013).

However, glocalization should not be understood only from the perspective of the US

media industries’ hegemony. As Iwabuchi (2010) remarks, multinational entertainment

companies originating from other territories are also taking advantage of glocalization

strategies. These advantages include investments into East Asian regional co-productions and

TV content, or by establishing local production or distribution offices to bypass cultural and

legal restraints in order to access particular markets. East Asian media conglomerates such as

Huayi Brothers (mainland China), Shaw (Hong Kong) or CJ Entertainment (South Korea)

boast a widespread production and dissemination network in the region, and can be seen as

constantly seeking opportunities to penetrate into non-domestic and developing markets. And

as present-day examples such as Korean blockbuster, The Thieves (2012), shot in Hong Kong

and Macau, and Mr. Go (2012) have exemplified, cross regional productions utilizing

transregional casts and glocalizing strategies might even yield more successful results in

regional markets, rather than in the domestic markets.7

The second broad area of East Asian regional film industry targeted by glocalization is the

crossover of Asian formats and creative personnel such as performers and directing talents to

overseas markets, especially into Hollywood productions. Whereas the 90s saw both successful

and failed attempts, with notable actors Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and director John Woo

establishing themselves as household names in the blockbuster business, the recent years have

seen an increase in the attempts of East Asian stars to break through into Hollywood

productions including actors Lee Byung-hung (Red, Gi Joe), Asano Tadanobu (Thor, Battleship),

Ken Watanabe (Inception, Godzilla), actresses Gong Li (Memoirs of a Geisha, Hannibal Rising), Fan

Bingbing (Iron Man 3, X-Men: Days of Future Past), and Li Bingbing (Resident Evil: Retribution,

Transformers: Age of Extinction). Similar attempts by internationally acclaimed directors such as

Park Chan Wook (Oldboy), and Kim Jiwoon (I Saw the Devil) to name a few, have met with

!47

limited success occasionally attributed to come from the different production systems between

industries, specifically the relative lack of independence of the director in the decision making

process on Hollywood productions (Sandwell 2013).

In conclusion, if the previously discussed examples of media format hybridity, glocalized

product placement, or talent crossover refer to larger structural questions, then the question

arises of how to account for the position of the audience vis-a-vis these transnational flows?

A second pair of theoretical concepts describing the properties of East Asian media space

are the dichotomy of cultural proximity and cultural distance. The presence of this dynamic

has been widely advocated by Chua and Iwabuchi to account for the cross-regional popularity

of television dramas in East Asia. Whereas Chua (2008, 2012) has focused on the research on

the consumption of Korean television dramas by Chinese speaking audiences in Singapore,

Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Iwabuchi has made an effort to analyze the popularity of Japanese

television content in Taiwan (1998, 2002) and South Korean soap operas in Japan (2008).

Cultural proximity or coevality (as defined by Cho 2011, 319) is used by both authors to

denote a sense effect brought on not only by the physical resemblance of the performers in

regional media and television productions, but also by the similarities in value and belief

systems that operate as a culturally balancing and unifying factors (Chua 2004, 2008, 2012).

Interestingly, regional affinities seem to prevail in territories historically boasting close cultural

and economic ties—such as South Korea, Singapore, and China operating with a regional

“sinosphere”, whereas Japan and Taiwan form a comparable axis which could be perhaps

traced back to the Japanese WWII colonialism in Taiwan, but possibly also by following

Japanese modernity as a model of economic development.

Chua (2008, 2012) found that one of the principle reasons accounting for the Singaporean

audience’s appreciation of South Korean television dramas is the culturally proximate reliance

on Confucian value of filial piety as “Japanese dramas are read as too ‘Japanese’, too ‘Western’

and too ‘liberal’, all values that are deemed undesirable by the conservatives among the female

Huaren audience, regionally”. (B. H. Chua 2012, 2354).

!48

Iwabuchi (in 1998, 2008, and 2009) respectively argued similar processes in the

reception of Japanese televised content in the Taiwanese context, hypothesizing the reasons to

lie not only in the complex colonialist past that set the ground for widespread knowledge of

Japanese language, but also suggested a sense of familiarity between two countries: “Japanese

dramas are consciously watched as foreign, but Japanese culture is perceived as closer to

Taiwan while physical appearance and skin color are quite similar to the American

counterpart” (Erni and Chua 2008, 25). However, the author also advises against

oversimplification in understanding the potential cross-cultural affinity, since cultural

proximity is “never as self-evident as it appears to be” as differences in language, due most

importantly to differences in the level of economic development, as Japan’s present

modernization might be considered futuristic to other territories in the region (Iwabuchi 2002,

25). For Iwabuchi, the differences in modernization signal, on one hand, the Taiwanese

audience’s inclination to see Japan as a desire for capitalist modernity (Iwabuchi 2002, 2008),

while evoking, for their Japanese counterparts, a sense of nostalgia for a past of Asian vitality

that has been lost during the course of the country’s rapid modernization. (Erni and Chua

2008, 31) (Iwabuchi 2002, 69)

To follow Iwabuchi’s logic, East Asian film and media products must address a dichotomy

where cultural proximity evoked by seemingly similar body types or similarities of value

systems, a construed sense of Asianess is in a complex negotiation with cultural distance and

linguistic or visual/spatial differences. As Chua (2012) notes: “distilled from different audience

receptions is not a simple ‘cultural proximity’ or any shared cultural tradition, but an

intermittent closeness and distance that conceptually, and most importantly, evinces the

emergent sense of the ‘pan-East Asia/n’. (B. H. Chua 2012, 145). It is argued here, that this

potential for the emergence of a pan-Asian audience, or identity, as advocated by Chua as

early as 2004 on the lines of cultural proximity and distance, is perhaps not a fixed or stable

configuration, but perhaps yet another imagining for a pan-Asian media space set against

similar imaginations for pan-European or pan-American identity on the part of academics.

!49

Specifically, Chua juxtaposes transnationalisation in the region as an obstacle for a common

identity due to social stratification and a conflict laden historical legacy in East Asia on one

hand, and cultural proximity and shared Asianess as identity ascribing factor on the other, by

claiming that the shared East Asia “will unavoidably come up against the history of regional

conflicts, national identities, and national political interests” (ibid). Despite this juxtaposition,

most visibly played out between Western-modernity infused Japan and the underdeveloped

Chinese mainland, Chua firmly advocates for the possibility of the unified, media-driven

regional identity as “East Asian sensibilities are neither identifiable nor incommensurate with

Euro-American modernity… always inscribed by global modernity, [these] have been

historically cultivated and generated by the national and by regional specifics.” (Cho 2011, 395)

Similar in tone to Chua, Lim (2006) draws a direct link to co-productions as tool in fostering

this particular identity via the construction of networks between East Asian locales as “rather

than simply making strictly local Asian media productions… creating, and distributing pan-

Asian co-productions can create new products and services that are transnational, or

borderless but still enable each city or urban location to be interlinked.” (T. Lim 2006, 3)

The issue of whether co-productions could facilitate the creation of a regional identity is

discussed in more detail in chapter 6 by reflecting on and analyzing the interviews of some

fourteen East Asian film professionals. At this point, however, it can be highlighted that

cultural proximity and cultural distance are factors that could impact the entire filmmaking

cycle from development to distribution. Particularly, the axis between cultural proximity and

cultural distance not only projects an effect on audience reception of a certain film in the

cinemas across the region, but can also often change the course of an actual production as

well.

Based on expert interviews and industry publications, it is argued that a desire within the

regional film industry to produce culturally proximate co-productions and films for regional

audiences is present in East Asian context. However, the track records for culturally proximate

titles have varied, illustrative of major success and equally strong failures. For example, the

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creative and financial success of the collaboration for John Woo’s critically well-received

historical war epic Red Cliff (2008)—the most expensive Asian film produced at that time,

overseen by veteran Hong Kong producer Bill Kong, and spanning co-production capital

from US, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea—has been attributed by the producers to be

primarily based on the aspect cultural proximity. Specifically, a close familiarity with the film

source material: the historical battle of Red Cliff, and the Chinese classic “The Romance of

Three Kingdoms” was perceived by the producers to be present in their respective territories

and thus drove the project to success among regional audiences (DeBoer 2014, 2703; Industry

2013).

Elsewhere, producers and regional film professionals have also remarked on the

importance of cultural proximity as a binding structural factor between film industries, as in

the cases of increasing collaboration between South Korea and China. Although said to be

driven primarily by the size of the lucrative Chinese market and its relative lack of a well-

qualified creative and technical workforce, close cultural and historical connections, as well as

a shared body of Confucian thought as a maintainer of cultural proximity has been pointed

out as a structurally enabling factor (Saluveer 2014i). The importance of Sino-Korean

collaboration can been seen in the fact that every three months the Korean Film Council

selects six film companies to facilitate Chinese co-production and collaboration with the

KOFIC’s Beijing office providing “space, accommodation, hospitality, mentoring, [project]

doctoring, networking and consulting” (Saluveer 2014k).

Nonetheless, overtly relying on cultural proximity in film collaboration can lead to failure

as well. One notable example is the 2011 South Korean WWII epic My Way depicting a

confrontation between Japanese and South Korean officers, and their joint ordeals through

WWII battles leading to reconciliation between former enemies and ultimately to friendship.

Infusing culturally proximate topic of WWII colonialism with humanist elements, and

featuring well known Asian stars Jang Dong-Gun (Korea), and Jo Odagiri (Japan) as leads, the

expectations for the 25 million USD budgeted blockbuster were high for South Korean and

!51

Japanese territories, but met a lukewarm response in both markets. One of the executives

remarked that “it is still too early to talk about Japanese and Korean people amicably in

harmony… even if you enjoy the movie but want to pay for the movie for talking about the

compromise and friendship between Korea and Japan, no” (Saluveer 2013b). Another

producer critically remarked that the hopes for culturally proximate co-productions can easily

“backfire” since the collaboration has to meaningful to work across territories: “even if

there’s a lot of examples of Chinese films that include one or two Korean actors or one or

two Japanese stars, it doesn’t necessarily mean that those projects will work in those countries

where the stars… or the artists come from” (Saluveer 2014c).

The question of the performance of a co-production across the territories leads the

discussion the third dichotomy of East Asian media space, the concepts of decentralization

and recentralization, and the accumulation and channeling of media capital to follow Curtin’s

widely discussed framework. DeBoer underlines that the media capital framework unmasks

the translational element in the regional film collaboration, “to see ways in which film and

media production is not simply mediated through the territorial boundaries of ‘Japanese’ or

‘Chinese’ or ‘Korean’ for example … as it accounts for transnational flows of media and

capital” (DeBoer 2014, 245). The next section of this chapter will present the definitions of

the decentering-recentering dichotomy, and media capital, as well as situating these definitions

in the larger discussion of the role of festivals and co-production markets as a form of media

capital(ism).

!3.3 Decentering-recentering networks, and media capitals

The previous sections of this chapter suggested that characterizing East Asian media

space avoids conceptually and spatially rigid terms, and instead uses a convoluted network of

cross-cultural and transnational dichotomies that condense various flows into nodes of

production, consumption and dissemination. The current section focuses on the importance

of this accumulation, and focuses on locales in East Asian media space by situating them into

!52

the discussion of the dichotomy of decentralization-recentralization, and media capital.

Somewhat in contrast to earlier works, Iwabuchi (2009) has claimed that the reality of

media collaboration and consumption in East Asia cannot be recently accounted for as

bipartite, as the differences between the center and periphery have increasingly begun to erode

(Berry, Liscutin, and Mackintosh 2009). In that respect, the argument closely follows Ching’s

widely cited remark of the potential end of the global Euro-American hegemony, since

transnationalization has “put an end to Euro-American economic domination of the world,

and for the first time abstracted capitalism from its Eurocentrism” (Ching 2000, 246). So, if

historically the media production and dissemination could be seen as centering on the US in

relation East Asia served as its periphery, then contemporary East Asia presents a more

intertwined picture where “cross border partnerships and co-operation among media and

cultural industries and capital involving Japan and other non-Western developed countries are

being driven forward, with the US as pivotal presence” (Berry, Liscutin, and Mackintosh

2009). As marked previously by various examples, the decentralization of the previous US

media hegemony within the region is increasingly recentralized through various strategies such

as joint Sino-US or Korean-US ventures, co-productions, remakes of regional films for non-

Asian markets, location shooting, or utilizing regional talents in global productions. Therefore

as Cho (2011) notes, the cultural geography in East Asia is being shaped asymmetrically, and

the region being “envisaged through these growing pan-Asian cultural flows, is constituted not

as a reified, fixed site, but as a variable space of both integration and contestation” (Cho 2011,

393). In shaping and modeling this variable space, regional cities Busan, Hong Kong, Tokyo

and most recently Seoul, and their respective film festivals are playing an increasingly notable

role as sites of media capital within physical media capitals where creative labor meets

migration, national and international finance in negotiation with national and international

politics and power. Iwabuchi has recently noted, that the national constantly attempts to

project its power through the “global screen” of various transnational sporting and cultural

events, because these are “the most marketable and significant local units, as a unit of

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commercialized and standardized cultural diversity in the glocalization process. National

cultural specificity is increasingly expressed and constituted more and more through global

mass culture formats” (Iwabuchi 2010).

The interplay between national and international flows of culture, capital and power in the

region can be addressed through the influential framework of media capitals articulated by

Curtin (2003, 2007, 2010), which are applicable to the present context of film festivals and co-

production markets as well. Curtin compares the changes between the media landscapes in the

PRC, Hong-Kong, Thailand, and India, and argues that global media flows and capital are

steadily accumulating into powerful regional media centers, or so called “media capitals”.

According to the author, these locales, “are powerful geographic centers that tap human,

creative, and financial resources within their spheres of circulation in order to fashion

products that serve the distinctive needs of their audience” (Curtin 2010, 265). However, what

Curtin underlines is the transience and intraregional competition between these locales,

because media capitals are “emerging out of a complex play of historical forces [and] are

therefore contingently produced within a crucible of transnational competition” (ibid.).

Curtin (2007) identifies three socio-historic elements as the primary drivers behind the

formation of media capitals. First, the capitalist logic of accumulation which suggests that

although media companies might initially serve certain national cultures or locales, they must

ultimately, “as applied to contemporary media, this insight suggests that even though a film or

TV company may be founded with the aim of serving particular national cultures or local

markets, it must over time redeploy its creative resources and reshape its terrain of operations

if it is to survive competition and enhance profitability” (Curtin 2007, 11). Second, trajectories

or migration serve as a crucial element because while media industries are knowledge and skill

intensive, at the same time they are seeking opportunities for new production centers, locales

and workforce for cost optimization. Curtin furthermore underlines, that “cultural production

is especially reliant on mutual learning effects and trajectories of creative migration and that,

inevitably, particular locations emerge as centers of creativity” (ibid., 18).

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Finally, forces of sociocultural variation relate both to flows of capital and migration

in linking these to existing (national) governing and power structures, “demonstrating that

national and local institutions have remained significant actors despite the spatial tendencies

of production and distribution” and “tend to flourish at arm’s length from the centers of state

power, favoring cities that are in many cases disdained by political and cultural elites” (Curtin

2007, 19; Curtin 2010, 266).

Although Curtin observed the process of media capitalization between the television

industries in Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Mumbai in the mid 2000s it can be argued that the

phenomenon is clearly observable in the case of film and festival locations, of Busan, Seoul,

and Tokyo as well, especially due to the regional festival circuit’s increasing focus on film

industry activities such as co-production and exhibition markets. Therefore, festivals and their

industry activities serve as channels for regional and transnational capital, not only through the

sales of completed titles, but also at the level of attracting financiers for co-production

projects, not to mention the publicity, hospitality and tourism industry surrounding festivals as

sites of spectacle. In this respect, Stringer’s (2001) celebrated argument becomes valid by

drawing attention to the fact that contemporary festivals are a “unique cultural arena that acts

as a contact zone for the working through of unevenly differentiated power relationships… it

is cities which now act as the nodal points on this circuit, not national film

industries” (Stringer 2001, 138).

Aspects of transnational migration are also prominently on display at film events, albeit

temporarily limited, festivals attract a significant number of international participants that

creatively participate in the formulation of media capital either through their cultural activities

at the festivals (such as film screenings, master classes or so on), directly engage in creative

collaboration at co-production markets, or economically contribute to the festival cities’

infrastructure. The numbers are indeed significant considering that, for example, the Tokyo

TIFFCOM content market in 2013 attracted 316 organizations from 26 countries with

“22,738 visitors, a 176% increase from the previous year” (TIFFCOM 2013). The intensity of

!55

the migratory flows within a temporally and spatially limited space has also set a basis to

consider festivals and their industry activities as a “festival circuit” which “exists as an

allegorization of space and its power relationships, it operates through the transfer of value

between and within distinct geographic localities” (Stringer 2001, 138).

Last but not least, sociocultural variation is revealed by noting that the festival circuit in

East Asia yields a close connection to municipal and national governing bodies,

simultaneously serving as a negotiation site between the activities of nation branding-nation

building strategies and transnational flows. Ahn (2009, 2012) has widely discussed the close

relationship between the Busan Film Festival and various South Korean municipal,

governmental and public sector players in developing the festival and its Asian Project Market

co-production forum into Korea-driven Asian cinema hub, by noting that Busan’s “distinctive

approach to cultural politics in East Asia demonstrates the ways in which the festivals more

generally have begun to negotiate and renew their roles and identities between the national,

regional, and the global” (Berry, Liscutin, and Mackintosh 2009, 1458). However, similar

interaction is visible in the case of Hong Kong Film Festival’s HAF co-production market that

has been historically supported by the Hong Kong Trade and Development Council

(HKTDC) and recently by the Create Hong Kong program. Puchon’s Network of Asian

Fantastic Films is backed by Puchon city, and by Tokyo’s TIFFCOM content market and the

Co-Pro Connection supported by the Japanese Ministry Ministry of Economy, Trade and

Industry (METI). The presence of the “national” also manifests itself not only structurally

but also content-wise since the festivals and industry activities tailor special promotional

programs for their native industries, whether in the form of showcases and presentations, or

special selections of domestic films at project markets (such as KOFIC projects at Busan and

Tokyo Co-Pro Connection events). Thus, the festivals and their events in East Asia are in

constant negotiation between the national and transnational, in their quest for “status of a

global event” or media capital prominence in the regional cultural economy “through the

implementation of their programming strategies and through the establishment of an

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international reach and reputation.” (Stringer 2001, 139)

This chapter focused on the widely acknowledged theoretical framework of East Asian

media space proposed by Iwabuchi and Chua, by situating the dichotomous concepts of

hybridization-glocalization, cultural distance-cultural proximity, and decentralization-

recentralization to the contexts of film industries in East Asia. Through various examples,

regional industries and festivals, as nodes of focus, can be viewed as forms of media capitals

where aspects of financing, migration, and local, regional, and global powers intertwine.

However, the question of how and to what degree this theorization resonates with the

stakeholders who actively engage in the creation of East Asian media space inevitably rises.

Therefore, the following chapters of the thesis focus on the relationship between the

academic and the everyday, by first proposing a set of critical and methodological questions,

and then proceeding to case studies and interview analysis of East Asian film professionals

from filmmakers to market runners and policymakers.

!

!57

CHAPTER 4: METHODOLOGY, RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND OBJECTIVES !4.1 Methodology

When embarking on an investigation of the multi-faceted phenomena of contemporary

film production networks and locales such as film festivals and markets, the researcher is

immediately faced with a dilemma of choosing an appropriate methodology that would take

account of the complex interplay of place, culture and various forms of power.

As Ahn (2011) points out, study of film festivals eludes a simple methodological

approach, because the research is face a complex web of entities “interlinked with multiple

fields, from national cinemas, world cities, spatiality and temporality, to cultural industries and

branding culture” as well as questions of textual and economic power plays (Ahn 2011, 272).

Pioneering researcher of film festivals and production networks, de Valck also rightfully

pointed out that a new, dynamic paradigm is needed for film festival and industry studies,

because

“the old notions of ‘auteur’ and ‘nation’ seem insufficient in construing the transformations. Frameworks based on either personality or ideology remain encapsulated within the classic sociological distinction between human agency and structure, while film festivals, on the other hand, seem to thrive thanks to a variety of relations”(de Valck 2007, 29). !

Bergfelder (2005) also confirms that the study of film production networks and co-

productions has taken on the burden of the auteur and textual reading approaches that often

do not yield appropriate results. Especially in the case of the history of popular genre co-

productions in Europe, “individual texts and directors mean ultimately less than, or at least are

impossible to comprehend out a knowledge of, the generic and industrial regimes, let alone

the cultural and social contexts” (Bergfelder 2005a). Instead, he argues for a transformation

“from an exclusively auteur-based analysis of selected, aesthetically as well as politically

worthy, masterpieces” towards an interdisciplinary sociology of cinema, because the “issue of

co-productions demands the acknowledgement that economic considerations interact with

specifically national developments, but that they are equally informed by the dynamics of an

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international media market” (Bergfelder 2005b 2005wt).

The form of the sociology of cinema to which Bergfelder attests is the methodology of

institutional ethnography proposed by Smith. In Ahn’s (2011) study, institutional ethnography

was widely applied to investigate the Busan film festival and its co-production market, the

Pusan Promotion Plan (now Asian Project Market). Ahn claimed that institutional

ethnography “problematises [sic] social relations at the local site of lived experience and that

examines how textual sequences co-ordinate consciousness, actions, and

ruling relations”(Ahn 2011). Campbell further explains that the goal of institutional

ethnography is to “tap into people’s expertise in the conduct of their everyday lives—their

‘work’”, and the “framing of the everyday” helps to reveal various discourses and politics that

surround the observed and are produced by them (Campbell 1998).

de Valck (2009) points out that “this idea of mobile agency is very instructive because it

elevates the necessity of distinguishing between the “festival” as abstract superstructure—the

sales representatives, film critics and filmmakers meeting at film festivals are not considered

separate from the event, but whose congregations, performances, and products are

understood as necessary links that make up the event” (de Valck 2007). Considering that the

co-production markets of film festivals are entities with changing boundaries, this approach is

especially fruitful. In these markets, various elements and discourses of the film business—the

textual and financial aspects of film and co-production projects, the cultural and creative

power of directors, the professional expertise and “work” of producers—interact with the

larger networks and politics of production, dissemination and exhibition. Ahn also highlights

another important feature of institutional ethnography: the fact that by conducting

institutional ethnography, the “researchers are in the same world as that which they are

investigating” (Ahn 2011 2011tg). The researcher then gains relatively more open access to

information, including the opinions of interviewees and research participants, than would

typically be available through traditional methods. Historically, there has existed a relatively

strong divide between the academic film and production studies, and the film business

!59

communities. This divide exists not only due to the prevalence of auteur and textual studies,

but also due to the access limitations for academics to the networks, practices and know-how

of the film industry. Therefore, an “insider approach” enabled by institutional ethnography

has the potential to provide rare firsthand accounts, and “off the record” information about

the working mechanisms of film industry and co-production practices.

Within the larger discourse of institutional ethnography, the current research project

applies a methodology of combined qualitative and quantitative approaches. These include,

expert interviews with film industry professionals, participant observation and attendance to

major film festivals and co-production markets in East Asia. Also, it utilizes a quantitative

database compiled by the researcher of the co-production projects presented at the film

markets.

The goal of combining qualitative interview data with statistical information is to reveal

the larger trends of co-productions in East Asia including genre and budget preferences and

film completion performance.

!4.2 Object of study

This research project, carried out during a three-year period from 2011 to 2014, focused

on four film festivals and co-production markets in East Asia that are acknowledged by and

frequently attended by regional and international film professionals. These include the Busan

International Film Festival (BIFF) and the Asian Project Market (APM, formerly Pusan

Promotion Plan or PPP), the Hong Kong Film Festival (HKIFF) and the Hong Kong Film

Financing Forum (HAF), the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival (PiFAN) and the

Network of Asian Fantastic Films (NAFF), and finally, the Tokyo International Film Festival

(TIFF) and the TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection (CPC, formerly Tokyo Project Gathering or

TPG). The selection of these festivals and markets was based primarily on two broad criteria:

the geographic and cultural representation of native film territories, and the availability of

professional access to the researcher. Regarding the former, these particular film markets were

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selected to serve as gateways into native film territories and film cultures in East Asia

including South Korea (APM and NAFF), Japan (TPG), and Hong Kong and Chinese-

speaking territories (HAF).

The Golden Horse Film Festival and the Golden Horse Film Project Promotion, which

specifically cater to Chinese-speaking professionals and audiences, also play a noticeable role

in the region. The Golden Horse Awards gala is widely considered to be one of the highlights

of the annual cycle of Chinese-speaking cinema. However, the Taipei-based festival and the

market have been excluded from this work due to restraints in time and scope.

It should be noted that in recent years, the internationalization of activities inside the film

industry and co-production initiatives have also increased in mainland China. The primary

examples are the Shanghai Film Festival and its China Film Pitch and Catch (CFPC) and Co-

production Film Pitch and Catch (Co-FPC) programs, and the recently launched Beijing Film

Festival and its associated film market. These events play an important part in the larger film

industry and in co-production discourses and politics in East Asia. Again, they were not

included in the scope of the present research also due to time and scope restraints, as well as

due to the limited access of the researcher to the their personnel.

Regarding the analysis of the Chinese-speaking cinema within this research, Hong Kong

and its Filmart and HAF markets also serve as a gateway to the mainland Chinese film

industry. Specifically, the HAF co-production market features an annual selection of mainland

projects, and thus, the discourses and effects of the lucrative “China market” are sufficiently

discussed through the analysis of the Hong Kong event. In his upcoming PhD work the

researcher will aim to provide more comprehensive insight into the inner mechanisms of the

Taiwanese and the mainland Chinese industries. Despite operating in the Chinese language

cinema space, the respective film events and project markets frequently exhibit conflicting

goals and ideologies rather than rather unified entertainment geography.

Major film festivals, such as the Berlin Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival and their

respective European Film Market and Marche du Film events, were visited to gain access to

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the filmmakers and opinion leaders who influence the film industry in East Asia. Additionally,

two field trips to South Korea, in 2013 and 2014, were conducted to perform interviews with

the major South Korean film production and distribution companies that are actively

operating in the region.

The selection of interviewees was based upon the notion of representing a full range of

professionals that are engaged in the sphere of co-productions in the region, from filmmakers

and producers, to film festival and market organizers, to policy planners and public sector

officials. In order to ensure a balanced geographical representation, at least three interviewees

were selected from Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea. The interviewees included acclaimed

and award winning East Asian producers Jeffrey Chan (A Simple Life, Hong Kong, 2011),

Lorna Tee (Postcards from the Zoo, Indonesia-Germany-Hong Kong, 2011), Yukie Kito (Tokyo

Sonata, Japan, 2008) and Raymond Phathanavirangoon (Headshot, Thailand-The Netherlands,

2011). Film market managers Jacob Wong (HAF), Susan Chae (APM), Mika Morishita and

Takenari Maeda (TIFFCOM, TPG), and Jongsuk Thomas Nam (NAFF) are also included.

Representatives of public sector film policy organizations, Sanghee Han of the Korean Film

Council (KOFIC), and Takashi Nishimura of the Japan Association for International

Promotion of the Moving Image (UNIJAPAN) also shared their invaluable opinions.

Within a six month period, fourteen interviews were conducted following an open-ended

questionnaire, each lasting up to an hour. The aim of using open-ended questions was to gain

a full perspective and insight into the field of co-productions while paying attention to major

themes of interest such as the creative, economic and political aspects of co-productions in

the region. As briefly mentioned above, the access to acclaimed film professionals and experts

was gained through the researchers’ personal participation in film industry activities for more

than a decade. This background enabled the researcher to gain valuable “insider” and “off the

record” information from the participants. The full list of interviewees as well as the

questionnaire is provided in the Appendixes. References are also made to the international

film industry symposium “Industry at Tallinn” organized in 2013 and 2014 in Tallinn, Estonia,

!62

in conjunction with the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. There various panels explored the

issues and attitudes of East Asian filmmakers who had engaged in international and regional

co-productions.

Instead of a rigid content analysis driven perspective, a dynamic and interpretative

framework for identifying larger themes or frames was applied. Although a similar set of

thematic points were explored, the perspective and concrete examples provided by the

interviewees differed to a large degree. Therefore applying content analysis would have yielded

very limited results. By flexibly and dynamically identifying patterns and themes of

importance, the author follows an interpretative research practice advocated by de Valck

(2009) and Ahn (2011). Both authors suggest that film festivals and, in the context of this

research, associated film markets should be analyzed as dynamic and frequently changing

events. So the researcher should “follow the diverse, rapidly changing festival landscape by

creatively employing a mobile, flexible and interdisciplinary approach” (Ahn 2011).

!4.3 Research questions and hypotheses

The inspiration for this research project stems from the intersection of practical

experience in the film industry, especially production and exhibition of East Asian cinema,

and an observed lack of academic conceptualization of these practices. Especially intriguing

was the realization, that whereas the notion of co-productions has been internalized to a great

degree in business and academic discourses alike, very few have tried to conceptualize and

explore this field. As the collaboration between East Asian and international film industries

has accelerated over the past decade, so has the demand from academia and business, for

inquiries that would explore the cultural, economic and political aspects of respective film

festivals and co-production markets.

Based on these observations, two main research goals emerge. First, to investigate how the

phenomenon of co-productions and markets in East Asia was conceived and developed, and

what properties make them unique. Second, to explore how co-productions relate to the larger

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sociopolitical discussions and formations, considering the role of co-productions in the

current (European) agenda of cultural politics and policy, giving attention to the increased

importance of the discourse of creative industries. This also includes the cultural and political

“imaginings” in the region, such as the widely discussed theoretical framework of “East Asian

media space”.

Over the course of the three-year study, the following research questions were articulated.

First, how did international co-productions emerge in East Asia, and what were the major

cultural, social, economic and political factors? Second, in which sites are co-productions

developed and how do these sites relate to the rise of media capitals in East Asia? Third, what

kind of structural factors influence co-productions and their production, reception and

dissemination across East Asian territories, and how are co-productions related to media

globalization, transnationalism and the drive towards East Asian media space? Further, are

there differences in perception between the filmmaking community, the festivals, and the

policymakers? And fourth, what is the relationship to and impact of film co-productions on

larger cultural, social and political agendas, and ideologies such as media nationalism and

Beck’s (2007) notion of cosmopolitanism.

The main hypotheses of the study were formed along the notion of a fascinating

discrepancy that surrounds the film and media industries in East Asia. On one hand,

governments and public sector bodies in the respective countries are engaged in supporting

the film festivals and markets in East Asia . However, considering that these events are aimed 11

to foster and promote East Asian filmmaking and film industries, one could hypothesize that

their sponsoring of these events are merely attempts to exercise soft power strategies within

the region. On the other hand, one could argue that various ongoing political tensions within

the region might be simultaneously undermining or limiting these soft power activities. This

raises the question: how do filmmakers and producers, market professionals and film

These include Hong Kong Trade and Development Council in the case of HAF, Ministry of Economy, Trade 11

and Industry, and Agency for Cultural Affairs in the case of TPG/Tokyo Co-Pro Connection, various South Korean municipal and government bodies in the case of APM, and finally city of Puchon in the case of NAFF.

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policymakers relate to this multifaceted situation, and to what degree it would influence the

actual filmmaking and production practices within the region. It is from that line of

argumentation that the following hypotheses were formulated:

Hypothesis 1: there exists a disjuncture in the perceptions of the goals of East Asian co-

productions between the filmmaking community, festivals and policymakers. Whereas

filmmakers might engage in co-productions for cultural or economic aims, the festivals and

policymakers promote co-productions for setting agendas of prestige or national media

power.

Hypothesis 2: political tensions between the countries in the region act as a barrier for

achieving wider engagement in co-production and media collaboration activities, and the

creation of an East Asian media space.

Hypothesis 3: film festivals and media space in East Asia feature a dichotomy of global

nationalism and Asianism, as the promotion of national (mono) culture goes in hand in

aspirations for expansion to Asian markets.

Hypothesis 4: the producers and the filmmaking community engaging in co-productions

are representative of a new and cosmopolitan division of cultural labor, preferring

multiculturalism over specific national heritage and values, that sets them apart from their

national and local peers.

!4.4 Theoretical framework

Similarly to the methodological issues, the question of an appropriate theoretical

framework that would account to the complexities of the object of study (co-production) and

place (East Asia) emerged during the course of the study. As pointed out previously, co-

productions and the associated festival and market networks encompass textual, geographic,

economic and political aspects that would elude a comprehensive analysis by applying a single

theoretical framework. Moreover, the researcher is forced to counter the question of how to

account for the locale and place of East Asia, both in its imagined and tangible form, in

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assessing its role in regard to the film and media industries that operate within and in relation

to that particular geography?

Therefore, within this study, a synthesized theoretical framework is proposed that attempts

to assess the research subject and its complexities in an interconnected and interdisciplinary

manner addressing the aspects of place (markets and festivals, East Asia as place and

geography), practice (co-production discourses and co-produced films), and practitioners (film

industry professionals).

In examining place, the research utilizes the theoretical notion of East Asian media space,

popularized primarily by Iwabuchi and Chua, that has gained a somewhat canonical status in

studies of popular culture in East Asia. Widely applied by researchers to diverse forms of

audiovisual media—from television dramas to the popularity of Japanese animation and

Korean popular music—East Asian media space has formed a frame of reference that calls

for exploration and critique vis-a-vis the film industries in the region. Specifically, the current

research seeks to explore the degree to which the dichotomies of East Asian media space,

such as hybridity-glocalization, cultural proximity and distance, decentralization and

recentralization are valid in the case of regional film industries in East Asia, and if they indeed

influence the production and reception of regional media as Iwabuchi and Chua argue.

In discussing place, one cannot also exclude the importance of the framework of media

capitals proposed by Curtin (2003, 2007). Considering the tremendous role that film festivals

play in the contemporary cultural and creative economy (including in East Asia), and the

complex relationship of regional film festivals to various government and municipal

organizations and players, Curtin’s discussion of the struggle of regional cities for media

capital stature becomes highly relevant as Ahn (2011) has articulated in her study of the Busan

Film Festival.

The question of co-productions in practice looks at the phenomenon by providing a

literature overview of four major discourses. First, the cultural regulatory discourse primarily

associated with the EU and the art film/auteur context; second, the legal discourse that

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surrounds international bilateral and multilateral agreements between countries with the aim

of ascribing national status along with various incentives and benefits to a co-produced film;

third, the economic-business discourse that has its firm roots in the US context and takes the

producer, and the business practices and benefits as its modus operandi; and fourth, the

recent cultural studies discourse that aims to view co-productions as a technology of

assemblage that encompasses all previous discourses and ties them to various narratives and

aspects of place and power is explored.

Finally, a discussion of the professionalism and market data of the interlinked notions of

the network economy, transnationalization of media industries and cosmopolitanism are

employed. The rise of international collaboration within the global film industry, specifically

through co-productions, can be viewed from the perspective of Castellian’s notion of network

economy. Furthermore, the practices of the producers who set up and manage multinational

and multicultural co-productions can be interpreted from the perspective of cosmopolitanism,

if one sees their actions as a navigation between the national and transnational as Hannerz

(2002) and Beck (2007) advocate.

!4.5 Limitations of research

The current thesis has certain limitations primarily connected to its spatial and temporal

scope. During the course of the research, it became clear that despite the academic neglect of

the subject matter, the history of co-productions and transnational collaboration in the

international and East Asian context is far longer and increasingly multifaceted than was

initially believed. While indeed co-productions have escalated after the liberalization of the

media markets in post-1990s East Asia, a more in-depth account is certainly needed into the

history of transnational film collaboration within the region.

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, discourses surrounding the film industry in

mainland China as an increasingly powerful player within the region should be explored in

depth from the perspective of cultural and geopolitical studies. Specifically, the complex

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dynamics within the Chinese language film production landscape, Hong Kong, Taiwan and

mainland PRC must be explored in further detail, exceeding the scope of this research.

Although briefly touched upon, textual and interpretative questions relating to the object

of this study, the co-produced film and its reception by various audiences groups across the

territories within East Asia should be addressed in future research. Case studies of the

reception of co-produced films within its countries of origin can potentially reveal the

audience and market preferences for certain genres or content, but would also help to situate

film industry research into the wider, and already rich body of audience studies in East Asia.

The question of the impact of larger government policies and strategies inevitably arises

as well. All governments within the region pursue a relatively active media policy. Investigation

of how certain measures shape the inner dynamics of the film and content markets

domestically and regionally would not only yield comparative results but also would provide

valuable information on the relationship of policy to the larger development dynamics of the

film industry, and perhaps taste and content preferences too.

Despite these limitations the current study aims to provide an introductory account to the

field of co-productions with the East Asia by outlining major points of concern and an entry

point for further studies and explorations.

!!

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CHAPTER 5: CO-PRODUCTIONS IN EAST ASIA: FESTIVALS AND MARKETS !

! !Figure 7. 2013 Asian Film Market and Asian Project Market of Busan International Film Festival. Copyright & printed with the permission of Asian Project Market. !5.1 Film festival and film markets: from art to symbiosis with industry

The recent years have witnessed an increase in the studies investigating the artistic,

financial and geopolitical role of film festivals, and their connection to the cultural economy

and the larger discussion of creative industries. For example, de Valck (2007) has explored the

transformation of major European film festivals such as Berlin, Cannes and Venice from

celebration sites of national cultural to the international festival network of “sites of passage”

and locales of transforming cultural power into economic outcomes. In the case of these

events, as de Valck argues, the cultural value of selected filmmakers is being transformed into

prestige and economic power, especially considering how festival awards, such as the Cannes’

Palme d’Or or Berlin’s Golden Bear are considered essential in generating public interest, and

potential success in post-festival exhibition (de Valck 2007, 106). Thus, the festivals form an

“alternative cinema” network to the Hollywood-driven mainstream structure, that needs to

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facilitate and maintain complex relationships with both the creative and financial members of

the predominately art house or independent film industry. These festival screenings allow for

the discovery of new and potentially culturally significant filmmakers, while at the same time

providing networking and financing possibilities for the completion of their films. As

Steinhart (2006) has noted in connection with Rotterdam Film Festival, by receiving support

from the festivals, the filmmakers are often obliged to premiere their film at the event where

they received (financial) support (Steinhart 2006). Thus, it could be argued that through these

processes a “self sustaining and circular festival economy network” is formulated where

production, financing, exhibition, and promotion are tied to each other within an intertwined

set of relationships helping to “understand film festivals as a set of relations instead of

organizations” (de Valck 2007, 101). Wong (2011), in her study of primarily Asian film

festivals and their co-production markets, also highlights the increasing role of festivals and

their co-production events in fostering the production of new films, because “these selection

and financing structures epitomize the crucial emergent role of festivals in creating films

before arbitrating and extending film knowledge” (Wong 2011, 148).

The imminent outcome of this consolidation within the film festival economy is the

drastically increased importance of attracting and maintaining connections to the financing,

sales and distribution sectors of the business i.e. “the industry”. This consolidation is marked

primarily by the establishment of both film sales markets, and co-production markets to

accompany the festival’s creative programming: the presence of financiers, buyers and sales

agents creates opportunities to market and sell projects at the market, to promote

programmed films, or to award winning titles with regional or local exhibition within theatrical

or ancillary markets. Referring back to de Valck, this interplay of the creative and financial

aspects of the film community signals a rapid transformation of the cultural power of the

directors over economic outcomes in a Bourdieuan sense as the elements of symbolic

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power —awards, marketing, and the publicity power of the director, attached stars, and locale12

—are transformed into financial gains (ibid.). In return, the festivals maintain a mutually

beneficial relationship with their business counterparts gaining access to exclusive films from

the production and sales community for upcoming editions, or in the case of smaller 13

festivals, to be granted access to popular titles, since the competition for festivals screenings

and premieres has tremendously intensified over the past five years due to the rapid increase in

the number of festivals across the world.

The best examples of these interconnected relationships, and symbiosis between the

creative and economic aspects of festivals, are the Marche du Film and European Film Market

events that accompany the Cannes and the Berlin Film Festivals. Their centrality to the film

production and distribution ecosystem are highlighted by sheer attendance numbers. For

example, the former is attended by “20,000 film professionals, including 3,200 producers,

2,300 theatrical distributors, 1,500 sales agents and 790 festival programmers” (Marche 2014a).

Within these markets, distribution rights for completed and upcoming films are being sold, co-

production deals negotiated, and festival programming decisions made, as the markets are “a

magnet for international industry professionals, and… seen as a barometer for the upcoming

year in film” as the EFM’s website argues (E. F. Market 2014). 14

For extended discussion on the relationship between festivals and Bourdieus notions of embodied, objectified 12

and institutionalized cultural power see Valck & Soeteman (2010). The authors suggest to analyzed festival economy especially from the perspective of latter two as the power of festival awards can be analyzed form the perspective of objectified power, whereas institutionalized power can be applied to scrutinizing the cultural force that A class festivals such as Berlin, Cannes or Venice hold over the filmmakers, and the audience.

Programming, and film selection strategy of Cannes film festival should be addressed by further research as it 13

constitutes a carefully coordinated performance of showcasing the worlds most celebrated filmmakers, geopolitical considerations, and filmmakers cultivated by the festival. Especially regarding the latter, Cannes programming tends to favor close relationships with filmmakers being “discovered” by the festival, inviting these back with new films or as jury members. Recent examples include Japanese director Naomi Kawase, or Danish helmer Nicholas Winding Refn, who have both returned to Cannes as filmmakers and jury members.

It has been estimated that there exist about 3000 film festivals in the world of which 51 are regulated by the 14

International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF), and thus attributed importance in the yearly festival cycle. However, it should be noted that that since the traditional release windows for especially art house films are shrinking there exists an increasing consideration from the sales sector to see festivals as alternative distribution platform. That notion also escalates competition between the festivals to attract premium content in the form of critically acclaimed films. Thus establishing various industry activities such as inviting sales agents, organizing co-production events or larger markets helps to facilitate negations for content.

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An especially predominant role in the transnational festival economy is being asserted

by the symbiosis of Cannes Film Festival , its Marche du Film film market, and the 15

Cinefondation co-production initiative with each element contributing to the cycle of “made

in Cannes” films and filmmakers. This “Cannes ecosystem” not only serves as a center of

gravity in the transnational film economy, both for art house and Hollywood major industry,

but also as a reference point and example of the intertwined creative and financial aspects of

today’s film entertainment industry. Although technically managed by different organizations,

the well-coordinated interplay of these events, taking place annually in May, in conjunction

with the Cannes Film Festival, has succeeded in branding Cannes as the most important film

experience of the year, and an ultimate “site of passage” for a filmmaker. Whereas the Cannes

festival itself, with the combination of its meticulous and craze-inducing programming

strategy and red carpet spectacle, serves as an attraction point for the film programmers and

the public alike, the Marche du Film film market helps to capitalize on the artistic and PR

value of the festival into film sales. Cinefondation program supports the previous two through

competition programs aimed at discovering new talent from film schools with the lucrative

prize of premiering the full debut feature film at the festival, whereas Atelier serves as

development platform and incubator for Cannes selected filmmakers for new films. Various

sub-events, such as invitation only Producers Network, that invites some 500 celebrated

producers “for a series of meetings and unique events specifically designed to stimulate

international co-production and optimize networking”, NEXT program focusing on

transmedia and new trends in filmmaking, and the thematic Mixers program for informal

business talk, furthermore enforce the “made or done in Cannes” ecosystem (Marche 2014b).

Cannes Film Festival serves as an interesting example of a complex marketing effort where different elements 15

come together to build a brand of “Cannes”. Technically there exists no unified Cannes Film Festival, as in addition to the two “official competition programs”, Official Competition and Un Certain Regard, also three other competition programs—The Directors Fortnight, Critics Week and Cinefondation are taking place, and managed by their respective creative directors and teams. Despite these decisions, they all are communicated to give the public and impression of “one Cannes” thus enforcing all members of the structure.

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As Ostrowska (2010) notes, altogether, the Cannes ecosystem creates a form of

transnational art house cinema with a strong French elements as the activities

“coalesce in creating a peculiar type of a festival film, which could be called ‘French global’ art house film. The films are essentially transnational projects with a strong French [sic] to them acquired through the association with the international film festival funds and development programmes [sic]” (Ostrowska 2010, 150). !

The interdependence between the creative and financial sectors within the film entertainment

world is also maintained on the production side, namely by the International Federation of

Film Producer’s Associations, FIAPF, which not only regulates and certifies the world’s top 50

film festivals, but also boasts close ties to the MPAA which represents the interest of the

major Hollywood studios. Specifically, FIAPF’s goal is to ensure that internationally significant

festivals serve as a gateway for the international film industry and its products to the regional

or local market where the particular festival operates. By complying with FIAPF’s certification,

the festival therefore takes account that they enter “a trust contract between those festivals

and the film industry at large… [and] accredited festivals are expected to implement quality

and reliability standards that meet industry expectations” (FIAPF 2014). In light of the

Cannes Film Festival and FIAPF examples, it becomes clear yet again that the drive towards

consolidation between art and industry within the larger film entertainment world has

escalated to a degree where film festivals are not exclusively sites to celebrate artistic

accomplishments in film. Instead, they are organizations and networks of cultural economy

that, in addition to the programming, must provide business related benefits to their various

stakeholders within the film community. These services are primarily necessary to guarantee

access to good quality films for the sales agents and distributors—such as in the form of co-

production markets that provide access to exclusive content.

!!

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! !Figure 8. The author discussing a film project in development with Japanese producers in TIFFCOM CoPro Connection 2013 (formerly TPG). Copyright & printed with the permission of TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection & UNIJAPAN. !5.2 Co-production market as cultural interface

The consolidation processes between the artistic and economic aspects in the film

festival world are also marked by the increasing importance of co-production markets and or

other networking events. During the course of these activities, filmmakers and producers meet

with potential investors and financiers, sales agents, production or post-production partners,

as well as often undergoing training and seminars on diverse topics such as improving the

pitching skills for projects or aspects of international co-productions or certain territories.

The emergence of co-production markets as industry events attached to film festivals attests

to three larger cultural and economic trends.

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First, the increase in co-production-focused events signals and relates to the lack or 16

limited access to financing for primarily non-commercial film producers in smaller territories

or developing film cultures, including so called Third World countries, Eastern Europe and

East Asia. Although the Korean Film Council (KOFIC) has a support program for

international co-production which encourages art house filmmaking, and Japanese film

promotion UNIJAPAN has launched a certification system for recommending projects for

funding support from the Japanese Agency of Cultural affairs, East Asia has not yet

developed active and wide reaching support for non-commercial filmmaking such as those in

place in the EU context. This structural factor has a strong impact on the art house sector

insofar as the producers have to turn to private investors or co-production markets for

financial support. Furthermore, Ostrowska (2010) notes that often these filmmakers who have

limited access to financing are also marginalized. Marginalization should not be understood

here in purely political terms, but also in creative or economic aspects (Ostrowska 2010, 146).

In East Asia, for example, filmmakers who are engaged in art house filmmaking or explore

social taboos are often excluded from access to financing due to industry traditions and

conventions which do not actively support non-commercial filmmaking. Marginalization is

also enforced by the fact that the regional film industries are predominately focused on

commercial production and in certain territories, such as Hong Kong and mainland China, a

perception exists that worthwhile film projects should attract financing without co-production

based collaboration(Saluveer 2014g). Thus again, co-production markets become an intrinsic

A pioneering role in the rise of co-production markets is attributed to Rotterdam Film Festival`s CineMart 16

program, and the Hubert Bals Fund which has played a central role in introducing art house filmmakers, especially from Asian countries to European audiences. However, the 1990s and early 2000s saw the rapid escalation of co-production markets and networking events across the year including Cannes Cinefondation and Producers Network, Berlinale Co-Production market and its more recent Filmmaker residency program, Sarajevo Cinelink, Sofia Meetings and many others with currently 46 major co-production markets operating in Europe and US alone.

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strategy in finding overseas financing and distribution partners to complete titles that are 17

aimed at the non-mainstream audience.

Second, the boom of co-production markets is connected to the emergence of the

notion of “world cinema”, synonymous with transnational art house or artistic film, and its

distribution and consumption globally. As Ostrowska argues, “world cinema” is a product of

“the transnational film festival circuit, which is driven by the art house cinema ethos, and for

which the most important exhibition circuit is of film festivals” (Ostrowska 2010, 146).

Various co-production markets thus become sites where world cinema is discovered,

negotiated, produced and packaged for further presentation in the transnational festival

market. To ensure the circulation of artistically and creatively significant projects and

completed films festivals and co-production markets maintain close ties with each other on

personal and publicity levels. The Busan Film Festival partners with the European Audiovisual

Entrepreneurs program and the Udine Film Festival in the form of the Ties That Bind project

that matches European producers with (East) Asian colleagues in order to develop joint

projects. Tokyo’s TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection features annual workshops and producer

matching by French Atelier Cinema Du Europeen (ACE), whereas Hong Kong’s HAF

annually features projects from the DOX:LAB program of the Copenhagen Film Festival that

develops European-Asian creative filmmaking partnerships. Project markets also work closely

with each other exchanging projects and often giving out awards at partner events such as

Puchon’s NAFF award presented annually during the Hong Kong co-production market

providing “one round-trip ticket and hotel accommodation… to the filmmaker of the selected

project” (H. K. F. F. Forum 2014b).

Although transnational film studies have discussed this relationship in power balance terms, most recently 17

DeBoer (2014), the author strongly opposes the view that the linkages between European film industries and their peers in East Asia are shaped by orientalism or power struggles. Scholars advocating for indigenous industries are often missing the fact that these, predominantly Third World countries are lacking viable technical and financial infrastructure for film production, or if these are often managed by politically laden interest groups preventing access for the diversity of views. Recent example on politically significant co-production is Academy Award nominated documentary The Act of Killing (2014) depicting the atrocities of right wing militia in 1960s Indonesia.

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Interestingly, the central role in creating and maintaining these these international

networks has been historically played by the Rotterdam Film Festival, and the festival’s

CineMart co-production market and the Hubert Bals fund. Both have served for more than

two decades as the primary site of discovery and nurturing of art house filmmaking for East

Asian filmmakers, and have maintained close ties up to the present day with all of the co-

production markets, but especially with Busan and Hong Kong. In fact, the creation of the

Pusan Promotion Plan, the forerunner of the Asian Project Market in Busan, was directly

influenced and modeled on the example of Rotterdam and Cinemart. Know how and projects

were exchanged at the early stages of PPP as Ahn (2011) extensively describes (Ahn 2011). In

detail, Rotterdam Film Festival (IFFR) was initiated in 1978 with the aim of celebrating

innovative and challenging cinema in favor of red carpet and publicity driven festival films.

IFFR quickly achieved critical and popular appeal among cinephiles through its compromise

free programming (see Steinhart 2006, de Valck 2007, Wong 2011). Programmed and

managed by legendary cinephile director Hubert Bals, the IFFR’s CineMart film market was

launched in 1983 but quickly evolved into a co-production ventures as well as has came to

accommodate a film fund, the Hubert Bals Fund, together having “a rich history of

presenting daring, innovative and independent film projects”(R. F. Festival 2014). Bals has

been famously quoted arguing that “the future of cinematography is not to be expected from

Europe or the United States, but all the more from lesser known film cultures”, therefore,

CineMart, and its posthumously named Hubert Bals Fund, has historically focused on aiding

the development of art house cinema across the world’s lesser developed film cultures,

including East Asia (Steinhart 2006). Therefore, it is not surprising to discover the formation

of a close collaboration network between the Busan and Rotterdam festivals and co-

production markets. In fact, a substantial amount of films launched as projects in East Asian

co-production markets, especially those that have screened in Rotterdam, with the number

even surpassing heavyweight festivals such as Cannes, Berlin, Venice or San Sebastian. 18

For the international screening dynamics of completed titles see Figure 18

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!Figure 9. International screenings of completed projects from Busan, Puchon, Hong Kong, and Tokyo co-production markets 1998 - 2014. While exact numerical data is not available since the festival tracking process is time consuming, and the Tokyo market does not follow up on their projects, the centrality of the Busan, Hong Kong, Rotterdam, and Toronto festivals as main screening platforms for the completed projects is clearly visible.Source: Co-Production projects database of APM (PPP), HAF, NAFF & TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection (TPG) compiled by the author. !

Third, the predominance of co-production markets in the festival landscape also

signals the the emergence of a post-industrialist managerial and political thought of “creative

industries”. Specific to this paradigm, that is highly prevalent in the EU context, arts and film

sectors are seen as fields where an economy of ideas such as content or film exploitation

copyrights have replaced the traditional labor based or manufacturing industries. As Garnham

argues, a creative industries paradigm posits that “the idea of the culture and communications

sector as the new leading growth sector of the economy” (Garnham 2005, 24).

Broadly speaking, the impact of creative industries thought to the film industry can be

assessed in two aspects. First, the format of a co-production market itself attests to the notion

of an economy of ideas: teams consisting usually of a director and producer who are being

selected among applicants on the basis of certain creative and financial criteria are meeting

potential investors, financiers and production partners during 30 minute sessions where the

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film idea or project is first pitched, and then collaboration aspects are discussed. Thus, instead

of presenting or selling a tangible product in the form of a completed film, an idea or concept

for an upcoming and not finished project is presented.

Second, the creative industries discourse also underlines the economic value of

cultural production and cultural goods, which can be linked to Bourdieus’ notion of cultural

capital. The directors who participate in project markets possess “brand” or marketing value

which often translates into the potential to raise financing or boost the sales of a particular

film, and “it is not uncommon for symbolic capital accrued from participation in a

competition program to be directly capitalized at the market taking place next

door” (de Valck and Soeteman 2010, 294). One of the producers interviewed for this research

project verified the importance of project markets as a publicity and promotional avenue: “

this is the way to announce to the world that you have a film… it’s a platform to… get people

interested in your film in kind of like a PR/marketing terms” (Saluveer 2014b).

In connection to the discussion of a director’s brand value, similarly to film festivals,

co-producation markets serve as sites of passage for the participating filmmakers. To follow

the arguments of de Valck and Soeteman (2010), festivals—and in the context of this work,

co-production markets—function as “gateways of cultural legitimization, as filmmakers need

to pass through these events to make a transition - gain esteem in the professional

world” (ibid.). Project markets are especially noteworthy sites of passage, because they help to

discover and filter out new filmmaking talent through their selection and curatorial processes.

Therefore, project markets maintain a close relationship with the directors, and also track the

history of their projects as the completion and international festival exhibition success is also

translated to the brand value and sign of quality for the particular project market. Various

authors such as Ahn (2011) and Wong (2011) have analyzed the filmmaker-festival relationship

in the Asian context pointing out how the Busan Film Festival and its PPP co-production

market played an intrinsic role in developing and marketing their “own directors”, most

notably Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke whose earlier films such as Platform (2000) were

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closely related to the Pusan Promotion Plan.

Finally, and based on previous discussion, co-production markets could be considered

as an “interface” between the creative and economic boundaries surrounding an international

film festival, and their roles of producing and exhibiting world cinema. New media theorist

Lev Manovich has put forward that cinema “is actually on its own way to becoming a general

purpose cultural interface, a set of techniques and tools which can be used to interact with any

cultural data” (Manovich 2014). By expanding on Manovich’s notion, co-production markets

could be seen indeed serving as an “interface” that helps to shape and package cultural data

into internationally presentable projects, and occasionally completed films—they scout new

filmmaking talent, filter innovative and artistically interesting projects, and by providing

financing, networking and training opportunities, help to nurture ideas into completed films.

But since co-production markets take place within the framework of larger content markets

where film exhibition rights are sold, they also interface with the sales and distribution sector

for ensuring investment and exhibition possibilities. As Roger Garcia, the Director of the

Hong Kong International Film Festival remarks: “the sort of projects [co-production markets]

choose and present are the sort of projects that would probably be included in a film

festival… Not necessary in a commercial circuit run down… so for us, HAFF is an interface

between ourselves and the film market” (Saluveer 2014l).

Following the analysis of the cultural and theoretical aspects of co-production

markets, the following sections of this chapter will give an overview of the main co-

production markets in East Asia, as well as discussing their history, structure and properties.

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!5.3 The Asian Project Market: building regional film community

The Asian Project Market (APM), formerly Pusan Promotion Plan (PPP) is the co-

production market accompanying the Busan Film Festival and its film market, the Asian Film

Market. APM is held annually during three days in the first week of October on the premises

of the Busan BEXCO convention center and presents some 30 film projects in various stages

of development with more than 500 meetings organized between the filmmakers and

potential investors, producers or exhibitors. Several prizes are given to the best projects

including the Busan Award, the Creative Director Award, as well as prizes from various film

industry partners such as CJ and Lotte corporations, the PanStar Cruise Award, the Korean

Contents Agency Award (Kocca), the Technicolor Asia Award, the Funding 21 Award, and

last but not least, a prize provided by the pan-European television network ARTE (A. P.

Market 2014).

The inauguration of the co-production platform during the second year of the Busan

festival in 1998, is widely researched and documented by Ahn (2011) who links it to two major

changes taking place in late 1990s regional media environment. First, the launch of PPP

helped the festival to further solidify its regionalization strategy. In addition to a festival film

programming strategy that took East Asian filmmakers as their core feature the PPP also

sought ways to secure for itself a selection of fresh content via the projects developed at PPP

with the goal of screening completed films at the next edition of the festival (Ahn 2011). In

doing so, the festival aimed to build a strong relationship between the “made in Busan” brand

and the regional film community in East Asia as this strategy signaled “PIFF’s efforts to

integrate its image as a hub of Asian cinema with attempts to establish a reputation as a

market-oriented festival” (ibid., 2763). Indeed, as the analysis of the completed projects of the

regional market demonstrates, the first years of PPP managed to attract films from recognized

filmmakers such as Jia Zhangke, Hong Sangsoo, and Kim Ki Duk that were later screened at

world’s most recognized festivals including Berlin, Cannes and Rotterdam, achieving both

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critical and audience success, and furthermore, reenforcing the brand of the Busan film

festival and the PPP co-production market.

The second aspect that should be emphasized is the rapid development of the South

Korean film industry, the so called Korean wave that provided a flow of high quality Korean

feature films to regional and international markets during the late 1990s and early 2000s 19

coinciding with the launch of the PPP project market. As Susan Chae, the current head of the

Asian Project Market and one of the organizers of the event in its formative years, notes, “the

multiplexes were just starting in Korea, and [the industry] preferred and wanted to make the

business bigger… so in Korea the industry was very interested and there was [interest] from

the filmmakers” (Saluveer and Saluveer 2014). Thus, the success of the PPP in the formative

years and later of the APM, capitalized on the synergy of various cultural and structural

elements on the local, regional and international level. The careful selection of projects from

brand name or yet to be discovered East Asian and Korean directing talent, the linking of the

completed films to the locale of Busan via premieres at the festival, and finally, promoting

these films to international audiences via successive screenings at the world’s top film festivals

such as Berlin, Cannes or Venice.

It is fascinating to note that the strategy to discover and develop a coherent East Asian

film community has remained at the core of the Busan Film Festival up to the present day.

Over the years, the initial concept of the co-production market has evolved into a full-fledged

industry platform with events addressing the whole lifecycle of film production in the region.

This includes the Asian Film Market for acquiring and selling East Asian film content, the

Asian Project Market for nurturing new filmmaking talent, the Asian Cinema Fund where the

“goal is to encourage independent film productions and to help create a stable production

environment for Asian filmmakers” via script development, post production and documentary

support, the Asian Film Academy training program for up and coming Asian filmmakers, and

For a comprehensive discussion on the rise and impact of Korean wave see Saluveer (2013) “Breaking The 19

Wave: Audience Attitudes, Film Sector Performance And The Rise And Fall Of Korean Hallyu In Japan”.

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finally the BIFF Conference & Forum program which features international film industry

leaders discussing critical issues relating to regional film production (Noh 2011).

Importantly, the development of a full-fledged festival ecosystem, as was discussed in the

case of the Cannes Film Festival in the previous chapter, is concurrently linked to the Korean

governments efforts to export its film industry products and services internationally, with the

Busan city-festival brand occupying a central role in these strategies. As a sign of securing its

place as a locus of Asian festivals in terms of audience attendance, and promotional impact,

the festival moved in 2011 to a 150 million USD festival center designed by internationally

acclaimed Austrian architecture bureau Coop Himmelblau which according to Busan city

officials is a crucial venue for leading the future growth of Asia's media culture (Lee Hyo-won

2011). More recently, in October 2013, South Korea’s film policy coordination and

implementation organization, the Korean Film Council (KOFIC), also relocated to the city to

complement the already vibrant film production and promotion infrastructure that includes

the Busan Film Commission, and the Busan Cinema Complex focusing primarily on green

screen productions. The interplay of the festival’s creative aspects with the focus of regional

discoveries and international outreach, furthermore supported by municipal and governmental

structures have developed Busan into a central force of East Asian film industry which has

“adapted to the growing commercialism of the film industry, analyzed its economic

implications, and adapted its capacity to cope with changes in the regional and global context”

(Ahn 2011, 1467).

!

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!!5.4 The Hong Kong Film Financing Forum: the interface between Hong Kong and

mainland China

The Hong Kong Film Financing Forum or HAF, is the co-production market held

annually in March in conjunction with the Hong Kong International Film Festival (hereafter

HKIFF) organized by the Hong Kong Film Festival Society, and the Filmart Film and TV

market managed by the Hong Kong Trade and Development Council (HKTDC), the latter is

considered Asia’s largest with some 6,700 participants from 50 countries during the latest 2014

edition (HKTDC 2014). Hong Kong, a commercial and cultural hub in the region, has a rich

and widely documented history of local cinema, popular genres and pan-Asian stars and has

also played a pivotal role in the emergence of East Asian cinema as a film programming

concept that signifies internationally known films and filmmakers from the region. Also, the

role television played in developing the city into the first media and entertainment capital in 20

the region should not be underestimated.

In 1979, the second edition of the HKIFF launched, after just a year earlier presenting an

overview of classic Cantonese cinema that later evolved into the festival’s staple format of

that “showcased world cinema, Hong Kong retrospective and contemporary cinema and

regional Asian cinema” (HKIFF 2014). Long time Festival Director Roger Garcia also recalls

that at the time, the inauguration of the Asian cinema program aimed to challenge the notion

that Asian cinema primarily relied on Japanese cinema and the films of Akira Kurosawa,

choosing instead to showcase films from Thailand Korea, Indonesia and other countries from

the region which “attracted people to come to Hong Kong for a festival… because Hong

Kong as a trade and finance space was the hub of Asia anyway” (Saluveer 2014l).

For Hong Kong television and cinema history see Odham Stokes, Lisa. 2007 Historical Dictionary of Hong Kong 20

Cinema. Scarecrow Press and Lee, Vivian P Y. 2009. Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997. Palgrave MacMillan.

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Curtin (2003) and Sala (2003), among others, have argued that the late 1990s marked a

rapid decline in a Hong Kong film industry that had enjoyed stable local and regional success

since the late 1970s, “while Hong Kong produced 200 films in 1993, by 2002 the total output

was just 90” (Sala 2003, 1-2). The primary reasons behind this steep drop in production has

been associated with a decrease in audience interest in local films when compared to

Hollywood titles, as well as the Asian financial crisis that had a tremendously negative effect

on the local entertainment industry (ibid.). Chu (2003) also claimed that by the 1998 the film

crisis had reached its12 lowest point with the previous exports of Hong Kong films 21

accounting for 60-70% of the revenue dropping to less than 30%, while major companies

such as Golden Harvest suffered tremendous financial losses (Chu 2003, 123). In addition to

content driven and financial difficulties, tensions within the local film industry escalated due to

uncertainties brought on by the “one country, two systems” policy after the post-1997

handover of Hong Kong’s jurisdiction to the PRC that left producers uncertain with of what

to expect from the new cultural, economic and political circumstances.

However, possibilities for the revival of the native Hong Kong film industry were

twofold: increasing regional collaborations and co-productions as local industries adjusted to

the conventions and practices of the mainland. Chu (2003) points out regarding the latter, that

the legendary producer Raymond Wong had already remarked that “in the twenty-first century

the world would be dominated by two cinemas, Hollywood and China’s, if the mainland were

to open its market to the Hong Kong film industry” (Chu 2003, 125)}. Thus, it does not come

as a surprise, that ultimately both strategies—internationalization towards regional co-

productions and a refocus on mainland China were synthesized to form a quasi-national

industry structure. In particular, this configuration became rooted under the 2003 CEPA trade

As mentioned previously the present quota system allows for the screening of 34 foreign films annually. Thus 21

major media conglomerates, such as US ventures are keen to establish official co-production with PRC to bypass these quotas and the associated revenue sharing. Interestingly PRC’s film quota policy has been tied closely to economic factors in favor of excluding the censorship issues, with a new major revision and perhaps opening associated with the ongoing US-China and WTO negotiations. Sala (2003) has remarked that despite the relatively liberation brought on by CEPA, independent Hong Kong productions have also utilized “guerrilla tactics” to shoot in mainland without official certification and permits.

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agreement with relatively censorship free conditions for Hong Kong native productions while

opening the mainland market for Hong Kong films. As opposed to other overseas films, the

post-CEPA Hong Kong productions could then bypass the then Chinese import quota of 20

foreign films, considering the titles to be domestic as long as they met mainland censorship

regulations (Sala 2003, 1-2). With the backdrop of these structural changes, the Hong Kong

Film Financing Forum, as the second co-production market in East Asia emerged in 2000.

Over the years, HAF has developed into the key market not only for Hong Kong and

mainland Chinese titles, and other big budget productions, but has become “Asia's premier

project market designed to connect Asian filmmakers to upcoming film projects with

internationally prominent film financiers, producers, bankers, distributors, buyers, and funders

for co-production ventures” (H. K. A. F. F. Forum 2014a).

Wong (2011) has documented the early years of HAF, noting that the co-production

market came to being as an “outgrowth of Filmart”, the local film and television market

modeled after overseas film markets, but witnessed several difficulties in the formative years

including financing issues and the SARS epidemic, resulting in the cancellation of few editions

of the event and thus, increasing the centrality of Busan’s co-production efforts in the region

(Wong 2011, 152). In 2005, the management of the initially privately conceived venture was

handed over to the Hong Kong Trade and Development Council, the central coordinating

body of Filmart, but by 2007, HAF’s organizational duties found their home at Hong Kong

International Film Festival Society which formally supervises the event to the present

(HKIFF 2014).

Interestingly, little if anything has been published about the transnational personal and

structural connections which were at the heart of HAF’s creation. Specifically, intrinsic to

HAF’s foundation were two foreigners: Wouter Barendrecht, a former film programmer at the

Rotterdam Film Festival and one of the founders of the Cinemart Co-Production forum, and

later a producer and one of the owners of Dutch film sales company Fortissimo Films; and

Paul Yi, a South Korean producer and festival manager who had been active during the early

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stages of the Busan Film Festival and its PPP co-production market. Thus, the creation of a

native Hong Kong production market resulted from the transnational triangulation between

the international (European), regional (South Korean), and local film industries (Saluveer

2014g). Wouter Barendrecht’s role in particular should be highlighted in both setting

groundwork of the HAF’s formation , but in being equally responsible for the wave of Asian 22

cinema in European festival circuits in early 2000s with acclaimed films such as Last Life in the

Universe (2003), Getting Home (2007) and Tokyo Sonata (2008) to name a few films from

Barendrecht’s and Fortissimo Film’s extensive catalog of East Asian productions.

As Jacob Wong, the long time curator of HAF and the HKIFF, recalls, the foundation

of HAF also struck a chord with the disjunction between the notions Hong Kong film culture

and Hong Kong film industry. Whereas the latter increasingly focused on commercialization

and productions with mainland China as the main source of its revenue, the local art house

and independent filmmaking industry was left in need of the structural support provided by

the financing and networking activities facilitated by a co-production market. Thus, HAF

served and still continues to operate as a particular “interface” within the ecosystem of Hong

Kong cinema. To once again revisit the argument by HKIFF director Roger Garcia, HAF’s

position between the art house and commercial industries in Hong Kong, is also articulated by

its management of the HKIFF as an art film driven undertaking, and on the other hand, its

temporal positioning within the larger frame of mainland business focused on the Filmart film

and television market.

Additionally, HAF’s ability to function as an interface can be seen operating at the

regional and international level, serving as a gateway between the art house focused East Asian

and international film (festival) community and the commercialization focused entertainment

sector of mainland China. Jacob Wong verifies this unique disjuncture by commenting that

“while HAF was set up after the European model… there is some kind of mandate to

The untimely passing of Wouter Barendrecht at an age of 43 in 2009 had a profound effect on the exposure 22

of East Asian worldwide (see ). HAF annually issues the Wouter Barendrecht award to “ to a project with a director who is under the age of 35 and has not made more than three feature films” (HKIFF 2014b).

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support younger filmmakers and the productions that are more personal films… [but]

especially from Chinese speaking producers there are requests for more commercial

projects” (Saluveer 2014g). The importance of maintaining an international network both

with Europe as well as Asia is clearly visible in HAF’s events and awards structure.

Internationally, HAF partners with several other project markets including CineMart,

Dox:Lab, Moscow Business Square (MIFF), No Border co-production market, as well as the

European ACE producers network with regional ties to Busan’s APM, Puchon’s NAFF,

Shangahi’s SIFF and Taipei’s Golden Horse Project Pitch with awards issued by Create Hong

Kong, the Chinese branch of Fox Entertainment and others (H. K. A. F. F. Forum 2014b;

H. K. A. F. F. Forum 2014c).

!Figure 10. HAF projects by countries 2000 - 2013. Source: Co-Production projects database of APM (PPP), HAF, NAFF & TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection (TPG) compiled by the author. !

Returning to HAF’s gateway and interface functionality, the intermediary role between the

Hong Kong native and mainland Chinese industries and as a central locus for Chinese

language cinema becomes clear through an examination of the database of participating

projects from 2000-2013. The data clearly shows that the majority of projects have been from

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Hong Kong (69), followed by mainland China (49) whereas other East Asian countries such as

South Korea (29), Taiwan (27) and Japan (26) and Thailand (20) follow with after a relatively

large gap. Also, by examining the proposed budgets from that same period, it indeed becomes

clear that HAF has the lead on relatively big budget productions ranging from 1-3 million

USD whereas, in the case of other markets, such as Busan’s APM, the focus tends to be more

equally divided between medium and higher budget films. Renown Malaysian-Hong Kong

producer Lorna Tee (Postcards from the Zoo) remarks that “HAF as a co-production market is

one of the best places for projects that are more geared for commercial arenas to do well…

[the participating financiers and producers] tell you need more action, you need big

stars” (Saluveer 2014c). However, how the balance between the requirements of Hong Kong

native art house filmmakers and the requirements for big budget mainland films will be set,

remains one of the key questions for Hong Kong film policy at large. As Kong (2005) has

remarked the negotiation been the artistic and commercialization aspects within the Hong

Kong industry, as well as HAF, is an ongoing process, with established companies often

considering attendance to the project market as not effective (Kong 2005, 72). Interviews

conducted for this research project also verified that local industry heavyweights are often

reluctant to submit projects or participate in the market since the connection to the Chinese

mainland can provide an abundance of resources, and thus films that are perceived as good

should be pre-financed without external help (Saluveer 2014g) (Saluveer 2014h). What will be

the outcome for the industry and HAF is indeed an impending question; however, the “the

filmmakers in Hong Kong understand that they need to persist, and they understand that

[Hong Kong Film culture] needs to persist… films that may not sell to a lot of places, maybe

only appeal to a relative minority but this minority is an important minority” (Saluveer 2014g).

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!

!Figure 11. APM, HAF, NAFF & TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection (TPG) Projects by budget 1998- 2013. It should be noted here that since TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection has not maintained a steady archive of project metadata there can be variances in the budget categories regarding the Japanese market. However, the general dynamics towards medium / to high budget projects are observable across all markets. Source: Co-Production projects database of APM (PPP), HAF, NAFF & TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection (TPG) compiled by the author. !5.5 The Tokyo Co-Pro Connection: negotiating internationalization and globalization

If the beginnings of co-production markets in Busan and Hong Kong were motivated by

the goal of discovering new talent for the festival circuit, or addressing the imbalance between

art house and commercial filmmaking, then the roots of Tokyo’s Co-Pro Connection co-

production market (formerly Tokyo Project Gathering or TPG) emerged from a somewhat

more complicated background of structural and economic factors that maintain an ongoing

influence on the international collaboration with the Japanese film industry. These include: the

dominance of studio based production and distribution within the over-saturated and self-

sustainable domestic market, the media sector’s focus on content production, and finally, the

question of the balance between internationalization and Japanese economic globalization, the

so-called kokusaika.

The Tokyo Project Gathering was founded in 2005 by the Japan Association for

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International Promotion of the Moving Image (UNIJAPAN), an organization founded by the

Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA)

with the goal of promoting Japanese films overseas (UNIJAPAN 2014). In 2005, the

organization joined with the Tokyo International Film Festival and participates in the

management of the festival’s industry activities in addition to hosting promotional booths of

Japanese cinema at overseas festivals, maintaining a film database, and publishing an annual

yearbook of Japanese cinema (ibid). The creation of the TPG in 2005 to complement the

TIFFCOM film and contents market launched two years earlier as “an opportunity for

filmmakers and film professionals to present their projects at any stage: from development to

just-before finalizing, and help them find and raise funds from overseas” can be seen in light

of the structural changes in the Japanese film industry(UNIJAPAN 2009). Specifically, it

resonates with the “cool Japan” policy to increase the exports of Japanese content overseas.

Whereas the Japanese film and entertainment market is considered to be the third

largest in the world after US and China, by the early 2000s it had entered a steep crisis, and by

the year 2002, it hit its lowest point in terms of domestic film production. with just 27.1%

domestic production versus the 72.9% foreign imports (Observatory and Marche 2014;

Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan 2014). This widely noted and discussed

decline is attributed to a variety of factors , including: the prevalence of television as the 23

main source and producer of entertainment, the over-saturated domestic market, and the

boom of so called mini theaters in late 1980s and 1990s that escalated film and content prices

resulting later in a wave of bankruptcies (UNIJAPAN 2009, 10-16) (Tezuka 2011,1605, 1769).

As Tezuka (2011) further notes, the long lasting effects of the burst economic bubble of the

1990s forced the Japanese majors in the entertainment industry to focus even more inwardly,

thus strengthening the already dominant position of the major studios against the smaller and

An important aspect in escalating the divide is also related to the lack of exhibition possibilities for 23

independent films in major cinemas. The confinement of independent productions to art house theaters with the lukewarm interest towards foreign films and cultures especially among younger audiences is also casting negative impact on both the production of domestic independent films as well as international co-productions. For extended discussion on audience and industry dynamics see (see Niskanen 2010; UNIJAPAN 2009).

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independent producers of primarily art house films (ibid., 3303).

Considering that in early 2000s a new wave of Japanese filmmakers such as Takeshi

Kitano, Takashi Miike, Hirokazu Koreeda and Kiyoshi Kurosawa had enjoyed success at

international festivals, a complex situation emerged where several seemingly contradictory

ideologies regarding the development of the film industry emerged. At the larger policy level,

the Japanese government was interested in increasing the country’s exports and the new

notion of content—including anime, games, and film—was seen as a lucrative opportunity in

the post-2002 boom of “cool Japan” thought, due to the perception that “Japanese animation

and computer games is competitive content, but the feature film is not so

competitive” (Saluveer 2014e). Thus, the launch of TIFFCOM in 2003 was intended to help

“capitalize on Japan’s achievements in animation and other content creation… [and] it attracts

not only buyers and sellers of films, but also of TV programs, animations and other

entertainment-related content” (Niskanen 2010, 33). On another hand, the increasing vertical

integration dominance of the major studios in all areas of the film cycle from development to

exhibition, left independent filmmakers in need of resources for their productions since the

majors “Toho, Toei and Shochiku, command over 80% of box-office revenues through the

release of films that comprise roughly 20% of all Japanese film releases” (Niskanen 2010, 12).

Since 2002, the dominance of foreign films has steadily decreased, and by 2013, Japanese films

had regained their lead with a 60% dominance of the domestic box office. The divide between

the independent and studio sectors has correspondingly escalated, leaving the Managing

Director of UNIJAPAN, Takashi Nishimura, to recently comment that the “studio films, and

independent films, commercial films, and art films [are like] two worlds” (Saluveer 2014e).

The TPG (now TIFFCOM Co-Production market) and its host organization of

UNIJAPAN can thus be seen operating between the axes of two seemingly polarized

objectives—the internationalization of exported Japanese contents overseas, and the

globalization of the relatively isolated Japanese domestic film industry. Tezuka (2011) has

remarked that in the case of the Japanese film industry, internationalization and globalization

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assume meanings that rather oppose the widespread contextual use. For the Japanese industry,

internationalization is widely used to denote “winning more prizes in international film

festivals and increasing film exports” whereas kokusaika or economic globalization is seen as

“the removal of Japan’s cultural barrier and further opening the domestic market for foreign

(mainly Western) goods and symbols” (Tezuka 2011, 294, 307). It should be further noted,

that the internationalization aspect can also be viewed as entailing a belief for the existence

of an overseas, primarily Asian market where Japanese content could be exported because

“Japan can raise the added value and competitiveness of its industries, even amid global

competition, by directly and indirectly presenting the appeal of Japanese culture to the world,

and by incorporating the elements of ‘Cool Japan’ founded on a new industrial structure and

lifestyles” (Cool 2011). Thus, at the wider perspective co-production activities can be viewed

in this context, not as creative collaboration or partnership opportunity but as a tool for

foreign investments into Japanese content which could, in turn, be exported overseas.

Taking place over the course of three days at the end of October, in conjunction with

the Tokyo International Film Festival and the TIFFCOM contents market, the format of

Tokyo Co-Pro Connection closely follows closely the aforementioned internationalization -

globalization axis with sections divided among Japanese, European, South Korean (KOFIC)

and Rest of the World projects. The TIFFCOM content market, as the event host, facilitates

sales of animation, television programming, and in recent years, music and other content,

tying the co-production market to the larger policy of content export seen as an “interway to

an exchange of export and import of other Asian countries and Japanese companies” as Mika

Morishita, head of TIFFCOM has remarked (Saluveer 2014e). Whereas the historically

prevalent focus on Japanese projects in a variety of forms and formats, from animation to full

features, can be seen to be in line with facilitating the export function (See Figure 12), the

recent European and Rest of the World sections, as well as the training programs provided by

the French ACE network fall close to the globalizing aim of widening the domestic film

industry’s understanding of international collaboration practices.

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!

!Figure 12: TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection (TPG) projects by country 2005—2013 showing clearly the market’s preference of presenting domestic projects.

Source: Co-Production projects database of APM (PPP), HAF, NAFF & TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection (TPG) compiled by the author. !

Takenari Maeda, head of the Co-Pro Connection highlights the educational function of

the Co-Pro Connection by noting that due to the historical focus on domestic market,

Japanese producers “don’t have equal footing with foreign producers who have far more

experience in co-production, so we have to take it more step by step and let the Japanese film

producers grow and get acquainted” (Saluveer 2014e).

However, as several Japanese film professionals interviewed for this research

commented, TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection’s attempts are challenged to a degre by various

barriers, including foreign language ability, hindering international collaboration: the lack of

project driven producers, the absence of unions and common goals within the film industry.

Thus, the “big difficulty with trying to find an appropriate Japanese partner is you're stuck

with just those who can communicate in English… not meeting an executive that doesn’t

really know co-production” (Saluveer 2014c). The short-term goals of Japanese policymakers

regarding the film sector, and the absence of co-production treaties have also been considered

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as limiting factors (Saluveer 2014d) (Saluveer 2014f) (Saluveer 2014e). Furthermore, the lack

of comprehensive project completion tracking and absence of awards at the Co-Pro

Connection can also be traced to tensions and fears of nepotism within the Japanese film

industry leading several interviewees to point out that few films that have participated in the

market, such as Sono Shion’s Love Exposure, Yuya Ishii’s Mitsuko Decides, Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s

Headshot and independent and more experimental titles like Masaki Iwana’s Vermillion Souls and

Edwin’s Blind Pig Wants to Fly have an documented history of international exposure.

Thus, taking into account the rebranding of the event over the years , as well as the 24

larger structural issues such as the unavailability of a wide-reaching support scheme for the

independent film industry, with the exception of the pioneering UNIJAPAN Co-Production

certification program established in 2011, TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection has yet to establish

its position and identity with regard to the other production markets in the region. Several

producers, as well as researchers such as DeBoer (2014) have nevertheless communicated that

co-productions, especially with China and the US are seen as attractive possibilities for both

independent and studio producers, although the recent Japanese-Indonesian collaboration

Killers (briefly discussed in chapter 2) have demonstrated the feasibility of international

collaboration (Saluveer 2014d). But the question of how to effectively manage the relationship

between the diverse needs of independent filmmakers while also attracting the interest of

major studios and attractive projects will remain a challenge for the Co-Pro Connection into

the foreseeable future. Ultimately, this question addresses a larger sociocultural discussion

between Japanese policymakers and both the independent and major studios on the nature of

film industry development and methods of encouraging creative and financial collaboration

with overseas partners.

!

Tokyo’s co-production market has been rebranded several times over the years from Tokyo Project Gathering 24

to TIFFCOM Project market and most recently TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection.

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5.6 The Network of Asian Fantastic Films: taking genre global

The Network of Asian Fantastic Films or NAFF, is the latest event to join the network of

co-production markets in East Asia, having been initiated in 2008, a decade later from the

region’s pioneering market in Busan. What clearly sets NAFF apart from the above discussed

co-production markets of APM, HAF and TPG / Co-Pro Connection is its sole focus on the

promotion of genre cinema—comedy, horror, fantasy, sci-fi and other “edgy films” and

filmmakers in East Asia. The organizers see NAFF as a comprehensive platform for genre

filmmaking, “a multifaceted, in-depth industry program for global genre film professionals…

for all film-related fields, including film development, co-production, financing, post-

production, solidifying its place as a leader of Asian genre film market” (Network 2014).

Taking place annually in July during the rapid rise of the Puchon International Fantastic Film

Festival (PiFAN), the largest film festival dedicated to showcasing genre films in Asia, into a

well known player in East Asian film industry collaboration can be attributed to a successful

combination of several elements including the international interest for Asian action, horror

and fantastic cinema, the synergy with domestic audience film industry via the PiFAN festival,

and the event’s strategy to build a community between genre film professionals in East Asia.

The overseas interest in East Asian genre film has been widely documented by academia

(such as Choi & Marciano 2009, and Lee 2011 to name a few) and the film industry trade

press has dissected its genre conventions, actors and stars, and Hollywood remakes. Without

going into further discussion, it is sufficient to consider that many critically and publicly

lauded East Asian films—such as Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Zhang Yimou’s

Hero, Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy, Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale, not mention Takashi Shimizu’s

Ju On, Hideo Nakata’s Ringu series or Takashi Miike’s Audition—can be viewed as belonging to

the canon of East Asian genre cinema. However, if previously, genre films have been treated

as somewhat inferior in comparison to primarily dramatic feature content, or associated with

subcultures and cult cinema fandom, then the recent years have seen the liberalization of

genre from its relative negative connotations. Partially this has resulted due to the academia’s

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discovery that extreme label has been often utilized as a marketing strategy by overseas

distributors , a process that has also coincided with the industry success in distributing Asian 25

genre films abroad such a the Hong Kong thriller series Infernal Affairs, remade later in the US

by Martin Scorsese as The Departed, Thai martial arts extravaganza Ong-Bak, or the above

discussed example of Indonesian action spectacle The Raid and its sequel. The ability of genre

films to travel and overcome cultural barriers both regionally within pan-Asian filmgoing

culture, according to Lim (2007), or internationally can be perhaps attributed to the fact that

genre films can more easily bypass national and cultural borders precisely based on the

audience’s association with features and conventions of the genre not the films cultural

properties per se (B. C. Lim 2007, 120) . But perhaps the best verification for the redefined role

of genre can be witnessed from the recent editions of Cannes Film Festival which have not

only featured the restored version of Tobe Hooper’s horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

during its Director’s Fortnight section, but also has included genre titles across the entire

programming spectrum alongside a midnight genre program and industry networking mixer 26

(Sandwell 2014).

NAFF has actively tapped into the the recent boom of genre cinema both by its project

selection and international networking strategy. Instead the of the original plan by the

organizers to create a traditional film market attended by film companies, buyers and sales

agents, a decision was made to develop a genre specific collaboration conference-like platform

which had never been previously executed (Saluveer 2014j). The event boasts an umbrella like

structure with It Project for co-production meetings, the Industry Program with Project

Spotlight on “one selected Asian country's genre films in development and its filmmakers”,

NAFForum of genre specific lectures and discussion and the Fantastic Film School for

For an excellent discussion on the branding of East Asian cinema as “extreme” by once prominent now 25

bankrupt DVD label Tartan see Dew, Oliver. 2007. “Asia Extreme: Japanese Cinema and British Hype.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 5 (1).

Examples of recent titles that could be classified as genre films in Cannes include Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, 26

Nicholas Windig Refn’s Only God Forgives, Jang Chul-soo’s Bedevilled, Sang-ho Yeon’s The King of Pigs, Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are (and its 2013 remake by Jim Mickle), as well as David Cronenberg’s recent Maps to the Stars.

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“aspiring filmmakers to experience colorful (or, multicolored) world of film images through

workshops, team pitching, and Master Class” (Network 2014). Besides engaging

internationally recognized genre professionals as lecturers and masterclass teachers, NAFF’s

international networking has established partnerships with Hong Kong HAF project market,

as well as participating in the recent midnight genre film screening program Blood Window

(Hopewell 2014).

!Figure 13: NAFF projects by country 1998 -2013.

Source: Co-Production projects database of APM (PPP), HAF, NAFF & TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection (TPG) compiled by the author. !

NAFF’s successful strategy to tap onto the popularity of genre films regionally and

internationally is also visible from the overview of projects that have participated in the It

Project market with South Korea (45), followed by Japan (15), Singapore (14), the Philippines

(10), Hong Kong (10), Taiwan (9), and the USA (10) among the region’s countries with a

notable representation. Several NAFF’s titles including the South Korean school bullying

thriller The King of Pigs and transgender drama The Weight, along wight Taiwanese gay comedy

Will You Love Me Tomorrow, and the above discussed Indonesian action film The Raid 2:

Berandal, have been premiered in the international festival circuit, specifically in Cannes,

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Venice, Berlin and Sundance, signaling the potential of regional genre films to reach

international audiences.

Regarding its positioning towards the South Korean industry, NAFF’s position can be

interpreted twofold. Although the event inevitably has drawn inspiration from the country’s

leading co-production market in Busan, it has nevertheless managed to secure funding from

government bodies, despite the seemingly challenging content focus, by presenting Korean

genre projects as its core selection can be also witnessed from the data of participating

projects (Saluveer 2014j). However, NAFF also benefits from the synergy with its parent

organization, the PiFAN festival established in 1997 by the city of Puchon “to highlight

horror, psycho-thriller, sci-fi, and sexual themed films which are all marginalized in

Asia” (PIFAN 2014). As the former festival programmer Jin Park has marked elsewhere, the

fact that PiFAN’s popularity also translates to the NAFF has been partly derived from the fact

that the festival is able to screen films outside the ratings system and thus feature content

which would be otherwise censored by the Korea Media Rating Board (Industry 2014).

Finally, NAFF’s efforts in creating a East Asian genre film network are highlighted by the

events annual focus on different Asian territories within its Project Spotlight program that has

featured Singapore (2009), Taiwan (2010), Japan (2011), Indonesia (2012), and recently the

Philippines (2013). The Project Spotlight has risen from the organizers desire to increase East

Asian co-production possibilities for genre titles between Singapore and Australia or New

Zealand, in order to account for English language commonality, or Malaysia, mainland China

and Hong Kong within the Sino language axis (Saluveer 2014j). However, an inartistic role is

also played by the realization of overseas markets as “there is a channel to have a co-

production and in fact many producer financiers from outside of Asia who are looking for

these genre titles” (ibid.) .

The tying of a genre film driven identity with a locale of Puchon to construct an

internationally recognized genre festival and project market brand echoes with Stringer’s

arguments for the interplay of festivals and their locales in creating a marketable identity.

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Stringer claims that “the international dimensions of local film cultures, may produce a

genuine local city identity based around a shared sense of cinephilia and an engagement with

dynamic processes of cultural exchange” (Stringer 2001, 140). Combining the attraction of

genre film content with regional production networks in East Asia with international

outreach via project selection and participation in international industry networks and events,

and tying that to the edgy image of the PiFAN festival, NAFF has managed to create a unique

indignity for the Puchon city, otherwise an relatively unknown industrial outskirt of Seoul.

The case studies presented in this chapter illustrated that although the co-production

markets in East Asia operate within a physical geography, the structural conditions and thus

creative and film industry related focus of each market differs to a great degree from the

others. Situating the case studies into the larger discussion of the transformation of the film

festivals from from sites of national cinema to multifaceted international events that operate

in symbiosis with the needs of the international and transnational film industry, the chapter

presented how Busan perceives its role as a regional discoverer of new talent, Hong Kong

operates as cultural interface between mainland and its native film culture, Tokyo seeks its

identity between the international and global, and Puchon builds a genre production

community based on unique positioning and a diverse set of regional and international

activities. How these strategies will contribute and correlate to the production of East Asian

media community and space facilitated by co-production will be explored in the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 6. DISCUSSION: PRODUCING EAST ASIA

Figure 14. Co-production meetings between filmmakers and financiers at the Network of Asian Fantastic Films (NAFF), Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival. Copyright & printed with the permission of Network of Asian Fantastic Films. !!The previous chapters conceptualized co-productions, observed the consolidation within the

festival circuit towards film business and production practices, analyzed film festivals and their

co-production markets in Hong Kong, Busan, Puchon and Tokyo, and gave an overview of

the theoretical debate on the notion of East Asian media space enabled by the flows of

people, capital and popular culture. But if indeed East Asia has a recognizable cultural

geography or identity based on popular culture, formed by the interplay of the forces of

hybridity-glocalization, cultural proximity and distance, and decentralization-recentralization as

presented in Chapter 3, then inevitable questions arise. How do certain media locales, or to

follow Curtin, media capitals of film festivals, and their human actors—filmmakers,

producers, market runners, and policy managers—contribute to the creation of this particular

identity? Are there discrepancies between different groups regarding the role of film

collaboration in the region, acknowledging that arguments have been put forward that

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globalization and transnationalization processes have not erased, but re-articulated the efforts

for nation building and nation branding in the region (Berry, Liscutin, and Mackintosh 2009,

722) (Huang 2011, 5-7)? Are co-production markets and their participants thus engaged in a

dialogue between the national and the transnational for the cultural geography of East Asia?

The current chapter sets the theoretical conceptualizations of co-productions and East Asian

media space framework against case studies of film festivals and markets in the region. It

furthermore draws from the interviews with some fourteen film professionals in the region

ranging from producers to quasi-governmental film management and policy organizations.

The main conclusion of the research, and a starting point of the discussion of this

chapter indicates that instead of a coherently observable cultural geography fixed by the

dichotomies proposed by Chua and Iwabuchi, the East Asian regional film community is a

dynamic constellation of ideas and film industry practices interacting with the local, national

and regional as a particular narrative of future. Thus, East Asia in this regard is not so much

imagined, to follow Anderson’s classic notion of imaginary communities, but a (co)-produced

sense of future encompassing transnational identity and a set of interactions, practices and

outcomes, such as (art house) film productions, emerging at sites of film festivals and co-

production markets. In claiming such, the author agrees with DeBoer viewing the

transnational film networks as “assemblages that make up East Asian coproduction [that]

incorporate a range of differently scaled production practices—film and media imaginaries,

promotional and production practices, and industry mandates and aspirations” (DeBoer 2014,

119). What prevents these aspirations from materializing into a regionally coherent media

identity and media collaboration space is a set of differences or obstacles—structural, cultural,

and geopolitical—that will be subsequently discussed within this chapter.

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!6.1 Structural obstacles

Figure 15. Thai thriller Headshot (2011), produced with the support of French film sales company Memento Films, participated in Tokyo Project Gathering (TPG) co-production market in 2010. Copyright & printed with the permission from Local Color Films !The first set of obstacles to a coherent East Asia media identity and space are structural, and

concern the fundamentally different characteristics of regional film industries. As Jäckel (2003)

and Bergfelder (2005) have demonstrated, the shared understanding of European art cinema,

and pan-European co-productions emerged due to the interplay of a shared sense of auteur as

well as cultural and economic affinities such as the “perceived commonality of independent

artistic expression or style, and a wider humanistic concern, as well as creative autonomy and

independence” along with with relatively equally developed economy (Bergfelder 2005b, 317)

(Bergfelder 2005a, 55).

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Jäckel (2003) furthermore highlights the role of cultural and structural similarities as

homogenizing factors in the case of intra-European co-productions which paved a way for a

“genuine form of international cultural—and economic—collaboration… certainly

represented a popular form of cultural production in Europe—admittedly, with a strong Latin

flavour” (Jäckel 2003, 239 s). However, as case studies from Japan, Hong Kong, and South

Korea have demonstrated, the countries as well as their respective film festivals and co-

production markets project distinct structural conditions and thus engage in different

strategies.

Perhaps the most contradictory state of affairs concerns Japan, as the world’s third

largest entertainment market has so far been relatively self sustained, if not to say self isolated

regarding international collaboration. Here the historically stable hegemony of major studios

such as Toho, Toei and Shochiku paired with the production committee system (seisaku

iinkai) , and lack of foreign language speaking media professionals has had a negative impact 27

on regional and international co-productions. Although Tezuka (2011) and DeBoer (2014)

provide examples of a diverse history of regional linkages with Hong Kong and China such as

the example of Japanese producer Shozo Ichiyama who has produced several of the

acclaimed films of Chinese director Jia Zhangke, these attempts have been largely limited due

to various structural limitations some of which are discussed below.

First, within the Japanese film industry and policymaking circles there exists a lack of a

clear definition as to what constitutes a “Japanese film”, which in turn reduces international

collaboration to “cultural exchanges” and prevents the development of a “point system, and

implementation of tax incentives and other schemes that would be available to

countries” (Niskanen 2010, 36-37). While the recently launched, and one of a kind,

Seisaku iinkai or the production committee model is the prevalent production system in Japan in case of which 27

companies across the film production and dissemination system form a joint committee. These would often include but are not limited to production company, studio, distributor/exhibitor, talent management offices, and advertising companies. Although the goal of seisaku iinkai is to reduce costs, the joint decision making power of all members is seen as an obstacle to its efficiency, especially in the international context. For more discussion on seisaku iinkai see (Niskanen 2010; UNIJAPAN 2009)

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UNIJAPAN Certification Program allows for a recoupment of production costs for 28

Japanese-overseas co-productions and also features a point system for assessing the films

suitability for certification, its impact remains rather limited. Although the relatively high

budget requirements for a submitted project also curb the program’s potential to invigorate

the independent industry, the key limitation comes from the fact that the final decision for

subsidy qualification is take by the Agency of Cultural Affairs which has not set forth clear

terms as to what is entailed for a film to obtain Japanese nationality.1

This lack of a definition for the nationality of a Japanese film product also has a visible

implication for international co-production treaties since the ratification of bilateral

agreements would grant foreign producers the possibility of benefits within Japan’s territory.

However, this possibility stands somewhat in contrast to the present strategy of Japanese

policymakers as well as media businesses to encourage export in favor of collaboration. This

resonates with Tezuka’s (2011) argument for the persistence of an internationalization strategy

to promote Japanese film and media products abroad as being culturally unique. Specifically,

internationalization here goes hand in hand with the perception of an existence of a strong

(national) body of media products that can be exported, particularly to East Asian markets

where a demand is perceived to exist. Thus, it could be argued that the present Japanese media

policy follows a derivative of the EU art film discourse of co-production in the sense that

collaboration is seen as a way of developing a culturally unique (if not nationally

representative) film products, with partnerships established primarily for financial gain. The

examples of subsidy programs on behalf of the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry

(METI) such as a support for “TIFFCOM exhibition booth materials; film and TV subtitling

costs, and production of film masters for overseas releases” testify to this international export

driven concept national media (Gray 2012a).

1 For more information on the UNIJAPAN subsidy program see http://unijapan.org/news/28

CoproSubsidy130829.pdf

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Several interviewees further pointed out, that differences in how film and media

companies are structured and the somewhat passive role of the producer in the Japanese

production committee seisaku iinkai system are also limiting factors for international

collaboration,2 even in the increasing case whereas overseas finances are desired. In the

European or US context, producers are allocated creative and decision making power

according to their investments, and in the South Korean case producers take an percentage of

the profit of the film as their revenue, instead of a fixed salary as is often the case with

Japanese producers. Combined with the fact that often Japanese producers are contracted as

employees not as investors, and therefore not having an intrinsic interest in the success or

failure of the film, was also seen as limiting the possibility for co-productions (Saluveer 2014f;

Saluveer 2014a). These difficulties are further enforced by the prevalence of the seisaku iinkai

production system, which is based on consensual decision making between Japanese

production partners, wherein “the approval of the production committee must be obtained

for any changes made in the storyline, cast, etc” contrasting again with the rapid decision

making required in international collaboration (UNIJAPAN 2009, 46).

Considering these difficulties the TIFFCOM Co-Pro connection market operates

between contradicting forces of domestic industry limitations and prevalence of an

internationalization driven export strategy for Japanese content that contrasts with the

dynamic collaboration practices of the international film industry. Despite these limitations,

interviewees remarked on a high interest for Japanese collaborations since the country is still

considered to be a crucial territory, especially for South Korean films and co-productions

(Saluveer 2013b).

In contrast, Hong Kong and its Hong Kong Asia Film Financing Forum faces a

different set of structural questions and problems. As was revealed earlier, HAF serves on one

hand as a gateway or a cultural interface between Hong Kong and mainland China, but at the

same time as a tool for preserving Hong Kong’s local film culture. In that respect, the

perception of co-productions in Hong Kong seems to be associated with the financial/

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business discourse that aims to benefit from the lucrative Chinese market. However, that

process contrasts and is in complex negotiation with the European art film, and the artistic

collaboration-based “true love” format of co-productions advocated by HAF.

The question of local identity versus mainland hegemonization in the film business also

emerged also during the discussion with producer Lorna Tee who remarked that Hong Kong

policymakers see film purely as a business and not a cultural activity as “Hong Kong

government always considers the film industry as another business entity and therefore, has

always been reluctant [to support co-productions]. They say we can’t spend tax payer money

on businesses” (Saluveer 2014c). At the same time, others, including Jeffrey Chan, CEO of

Bona Film Group, the first privately owned company that gained distribution license the PRC,

have pointed out the inevitability of and the complex relationship between the Hong Kong

industry’s dependence on the mainland as source of income. Thus, for Chan, orientation to a

mainland Chinese audience has brought unforeseen profits previously unavailable in the

limited scope of the Hong Kong box office. But even if collaboration is based on the export

of the Hong Kong industry’s skills and expertise, the specific cultural and business conditions

cast an influence as “these big budget production(s) [are] actually getting more and more

China centered in the sense that you need to be more Chinese with more Chinese elements so

that it works better in China” (Saluveer 2014h). Questions therefore arise not only regarding

compliance with censorship laws, as was feared by post-CEPA writers such as (Sala 2003), but

also about larger topics such as historical memory and experience, since “the mainland is more

looking for their own type of entertainment, the mainland audience want to see their stories,

their memory, their experience” (Saluveer 2014h).

As curator of the Hong Kong Film Financing Forum, Jacob Wong has also articulated

the complex relationship between the mainland Chinese and the Hong Kong native film

culture within the boundaries of the HAF. While Chinese collaborations have brought a

massive influx of capital, and the possibility of accessing the second largest film market in the

world, these collaborations have also resulted in the perception in the local industry that films

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should be pre-financed considering the availability of mainland capital. Thus, participating in

the co-production market “would give the wrong signal” (Saluveer 2014g). Most importantly,

collaboration with the mainland also facilitates the imagination of a new type of collective

memory, “which is really rosy, which is really a fantasy” (ibid.).

On a positive note, amidst this search for an identity between the indigenous and the

mainland, a new school of filmmakers has emerged who not only cherish co-productions, but

has equally managed to attract Hong Kong audiences as well. For example, director-producer

Pang Ho-Cheung, and his Hong Kong and Beijing based production company Making Film

Productions, has been a frequent visitor of the HAF with projects such as The Bus about

“series of rapes on a long distance bus” while equally achieving box office success with Hong

Kong based romantic comedies Love in a Puff (2010) and its Beijing centered sequel Love in the

Buff (2012). The director also opened the latest edition of the Hong Kong International Film

Festival with his recent title Aberdeen (2014) (Hendrix 2014). For the interviewed producers,

the re-emerging of audience interest presents a hope for Hong Kong’s native film tradition as

“you can see the audiences want films made by Hong Kong for Hong Kong and not films

made by Hong Kong for China” (Saluveer 2014c). Last but not least, the example of Pang Ho

Cheung attests that despite the complex position vis-a-vis commercial productions, the Hong

Kong Film Financing Forum not only serves as an interface to the Chinese market, but also as

a site for nurturing “films that may not sell to a lot of places, maybe only appeal to a relative

minority but this minority is an important minority” (Saluveer 2014g).

Finally, the case of the well established Asian Project Market in Busan and the Network

of Asian Fantastic Films, the structural questions of the South Korean film industry should

be briefly assessed as well. Seemingly, the South Korean film industry could be described as

the most well off out of the three discussed countries in the region, with the territory having

the second highest rate of admissions in the world with 4.25 viewers per capita, a solid track

record of annual box office smash hits such as The Thieves, Miracle in Cell No.7, and most

recently the sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer (KOFIC 2014, 1-2, 19). Due to the “Snowpiercer-effect”

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generated by the successful sales of the film to overseas territories, the export revenues of the

country’s cinematic output increased a stunning 83.7% along with a concurrent rise in the

export of visual effects and skill driven services (ibid., 1, 47). However, as Sanghee Han, Team

Manager of the International Co-Production Team of the Korean Film Council (KOFIC) has

remarked, this rapid growth of the film industry has started to cannibalize the domestic

market, forcing both producers and policymakers to seek possibilities for expanding the

territory of Korean films. Whereas potential could lie in ancillary markets or digital services,

the main opportunity for the growth of the industry has been identified as relying on co-

productions, “if co-production is facilitated, you can secure more capital from foreign

countries and then or you can also secure the foreign market” (Saluveer 2014k). Therefore, the

various activities initiated by the Korean Film Council are seen to utilize the international

treaties and financially driven discourses of co-productions on one hand to increase the

partner territories where Korean films could be distributed, while simultaneously attracting

foreign capital to spend on Korean skills and services. Examples of the blend of these two

strategies include the 30% location rebate incentive for foreign productions, which has been

considered fundamental in securing the production of Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron in Seoul,

the active promotion of Korean co-production overseas via dedicated programs in Beijing and

Los Angeles, and last but not least, the framework agreements with mainland China, France,

and New Zealand, and most recently a Memorandum of Mutual Understanding with Estonia.

Both co-production markets, APM and NAFF and their respective regionalization

strategies can be seen to be in consonance with the the larger goal of the promotion of the

Korean film industry internationally. Various industry programs such as the Asian Film

Academy and the Asian Cinema Fund, or NAFF’s annual focus on a particular Asian territory

attract regional talent to utilize the local industry’s services. At the same time, the co-

production markets themselves discover interesting filmmakers for the festival screening cycle,

as well as offering financing and networking possibilities for Korean producers to link up with

their regional colleagues. However, despite these structurally enabling factors, facilitating co-

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productions in the Korean context has not been as straightforward as it might initially seem.

For example, veteran South Korean producer Jonathan Kim remarked that collaboration with

Europe is often hindered by the reliance of European producers on subsidies as “when it

comes down to how much that film going to make, they didn’t really care… it was all about

getting government grants and paying their fees” (Saluveer 2014i). But more importantly,

cultural differences between the countries in East Asia is seen as a major obstacle that has to

be crossed, “because in a perfect world when we do co-productions we all hope that the film

does well in both countries… but that’s not the reality” (ibid.)

In conclusion, this section of the chapter has presented that substantial structural and

policy differences, considering the utilization of the different discourses of co-productions,

persist between the territories and their film industries in the region setting obstacles towards

the formation of a joint East Asian media space. Japan has embarked on an a course of

developing a national film culture and media product overseas, with co-productions seen on

one hand as source of financing, and on the other as a means of globalizing its historically

homogenous film industry. Hong Kong however, is faced with a complex negotiation between

the mainland China focus on business while trying at the same time to preserve its indigenous

film culture through co-production activities. Lastly Korea, faced with a surprising surplus of

production and fierce competition in its domestic market is forced to seek overseas

partnerships to provide balanced growth in its domestic industry as the festivals and their co-

production markets work synchronously within this regional outreach. Thus, in contrast to

Chua’s (2011) argument that “the thick and intensifying traffic of finance, production

personnel across regional, linguistic, and national boundaries lends substance to the concept

of East Asian Pop Culture as a loosely integrated network”, a much more complex picture

emerges where the above described structural variances between the industries also collide

with cultural differences discussed in the next section (Chua 2011, 372).

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6.2 Cultural obstacles

The second set of obstacles towards a common regional identity relates to the aspect of

cultural differences, and in this respect clearly challenges the previous academic body work

that advocates for a common sense of East Asian popular culture as argued for by Iwabuchi

and Chua. Almost all film professionals interviewed for this research project pointed out in

one way or another the prevalence of cultural differences in the region, which in turn also

hinders collaboration. These included notions on the differences in audience taste as “Korea,

Japan and China the countries are very special, and very strong… its very, very difficult to

make a good film, because the locality is different, the audience taste and the culture is very,

very different” (Saluveer and Saluveer 2014). Incompatibilities in the working culture within

each film industry, and a lack of understanding as how to jointly collaborate towards a

meaningful film production film were also articulated both in the Japanese and the Korean

context, as “having collaborating between all the Asian countries and putting in what they do

best, that’s what I have been preaching. But I quickly realized that it’s not that easy because we

are making films of a different way in every country” (Saluveer 2014i) (Saluveer 2014d).

Nevertheless, the biggest hindrance to co-production and film collaboration is witnessed

in the increasing disinterest of the audience in regional content. As several interviewees

underlined, the audiences in East Asia nowadays tend to show interest for either local films or

Hollywood productions, but not for Pan-Asian productions. For example, producer and

festival programmer Raymond Phathanavirangoon who has collaborated on internationally

acclaimed art house films such as, Tokyo Sonata (2008), Sandcastles (2010) and most recently

Thai-French co-production Headshot (2011) notes that recently “Asian cinema has become

much more fragmented… maybe in the early 2000s people were a little bit more idealistic

about basically Asia becoming closer but now its really hard to get them to see those

[films]” (Saluveer 2014b). This argument resonates with box office statistics that paint a bleak

picture of regional cinema, showing that in Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea the top 10

most viewed films in 2013 were indeed either Hollywood blockbusters or domestically

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produced big budget commercial films 3. Without longer discussion, it can be argued here that 29

the ongoing dominance of local and Hollywood productions contrasts sharply with the

proponents of East Asian media space who advocate for the popularity of regional content,

but also a sense of a coherent or shared identity based on the consumption of this culturally

proximate or regionally glocalized media.

The point at hand, also relates to the question of the potential of regional stars as a

vehicles for Pan-Asian success, and a tool for building shared media consumption identity.

While the body of work in the East Asian media space field seems to advocate for the

possibility of Pan-Asian stars to foster a sense of regional cultural affinity, the conducted

interviews yet again demonstrate contrasting opinions. Several interviewees agreed that

although it would be possible to set up a co-production and raise financing by casting a

multinational star cast from the region, the success of this strategy would be meagre at its

best. For example producer Lorna Tee, has remarked that despite the fact that there have been

a considerable number of co-productions based on casting of Korean or Japanese stars in

Chinese films “it doesn’t necessarily mean that those projects will work in those countries

where the stars come from or the artists come… [the film ] has to be meaningful” (Saluveer

2014c). Therefore, in contrast to the arguments that attribute success to cultural proximity or

nostalgia for cultural distance, which were presented in the chapter on the theoretical

discussion of East Asian Media space, the potential for a film or a media product to exceed

cultural boundaries lies primarily in the common appreciation and understanding of the core

narrative. Thus, successful co-productions can not be constructed but a “co-production has to

be done because it needs to be a co-production” (Saluveer 2014i).

However, it should be pointed out that despite the arguments against cultural proximity

as an intrinsic force in regional media consumption, the interviews presented some evidence

In 2013 top 10 of South Korean and Hong Kong box office included Hollywood blockbuster Iron Man 3 29

along with local big productions Miracle in Cell No7 and Ji Han (Unbeatable). While Japanese box office was swept by Hayao Miyazaki’s retirement production The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu), Disney’s Monster’s University followed closely, indicating the audience’s taste for Hollywood and domestically big titles. For more details on regional box office see http://www.Boxofficemojo.com

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that in certain cases a shared cultural heritage could act as a positive factor for enabling

collaboration, such is the case of mainland China and South Korea. For example, one of the

interviewees articulated that the casting possibilities of Japanese stars in Korean films is

limited due to the local audience’s preferences for more stronger male body types, since

Japanese male actors are perceived too feminine to play leading roles (Saluveer 2014a). In the

Chinese context, it was also articulated that favoring Korean actors over Japanese, not only

derives from the culturally and historically connected past of the two countries, but often

results from the political tensions in the region. Although a Japanese cast would be suitable,

“you don’t want to use Japanese, because for fear you might create problems…[thus] you can

only look for Koreans” (Saluveer 2014h). The argument that the influence of political issues

on the production and reception of regional cinema leads to the third and last set of obstacles

—the role of geopolitics in hindering East Asian film collaboration.

!6.3 Geopolitical obstacles

The third and final set of obstacles for regional film collaboration is linked to the vast body

of geopolitical questions in East Asia including the primary question of what constitutes Asia

at all, the role of intraregional political conflict and its diverse implications resulting from the

post colonialist tensions, and last but not least the absence of a geopolitical “Other” against

which a sense of regional (media) identity could be constructed. Here, it is appropriate to

underscore DeBoer’s argument that the “the tensions of the variously post-colonial and post-

imperial relations among Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, not to mention the wider

production networks in the region” that came to light in the 1960s are still visible and

“haunting” in constituting and maintaing “unstable boundaries between past and

present” (DeBoer 2014). Without further dwelling upon the complex question of regionalism,

or the nature of intraregional conflict and its multifaceted history, the current section focuses

on the common themes outlined by the interviewees regarding the influence of geopolitics on

film collaboration.

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First, the ambivalence of the very definition of a concise notion of “Asia” was raised

not only in designating the certain origin of a film, but also in relation to the existence of an

(East) Asian audience. As was argued, due to cultural and structural variances in Asia, both as

a cultural and geographical signifier, opposes a clear definition in the film industry context,

having one of the interviewees argue that “Asia is blurred” and thus, always raising the

question of how to define Asian cinema—whether by actors, director, location or by

financing, as in the present transnational collaborations these could all yield no clear

connection of regional belonging, as in the case of the South Korean sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer

(Saluveer 2014l). Another noted that Asia is a “lazy construct” for identifying the region which

is multi-varied and thus cannot be approached by a unified content strategy: “if you can sell to

India, it doesn’t mean you can sell to Hong Kong, if you can sell to Taiwan it doesn’t mean

you can sell to Japan… there is no region… it’s never such a construct” (Saluveer 2014c).

Therefore, it can be also argued that the concept of an East Asian media industry, even in the

form of a “loose network” as Chua (2011) argued, producing particularly tailored content for

an audience sharing a regional identity can be challenged. Producer Lorna Tee summarized

this difficulty by arguing that “unlike say European film industry, and North American film

industry, the Latin American film industry… it’s quite impossible to define Asia as one when

you’re talking in terms of a film industry, or a film market, or a film audience” (Saluveer

2014c).

A critical role in undermining the regional collaboration and distribution of films across

the territories is played by the ongoing post-colonialist and post-imperial conflicts in the

region. In opposition to the arguments of various East Asian media theorists for the rapid

escalation of intraregional flows, the interviews presented that the tensions manifested at both

the level of government, as well as the audience and cast impact on the transnational

production and reception of co-productions, especially on the mainland Chinese-Japanese

axis. Several producers cited the recent cancellation of director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s high

profile Chinese-Japanese co-production 1905 due to political issues. The historical film,

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announced in 2012, was set to mark a big budget collaboration between Japan and China, and

featured Atsuko Maeda, the former singer of Japanese idol group AKB48, and the Hong

Kong superstar Tony Leung in leading roles, and aimed to “recreate the port of Yokohama as

it was 100 years ago on location in Taiwan with additional shooting in Japan” (Gray 2012b).

However amid the escalating tensions regarding the Senkaku islands, the film was abruptly

cancelled in 2013 due to escalating costs, with industry insiders marking the role of anti-

Japanese protests in China as a decisive factor (Japan 2013) (Saluveer 2014a) (Saluveer 2014b).

The cancellation of the project due to the protests on the part of the mainland audience

also correlates with several interviewees notion that the political tensions are not primarily

influencing production, but distribution and dissemination with restraints set by audience self

censorship, along with the reluctance of the of the distributors to exhibit films from the

country of conflict. Producer Jeffrey Chan has underlined the limitations set by the self

censorship of the Chinese audience by arguing,

“not that the government would ban you, the government would not; it would be the theaters don’t want you to show it. Because of that will give a reason for people to come with riots and breakup everything so they don’t want to show it. And the stars don’t want to promote it” (Saluveer 2014h). !

Chan’s comments on the distributor’s reluctance, linked with audience’s self censorship, is

surprising, but not only limited to the Chinese context, but visible elsewhere in there region as

well. For example, South Korea also has a correlating negative history regarding screening

Japanese films with the restriction for screening Japanese films finally abolished in 20044

following the post-1990s media liberalization in the country . Recent research by the author 30

on the rise and fall of Korean wave in Japan articulated the opinions of several Korean film

sales companies that the self-censorship of Japanese buyers during political upheaval acts as a

strong barrier for transnational film collaboration (Saluveer 2013a).

For more information on the abolishment of censorship conditions see 韓国政府による日本文化開放政策30

（概要） at http://web.archive.org/web/20101114164721/http://www.kr.emb-japan.go.jp/people/rel/

meeting/meet_20060321_8.htm

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The above examples clearly challenge and negotiate with the ongoing theoretical body

of work of East Asian media space in that instead of a common sense of regional identity, or

“the possibility, or likelihood, of the engendering of a pan-East Asian identity among regional

transnational audiences” as Chua (2011) articulates, a sense of fragmented and contested

media geography emerges where structural, cultural, and geopolitical forces collide. These

processes are also further escalated by the clear absence of the “Other” as a balancing force

against which a sense of regional identity could be constructed. If in the European context, a

sense of EU film identity was constructed to encounter the possibility of the dominance of

Hollywood, as was discussed in chapter 2, then in the present East Asia, Hollywood has been

embedded into the development, production and exhibition structures to an unchallenged

degree. Here, arguments shall not be put forward whether the presence of Americanization

could be seen as cultural dominance; however, it is sufficient to note that the omnipresence of

Hollywood productions, as well as developing regional industries according to its production

model, has limited the possibilities for the creation of a unified regional sense of audience and

industry identity alike. As remarked Roger Garcia,

"for Asia, in general, the other is Hollywood, maybe not America but Hollywood… but the other thing is that, when you talk about Asia… Asia is a bit like Europe, it is not homogenous” (Saluveer 2014l).

Thus the degree of Otherness implicated across the territory inevitably varies, and in the

consideration of the economic and political linkages with the US ultimately fails to produce a

sense of urgency needed to form an East Asian identity.

As surprising it might seem, on the backdrop of these structural, cultural and

geopolitical obstacles, the present research still uncovered a sense of East Asian cosmopolitan

film identity. As proposed above, this shared identity, emerging at the sites of film festivals

and co-production markets is accountable both for its local roots and its transnational

everyday. How this identity is perceived and produced, and how this particular configuration

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relates to the hypothesis of this thesis will be discussed in the final and concluding section of

the discussion.

!6.4 (Co-) Producing East Asia as narrative of future

In imagining Asian identity from the perspective of the network of film festivals and

co-production markets, as well as considering the experiences of the regional film industry,

the academic and historically persistent framework of East Asian media space faces critical

limitations as presented throughout the previous chapter. It not only fails to clearly address

the complex nature of co-productions as a form of transnational collaboration, but it also sets

various cultural, economic, and political forces at human and societal level—from fracturing

audience preferences to contrasting policies for regarding transnational collaboration. Leo

Ching’s (2000) widely cited argument of the relational nature of the concept of Asia is

perhaps appropriate to describe current regional media collaboration, as “any attempt to

empirically ground and define regionalism would only confirm the changeable and indefinable

nature of regionalism as an organizing concept… ‘Asia’ itself is neither a misrepresentation of

the Orientalist nor the collective representation of the anti-imperialists” (Ching 200, 244, 257).

At the first glance, Ching’s arguments for the empirically impossibly definition of

regionalism resonate also with the findings for this work. While it was hypothesized that

perhaps East Asia, even if not economically or politically defined, would at least be

constructed as imaginary space, or a joint market to be addressed by transnational co-

productions and media products, then the discussed structural, cultural, and political obstacles,

alongside the interviews with film professionals, painted a picture of a locale infused with

fragmentation. Within this geography, contrasting national strategies regarding international

collaboration from export of national culture (Japan), balancing between the roles of a

gateway to mainland China and the preservation of indigenous film culture (Hong Kong), and

the balanced development of the film industry through international collaboration (South

Korea) meet with the aspirations of festivals and co-production markets to discover new

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talent, educate and globalize domestic players, or propagate genre filmmaking. Therefore, to

some degree the main hypothesis of this thesis—the existence of a disjuncture regarding

perception of co-productions amongst the three main groups of stakeholders—the

filmmakers, market managers, and policymakers—is revealed to be valid. However, it should

be emphasized that these discrepancies between the different stakeholders are not are not

opposing or contradictory, but often overlapping and complimentary, approaching the same

complex phenomenon of co-productions from a variety of viewpoints.

In this regard, arguments for the attempts at extensive nation branding and nation

building that Iwabuchi et al. have proposed in conjunction with the regional media space

framework, were not clearly visible within the scope of this research. Although it was

hypothesized that perhaps co-productions are seen by the policymaking communities as a

method for expanding the reach of national media markets in the region, and these “soft

power” attempts might collide with the a sense of transnational subjectivity within the

filmmaking and festival community, the research seems to suggest that the diverse economic

and structural backgrounds in Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea, still force the players to

focus on their domestic industries instead actively engaging at the regional level.

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!!

!Figure 16. Completion ratio of submitted film projects to APM, HAF & NAFF from 1998—2013. Tokyo TIFFCOM project market is excluded due to the unavailability of project competition statistics. !Source: Co-Production projects database of APM (PPP), HAF, NAFF & TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection (TPG) compiled by the author. ! Despite this challenging background, co-productions and co-production markets seem

to flourish with more than 1,000 projects submitted since 1998 and with almost one-third of

the films seeing completion as well. Also, the majority of the interviews conducted for this

research communicated that co-productions are necessary, either to raise finances, engage in

creative collaboration or seek new audiences for the films since the fragmentation of regional

audiences has further diminished the number of potential art house viewers, because “co-

production mainly stems from the need to put financing together but sometimes you co-

produce not just for financial need, you co-produce for more creative needs or… to reach out

to a wider audience” (Saluveer 2014c). These audiences are primarily overseas, art house and

festival-goers, which yet again testifies to the transnational and transcultural nature of the

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contemporary festival economy since “even the big films, they need festivals to launch at

nowadays to get attraction, get reviews, and get audiences” (Saluveer 2014b).

This interplay between locales with the regional festival network and the international

(festival circuit) audience can be understood in the light of DeBoer’s argument for co-

productions as a narrative for the future in East Asia, as “new technologies of Asian

production transcend a regional past fragmented and limited by national boundaries, not to

mention deeply inequitable imperialist past… characterized and fraught by comparative

underdevelopment” (DeBoer 2014, 4599). Technologies here should not be only understood

in the direct sense of tools, but also as structural factors, industry practices, and possibilities

opened by the transnational festival circuit. Thus, co-productions in the region serve, as

argued above, as technology or sets of cultural technologies producing a sense of regional

future taking into account the geographical scope of participating films. However, this

identity, inevitably local as well as transnational, emerges and is experienced through the

collaborations at the co-production markets and the international film festival circuit. As

Hiromi Aihara, renown film festival consultant and one of the early promoters of post 1990s

Japanese cinema internationally, notes “I think Asian market is quite important so we I think

in Asia also we should unite… and then make some association but unfortunately depends on

the country” (Saluveer 2014f). Jacob Wong, the Curator of Hong Kong Film Financing

Forum also shares the vision for co-produced Asia of the future commenting that “in time

with possible changes that the government in this part of the world will come to see that this

is the very fight to have a wealthy stage of auteur productions” (Saluveer 2014g).

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!Figure 17. Countries with more than ten project entries to APM, HAF, NAFF & TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection (TPG) 1998—2013 revealing the cultural geography of East Asian co-productions. !Source: Co-Production projects database of APM (PPP), HAF, NAFF & TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection (TPG) compiled by the author. !!This joint manifestation of local and international calls to mind Ulrich Beck’s notion of banal

cosmopolitanism. Beck argues not to see cosmopolitanism as not a certain set of values, but

more a

“quiet revolution of everyday life” being “non-linear, dialectic process in which the universal and particular, the similar and the dissimilar, the global and the local are to be conceived, not as cultural polarities but as interconnected and reciprocally interpenetrating principles” (Beck 2007). !

The position of film professionals engaging in transnational co-productions can be seen in

fact as representative of Beck’s cosmopolitan orientation precisely because of their

positioning in the middle of the global and the local whereas the festival and co-production

market circuit serves as a connecting network between these two. Yukie Kito, producer of

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s award winning Tokyo Sonata (2008) has highlighted the cosmopolitan

nature of the international film industry by saying “whatever happens [in a co-production

market] could lead into something. It might be exactly on that project or something else and

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the network you make there is priceless”. Yet she also notes that within this network Asia will

be still articulated—

“Asia it’s interesting… and Asia's coolness is more known globally now than twenty years ago or ten years ago or even more part of their lives outside Asia. So I think why not taking advantage of it” (Saluveer 2014a). !

Finally, this chapter situated the interviews of East Asian film professionals and the case

studies of co-production markets in Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea into the discussion

of the relevance of East Asian media space framework and a concurrent imagining of

regional identity. This chapter advocated and concludes with the notion that a coherent

theoretical understanding of East Asia as a media space is limited to structural, cultural, and

geopolitical differences at the level of production, dissemination and exhibition. However, the

regional co-production markets and festivals are sites where a transnational and cosmopolitan

identity of future East Asia is produced by the film industry members, joining both the

“local” and the “global”.

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CHAPTER 7. CONCLUSION

Figure 18. East Asia in production. Filmmakers, financiers, festival programmers and producers in Hong Kong Film Financing Forum 2014. Copyright & printed with the permission from Hong Kong Film Financing Forum. !This thesis commenced with the example of how one film, Snowpiercer, illustrated the ongoing

transformations within the world’s film and entertainment industry toward

transnationalization, and Snowpiercer shall also guide the work toward its conclusion. In the

film, the lead character Curtis orchestrates a revolution starting from the last carriage of the

train and working his way to the front, in order to reveal the secret of how the sacred engine

keeps the locomotive in eternal motion. While doing so, Curtis and his associates proceed

from carriage to carriage exposing new wonders as they move forward, but also facing new

challenges and complexities, symbolic to man’s journey through the ages of the Industrial

Revolution into the present and finally, the future. Likewise the goal of the research project

resulting in this thesis was to bring to light and pierce into the widely acknowledged but

relatively unexplored phenomenon of transnational film collaboration characterized by the

practice of co-production. Furthermore, it situated that exploration into the equally

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captivating contexts of the role of film festivals, the locales of production in East Asia, and

exhibition and dissemination which gain greater international prominence and visibility day by

day.

In doing so, the thesis aimed, and hopefully accomplished, to provide new insights for

two seemingly opposing groups—the members of international film industry and the

academic community—since so far both have remained somewhat distanced from each other,

despite a small number attempts by scholars, such as Soojeong Ahn (2011), Stephanie DeBoer

(2014), or Marjike de Valck (2007, 2010), to name a few. Proceeding from the standpoint of

institutional ethnography and cultural studies, this work attempted to draw attention to the

fact that co-productions are not merely a practice of creative collaboration or financial

partnership, but a form transnational sociocultural collaboration that can manifest itself in a

variety of discourses—from the perspective of art films, bilateral agreements between

countries are driven by the search of financial benefits with each of these discourses bringing

their own sets of implications. At the same time, employing DeBoer’s argument to consider

co-production in East Asia as a “technology of assemblage”, it was revealed how co-

productions have the ability to depend on, but also shape diverse flows of capital, culture and

power within the region and internationally.

Second, the case studies presented in the work revealed that, instead of a homogenized

“Asia”, the festival and media production landscape in East Asia is fragmented and still

“haunted” by its colonist and imperialist past with sets obstacles hindering the formation of a

commonly shared sense of identity, as well as a coherent media space into which films and

media programs could be tailored. This notion has implications for film professionals and

academia alike. For professionals, it signals that each respective territory, and its film festivals

and co-production markets must be approached from a tailored strategy acknowledging

cultural and structural differences. Hong Kong’s HAF directs the focus towards more

commercial mainland China focused projects while offering a windows for its native art house

filmmakers to persist. Japan’s TIFFCOM Co-Pro Connection struggles somewhat in the

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country with the world’s third largest entertainment market, by trying to balance between the

functions of facilitating export of Japanese content, while at the same time educating local

producers through transnational connections. Puchon’s NAFF has set a sail in a novel

direction by creating links between international and regional genre film professionals. And

last but not least, the pioneer of Asian co-productions, the Busan Film Festival and the Asian

Project Market continue their roles as discoverers of regional talent by nurturing them to

enter the international festival circuit.

These seemingly practical case studies yield implications and points of entry for

academia as well. Primarily, the thesis demonstrated the limitations of the East Asian media

space framework that has prevailed in the study of regional flows for more than a decade.

While the dichotomous concepts of hybridity-glocalization, cultural proximity and distance,

and decentralization-recentralization could be witnessed as present in the context of media

production networks in the region, they are too limited in scope to fully address the

complexities of transnational film industry collaboration. Furthermore, the work also

challenged arguments for the emergence of a common regional identity based on the

consumption of popular culture. In that regard, it was highlighted that instead of regional

media, audiences are inclined towards domestic or global Hollywood films, questioning again

the claims for the impact and popularity of regional entertainment flows in creating and

shaping a coherent sociocultural and economic configuration across the territories.

The various structural, cultural and geopolitical obstacles revealed in the last chapter of

the study, such as the varied national strategies regarding co-production ranging from the

cultural regulatory discourse of Japan, to the symbiosis of financial and international

perspectives of South Korea, and finally, the ongoing negotiation in Hong Kong to preserve

its cinematic identity in the face of an overflow of capital to and from mainland China - can

not be seen as hindrances but perhaps a complex background from which a new sense of

identity among film professionals emerges. This notion of transnational cosmopolitanism,

drawing inspiration from Ulrich Beck, is witnessed in the cases of regional film industry

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members, and produced at the sites of the East Asian film festivals and co-production

markets. This narrative of future produces a sense of future East Asia demarcated by film

industry collaboration, accounts for professional’s roots in the geographical locales of East

Asia, while at the same time embracing the possibilities enabled by the transnational film

festival circuit. It further challenges the present difficulties in regional film production and

dissemination, such as audience’s self censorship in China or Japan which limits distribution

and exhibition possibilities, while offering co-productions and their creators possibilities,

either artistically or by allowing culturally challenging films to be made and travel throughout

the transnational festival world.

The thesis also acknowledges its limitations and suggests implications for further

research. The role of mainland China, and whether it will become the “brother or the Other”

calls for investigation in terms of its weight on the gravity of the global entertainment

business, and also a perspective on the sociocultural impact that either of these possibilities

might entail. As several interviews revealed, transnational networks and their links within East

Asia to both Europe and the US for film collaboration are older and much more multifaceted

then the present academic body of work proposes, raising the question of the very definition

of national or regional cinema, which suggests the need for further scrutiny. Film festivals and

their role in production and exhibition should be approached from the perspective of the

sociology of cinema that Bergfelder (2005) advocates and increasing reflection on the voices

of film professionals in greater balance to auteur or reading based studies. And finally,

reception studies of co-produced titles across the region’s audiences call for researchers to

investigate exactly how joint transnational collaborations are received and interpreted.

Ulrich Beck has recently argued that humankind is a caterpillar emerging from its

cocoon, but “lamenting the latter’s disappearance because it does not yet suspect the butterfly

it will become” (Beck 2007). Acknowledging and cherishing international co-productions, and

film festivals across the world’s territories can break this cocoon, and pave the way for the

appreciation of diverse cultures through the language and medium of cinema.

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APPENDIX I. INTERVIEWEES !Judy AHN !Judy Ahn is Head of International Business at Showbox / Mediaplex, one of the largest film distribution companies in South Korea, founded in 2002. Showbox is the film investment, production and distribution branch of Mediaplex, Inc., entertainment arm of Orion Group. It is a sister company of Megabox, the theater chain in South Korea. Its main competitors for domestic box office are CJ Entertainment, Lotte Entertainment, and Next Entertainment World (NEW). Despite having very short history in the industry, they managed to have top 6 of 10 blockbusters in Korean box office history, number 1 being 2012's The Thieves and continues to have a series of hits !Source(s): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showbox !!Hiromi AIHARA !Hiromi Aihara, is an independent producer, international festival and promotion coordinator. Since 1997, she has been promoting Japanese films overseas. Her production credits include Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: Body Hammer, as well as co-productions Last Life in the Universe and Invisible Waves, both directed by Pen-ek Ratanaruang with Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano in the lead, as well as a Japanese-German co-production Under Water Love by Shinji Imaoka. !Source(s): http://www.haf.org.hk/haf/popup/aihara_hiromi.htm !Brian CHUNG !Brian Chung is the Director of International Business at Dexter Studios, a film production & VFX company based in Korea. Prior to Dexter Studios, he has worked at Showbox and CJ Entertainment, the leading film studios in Korea. While at Showbox, he oversaw Red Cliff by John Woo and heartwarming indie film, The Story of Luke. In CJ Entertainment, he oversaw the international distribution in Assian territories such as China, Japan, Vietnam and etc. He also worked at Cineclick Asia as the manager of international coproduction and marketing. In 2013, Dexter Studios has produced its first film, Mr. Go, the VFX-heavy blockbuster which Huayi Brothers co-financed. As the biggest VFX firm in Korea, it has participated in Young Detective Dee: The Rise of the Sea Dragon by world-renowned filmmaker Tsui Hark. !Source(s): http://www.industrytallinn.com/demo/speakers/brian-chung !!

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Susan CHAE !Susan Chae, is a founding member of Asian Project Market (APM), then named Pusan Promotion Plan (PPP) and has returned to the management position since 2014. She worked as a producer for various Korean film production companies such as BaekDu-DaeGan Films, Opus Pictures, and iFilm. She launched a film company, TheunDa Pictures, and produced Dance of Time (2009) by director Song Ilgon. Utilizing her years of experience in the film industry, which includes her expertise in independent arthouse films and commercial films and investment/import/distribution, Susan Chae will search for fresh projects and seek to further globalize APM. !Sources: http://www.biff.kr/artyboard/board.aspact=bbs&subAct=view&bid=9611_05&list_style=list&seq=32410 !!Jeffrey CHAN !Jeffrey Chan is Chief Operating Officer and Director of Bona Film Group, a leading film distributor in China, with an integrated business model encompassing film distribution, production, exhibition and talent representation. Bona distributes films to Greater China, Korea, Southeast Asia, the United States and Europe, invests in and produces movies in a variety of genres, owns and operates twenty movie theaters and manages a range of talented and popular Chinese artists. Additionally he manages a Hong Kong based distribution company Distribution Workshop together with acclaimed veteran producer Nansun Shin, a spouse of renown Hong Kong New Wave director, Tsui Hark. He has over 20 years of experience in the film distribution and entertainment industry. Before joining Bona Film Group, Chan served as the Distribution and Sales Manager of Media Asia Holdings Limited from 2002 to 2007, a Vice President in charge of media, content strategy and special projects of PCCW/Cable & Wireless Ltd. from 1999 to 2002 and a program controller at Asia Television Limited from 1993 to 1999. !Source(s): http://www.bonafilm.cn/management-team.aspx !Sanghee HAN !Sanghee HAN is the Team Manager of International Co-production Team in the International Promotion Department of Korean Film Council (KOFIC). The Korean Film Council (KOFIC), a government-supported, self-administered body, strives to promote and support Korean Films both in korea and abroad. KOFIC’s primary objective is to promote and support the production of Korean films through funding, research, education and training. It also strives to further development international markets for Korean films and to promote inter-cultural understanding through film-based cultural exchanges. !Source: http://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/jsp/kofic/intro.jsp !Jonathan KIM !Veteran producer Jonathan Hyong-Joon KIM has served two terms as the Chairman of the Korean Film Producer's Association. With the career in the Korean film industry that span over 25 years, Kim has produced over 20 motion picture films. He has recently concluded his appointment as an executive-level film consultancy role at South Korean entertainment conglomerate CJ E&M where he played an integral part in success of Masquerade and

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A Wedding Invitation. Currently, he runs his own multinational production company Hanmac Culture Corporation. His 2004 blockbuster Silmido, based on the true story of a team of South Korean commandos trained to assassinate the North Korean President, blew away with all records with 11 million box office tickets sold, representing one-quarter of the South Korean population. In 2004, Mr. Kim was awarded the Daejong Award for Best Executive Producer, the Korean equivalent of Oscar. A member of Korea/Japan Culture Exchange Committee and an International Advisor to the Hong Kong Asian Financing Forum (HAF), Kim has also been an advocate of intra-Asian co-productions. A regular speaker at various International Film & Contents industry forums, he sells Korean contents as cool and the most vibrant industry in Asia. !Source(s): http://www.haf.org.hk/haf/popup/jonathan_kim.htm !Kini KIM !Kini S. Kim is the Senior Vice President at CJ Entertainment, a film business unit of CJ E&M Corp. with responsibility for international sales. He also serves as the head of international direct-distribution for encompassing territories such as U.S., China, Japan, Vietnam, etc. He has been working for more than 15 years at CJ Group. Prior to joining the international division, he worked for music business team, consumer products team, corporate strategy and IPO & investor relations. !Source(s): http://tiff.net/industry/industry-programming/asianfilmsummit2013/networkinglunch !!Yukie KITO !Yukie Kito is a Tokyo-based independent film producer. Her credits include Ethan Hawke’s The Hottest State, which premiered at the 2006 Venice International Film Festival, as well as Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which won Best Film at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Her credits also include Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata, which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard Section and the Best Picture at the Asian Film Awards in Hong Kong. She acts also as an overseas manager for Japanese talents, including renown actor Koji Yakusho. Source(s): http://tischasiablog.com/2011/03/imp-colloquium-a-conversation-with-yukie-kito-9-march-wed-6pm/ !Shinho LEE !Shinho Lee, born and raised in Seoul, Korea, received his BFA in Film and Television and MFA in Dramatic Writing from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Lee co-wrote The Chaser which was one of the highest grossing films in Korea in 2008 and invited to The 2008 Cannes Film Festival for the Official Selection Midnight Screening. It is expected to be remade by Warner Bros. starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Lee also wrote screenplay Sayonara Itsuka based on the best selling novel by Hitonari Tsuji. It stars Miho Nakayama from Shunji Iwai’s Love Letter and was successfully released in Japan and Korea in 2010. Source(s): http://www.tischasia.nyu.edu.sg/object/shinho_lee.html !!

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Takenari MAEDA !Takenari Maeda graduated from The London Film School in 1993. Joining Bandai Visual Co., Ltd. in 1994, he was instrumental in founding the company’s international sales section and successfully introduced its new and catalogue programs to world markets. After working on international releases of Jin Roh (1999) a feature animation film written by Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell), which became a Berlin International Film Festival 1999 Panorama Official Selection, he worked as Associate Producer on a number of internationally recognized projects including Avalon (2000) (Cannes Film Festival 2001 Official Selection), and Steamboy (2004) (Venice Film Festival 2004 Closing Film). Between 2005 and 2007 he was stationed as Vice President at Bandai Visual USA Inc., a subsidiary in Los Angels, and worked on developing new program distribution channels and methods. He joined UNIJAPAN in May 2010 and has been in charge of programs and events that promote international coproduction. !Source(s): http://www.blackmarketonline.eu/admin/content/action/view/id/4527 !Mika MORISHITA !Mika Morishita serves as the Head of TIFFCOM, a multi-content market, which is affiliated with the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF). TIFFCOM is multi-content platform venue where all the participants can experience the power of Japanese content, and buyers from all over the world and other visitors can meet exhibitors interested in launching new profitable business with the contents they own. !Source(s): http://www.tiffcom.jp/2013/en/about_tiffcom !Jongsuk Thomas NAM !Jongsuk Thomas Nam graduated from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1993 with a degree in Communication Arts/RTVF. Upon his return to Korea in 1995, he served as an assistant director in KIM Hong-jun’s Jungle Story (1996) before joining Busan International Film Festival (BIFF, called as PIFF then) in 1997 as a curator for KIM Ki-young Retrospective. He subsequently served as the festival coordinator and the senior manager of Pusan Promotion Plan (PPP) before becoming the General Secretariat at the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC) from 2001 to 2004. Jongsuk joined Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival (PiFan) in 2007 and is currently serving as the managing director of its film industry program, Network of Asian Fantastic Films (NAFF) as well as general consultant of PiFan. !Source(s): http://www.blackmarketonline.eu/admin/content/action/view/id/6560

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!!Shinjiro NISHIMURA !Shinjiro NISHIMURA is a producer of at Japan’s oldest film entertainment company NIKKATSU. Nishimura served as assistant director to Takashi Miike, a prolific and world renown filmmaker, for 10 years after he moved to Nikkatsu. He’s recent productions include a first-ever Japan-Indonesia co-production thriller Killers directed by Indonesian new talent, The Mo Brothers, which premiered in Sundance film Festival 2014. His other credits include Michelle Gun Elephant - Thee Movie, RE;MIND, May'n THE MOVIE, Crow's Thumb, A Road Stained Crimson, and Arcana. !Source(s): http://www.asiatvforum.com/Conferences-Events/Speakers_Moderators/Shinjiro-Nishimura1/ !!

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!Takashi NISHIMURA !Takashi Nishimura Worked as Director of PIA Film Festival for young and upcoming filmmakers from 1982 to 1991. He Produced independent films like Bicycle Sighs ( Sion Sono’s first feature in 1991), March Comes In Like a Lion ( won the L’Age D’Or Prize in 1993), How Old Is the River ( won the Tiger Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 1995), 20th Century Nostalgia ( won the New Director Award of Directors Guild of Japan in 1998 ) in 90’s. In 2002, he serves as the Managing Director of UNIJAPAN, a non-profit organization established in 1957 by the Japanese film industry under the auspice of the Government of Japan ( the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), for the purpose of promoting Japanese cinema abroad. !Source(s): Private communication from UNIJAPAN, 23 April 2014 !!Raymond PHATHANAVIRANGOON Raymond Phathanavirangoon is an official delegate for Cannes Critics’ Week, a Programme Consultant for the Hong Kong International Film Festival and a Reading Committee Member for the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum. Previously he served as international programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival and was Director of Marketing & Special Projects for Fortissimo Films. In 2007 he was on the Berlin Film Festival’s Teddy Jury and in 2010 the Antalya Film Festival’s international jury, and most recently in the Vladivostok Film Festival jury. Since 2012 he also serves as a Development Director for Hong Kong filmmaker Pang Ho Cheung’s Making Film Productions. His production credits include Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata (2008, Associate Producer), Pang Ho Cheung’s Dream Home (2010, Co-Producer), Boo Junfeng's Sandcastle (2010, Associate Producer) and Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Headshot (2011, Producer) with ongoing production of Boo Junfeng’s upcoming Apprentice. !Source(s): http://www.asianfilmawards.asia/2010/popups/committee/raymond-phathanavirangoon.html http://www.screendaily.com/making-film-taps-phathanavirangoon-as-development-head/5048912.article !

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!Lorna TEE !Lorna Tee is a well-known personality in the Asian film scene. In 2005 she managed the marketing and distribution at Focus Films Hong Kong, and also worked alongside Chinese superstar, Andy Lau on his international business. After that, she managed the Asian office for Variety as their Business Development Manager, creating sales and marketing opportunities for the renowned publication. She then ventured to set up and be the general manager of the Asian investment fund Irresistible Films, working alongside top producer Bill Kong (Edko Films) and Avex Entertainment (Japan). Currently, she is working with leading production company October Pictures (Hong Kong) and manages her own production company Paperheart (Malaysia) to produce films across Asia along with Paris based film financier Backup Media. Tee also sits on the advisory board of Cinemart (IFF Rotterdam), Asian Film Awards (Hong Kong IFF), Shanghai International Film Market, Asian Film Market (Busan IFF), New Action Express Film Fund for Shorts (Hong Kong Arts Centre) and Malaysian Film Board/ FINAS. She has been invited to be a jury member at Berlin, Locarno, Hong Kong, Jeonju, Barcelona, Mexico, Durban, Sydney and others. In addition, she has presented at panels and forums in Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, India, China, Slovakia, Netherlands, France, Malaysia, Indonesia, Italy, Australia and Japan. Her producing credits include Beautiful Washing Machine, The Shoe Fairy, Rain Dogs, Crazy Stone, Love Story, I’ll Call You, My Mother is a Bellydancer, At the end of Daybreak, Lover’s Discourse, Come Rain, Come Shine, and Postcards from the Zoo. !Source(s): http://www.tiesthatbind.eu/portfolio/lorna-tee/ http://www.screendaily.com/festivals/cannes/backup-signs-up-lorna-tee/5056409.article !!Jacob WONG !Jacob WONG is a curator of the Hong Kong International Film Festival and the director of the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF). He is also a delegate of the Berlin International Film Festival and the Locarno International Film Festival. He pens a film column for The Hong Kong Economic Journal and Ming Pao. !Source(s): http://www.haf.org.hk/haf/popup/jacob_wong.htm

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APPENDIX 2. INTERVIEW QUESTIONNAIRE !Warm up !Please tell us a little bit of your background. How did you start your career in the film industry? How did you move into production?!What films do you consider as (your) most successful and most unsuccessful productions? Why? !Co-Production !How many co-productions you have produced? With which territories? What were the reason and goals for co-productions? !Please describe the experience? What were the positive and negative aspects? Why?!In your opinion, are co-productions necessary in East Asian context? Why? Why not?!What are the most successful territories for co-productions (in East - Asia)? !To whom (your) co-productions are targeted (audience?)!What elements/aspects constitute a successful co-production? Please give examples. What is necessary to co-produce a film? (creative aspects vs. business?) What are major drivers and obstacles?!What should be the considerations prior entering co-productions (in East Asia)? !Are there any regional / cultural / economic / political aspects that in your opinion influence co-productions in the region?!How are co-productions formed and developed? Please describe the process?!In your experience what are the most important sites or locations where co-production activities are taken place? !What are major target frames / distribution / exhibition channels and sites for (East Asian) co-productions? Why?!Which co-production sites or markets in East Asia do you attend? What markets do you consider the best suited to your needs? Why / why not? Are there any differences between the markets (in their business, creative, political impact?) Why / why not?!What kind of role do festivals play regarding East Asian co-productions? What festivals are doing well / not doing well? What they should do / do not?!How would you evaluate TPG/TIFF, APM, HAF, NAFF - please outline strengths, weaknesses, options?!

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Have there been any changes in (East Asian) co-production activities over the past decade in terms of activities, content, outcomes? Please elaborate? !Please describe / evaluate attitude of the producers / film community in your territory (Hong Kong, Japan, South-Korea) regarding co-productions? Are there any differences in major /!Please evaluate the attitude of the producers of other East Asian territories - what are the reasons for different opinions if applicable?!Are there any differences w US or European context? Why, why not?Political / Governmental !How would you evaluate the present state of film industry in your respective territory both from domestic and international perspective? Has there been any changes over past 10 years?!In your opinion what are the important legislative / policy / actions that have influenced film industry / production / co-productions ? !Please evaluate the role / activities of your local policymakers / government regarding co-productions in your respective country?!What kind of stance in your opinion should the government in your country take regarding film industry policy? What should government do / do not? & / What steps should be / should not be taken?!Does the government / policymakers or its branches exercise any restrictions over productions / co-productions (i.e business limitations / censorship etc?)!Do changes in political climate in East Asia influence film industry cooperation and co-productions? Why / why not? What should be done / not done? Please provide examples? In your opinion are there any differences between countries?Audience !Whom do you consider as the main target audience of your films? Please elaborate? Mainstream, niche, specialized? Specific demographics / psychographics? !Has there been any changes in the audience over the past decade? Why why not?!In your opinion, does there exist a pan-Asian / East Asian audience for films / co-productions? Why / why not? !Are there differences between (East) Asian and European / US audiences, please describe?Producers How would you describe East Asian producers who engage in co-productions in terms of psychographics / demographics / attitudes? How do they compare to local / domestic producers?!

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What traits and business characteristics should a good co-producer have? Why? Please elaborate on successful networking.!What kind of events / festivals / sites / locations a successful co-producers must attend?

Why? / why not?

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