The ProjectorFilmmakers seek box office boom with Chinese co-productions, but success is not guaranteed

The Chinese Film Panorama 2018 festival opened at City Hall, in Central, on October 18 with a screening of Where Has the Time Gone?. The 2017 omnibus feature comprises five shorts by filmmakers from BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The next evening, the festival continued with Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 epic The Last Emperor, followed on October 21 by contem­porary romantic comedies A Wedding Invitation (2013) and 20 Once Again (2015).

These seemingly unrelated movies are all co-productions, a form of filmmaking that, according to the festival’s co-organisers, the Leisure and Cultural Services Department and the South China Film Industry Workers Union, “laid a vital foundation in the global­isa­tion of China’s film industry”.

According to the programme notes, for example, “the full backing of China and a team of the finest craftsmen in the industry” was deemed crucial to the making of The Last Emperor, with the international cast of John Lone, Joan Chen and Peter O’Toole described as “a match made in heaven”.

This emphasis on collaboration has proved topical, with the programme unspool­ing just as Beijing contends with a trade war against the United States and a wave of can­cel­lations of Chinese-backed mega-projects in Malaysia, Pakistan and Sierra Leone.

International film co-productions have always been about business. And it’s tricky business, too, with a lot of money and national pride at stake. Chinese financiers and bureaucrats and their foreign counter­parts are constantly entangled in a difficult dance to get the best deal for themselves.

For example, Hollywood studios have been hard at work trying to convince Chinese officials to review the terms set in a memo­randum of understanding signed by then Chinese vice-president Xi Jinping and his US counterpart, Joe Biden, during the former’s visit to Los Angeles in February 2012.