Tapping into international funding
Q: CNEX brings Chinese-language documentaries to the international stage. Are there many opportunities? How have they been received?
A: Taking things international is a way to augment a film’s influence. When a film does well at an international festival, it earns a cachet that will improve its reception back in the Chinese community.
Naturally, not all films are treated the same way. We’re very deliberate about the whole process. Some films are ready to be shown to Chinese audiences immediately. With some of the others, the path is more circuitous, requiring exposure overseas before ultimately showing them back home.
There’s one film this year on the verge of completion about sandstorms raging in mainland China. The focal point is on an endangered oasis in Minqin in Gansu Province. The oasis is situated between two encroaching deserts. Should the oasis eventually succumb to desertification it poses a direct threat to Beijing and even to Japan, and the locals are constantly being displaced.
Last year at the pitching forum, Japanese and European attendees were very much taken with the plight of these environmental refugees, especially the Japanese, since they themselves are likely to be affected. As a result, NHK has been collaborating with us on it.
Q: Can you discuss the commercial aspects of documentary film? In Taiwan, for example, the domestic box office has been on fire in recent years. Have documentaries fared similarly well?
A: It’s still essentially impossible to fund these films through sales alone, which means that we’re relying heavily on fundraising and donor support. But there are some positive signs: In the last three Taipei Film Festivals, the top honors have gone to KJ: Music and Life, Hip-Hop Storm, and Hometown Boy. Our documentaries are going head to head with dramatic films and coming out on top. KJ: Music and Life even won prizes for Best Editing and Best Sound Design.
Every year there are documentaries that hit the theaters in Taiwan, such as Go Grandriders, a film made with the assistance of the Hondao Senior Citizens’ Welfare Foundation that will hit theaters in mid-October.
My general sense is that dramatic film is becoming more like documentary in terms of verisimilitude. Documentaries, on the other hand, are becoming more creative and engaging. They’re starting to make use of animation and music. Documentary can be fun—it doesn’t have to be some stuffy anthropological dissertation.
We’re constantly on the lookout for alternative media outlets, like television, which can share production costs and guarantee an audience. But the subject matter and visual aesthetic have to be appropriate to the TV medium for it to work. In the future, we hope that every documentary can have one cut for TV and another for the theaters: a more measured pace for people to digest slowly in the confines of the theater, and a faster pace for television, as well as a shorter duration of approximately 50 minutes.
CNEX’s declared mission to bear witness to unfolding Chinese history has achieved a broad resonance, as demonstrated by the success of such films as KJ: Music and Life, 1428, and Hip-Hop Storm, all of which received awards at various domestic and international festivals.