Top Asian Film Markets Wrap Up Project Funding And Sales

The Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF) wrapped up its 20th edition this week, alongside Asia’s largest film market, Hong Kong Filmart. Both events ran virtually, with HAF highlighting 43 film projects, including 15 works-in-progress. Among them were 11 Hong Kong projects.

Organizers shared that they facilitated around 900 private meetings between 14 to 16 March, involving project teams, distributors, international co-production and financing partners and festival programmers. This is double the number of meetings since HAF first went virtual in 2020. In a statement, Hong Kong International Film Festival Society executive director Albert Lee said that the overwhelming support from the filmmaking community and sponsors was gratifying, despite pandemic-related challenges. Hong Kong is currently battling its most serious wave of Covid-19 infections.

14 prizes were handed out at HAF to an array of projects from across Asia. The IDP Award for a Hong Kong project went to The Stars The Sun The Moon by Colleen Kwok Tung-Shuen. Chinese project Not Found by Huang Ningwei took home the IDP Award for a non-Hong Kong project. These two awards each came with a HK$100,000 (around USD$12,800) cash prize. Don’t Cry, Butterfly by Vietnamese filmmaker Duong Dieu Linh won two prizes — the Udine Focus Asia Award and Wouter Barendrecht Award. The latter award is given to a project by a director who is under 35.

At Filmart, more than 2,300 of the latest film and TV productions were promoted, with the online market seeing around 7,000 participants. Premier production companies from China participated, including iQiyi, Youku, Bilibili, Tencent, with pavilions also present from the United States, European Union, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Thailand.