Nowadays, China is the most interesting market for French coproduction.
With a limited quota of 34 international movies per year, the coproduction is the only way for French movies to enter the Chinese market. The agreement on coproductions signed between France and China in 2010 goes towards this direction.
The French motion picture industry is the second foreign movie industry represented in China, right after the US industry. 8 French movies were distributed in China in 2014. However, following the quotas imposed by China concerning foreign movies, French films’ distribution is limited. Moreover, Chinese distributors and movie-theatre managers are often stopping the distribution of French movies that don’t make enough money, in order to grant a greater visibility to big Chinese and American blockbusters. However, in 2014, with only 8 French movies released, China was still the second foreign market to distribute French movies (with 17,4 million entries).
According to UniFrance, 7 out of 10 French movies distributed in China since 2000 are Europacorp’s productions. Lately, Europacorp signed an agreement with Chinese producer Fundamental Films in order to extend the coproduction and distribution of Europacorp’s movies in China (Fundamental invested 50 million euros in the new Europacorp’s movie “Valerian”, to be released in 2017).
In 2010, France and China signed a coproduction agreement after 7 years of negotiations. This agreement provides that coproduced movies will have the nationality of both producers in order for them to benefit from both national subventions systems. This will therefore exclude coproduced movies from Chinese quotas on foreign movies.
To develop this strategy of coproduction, Wild Bunch has created in 2015 an investment fund with China Film and TV Capital in order to develop and finance French-Chinese coproductions.
At last, for the sake of the development of these coproductions, distributors and public institutions (CNC, Unifrance) are using Chinese Film festivals to present French movies, because it also excludes them from the quotas (Shanghai and Beijing film festivals being the two biggest movie festivals in China).
@ATurquoise
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