Hong Kong’s New European Coproduction Funding Scheme Is Aimed at Industry Revamp: ‘We Want Our Movies to Be More Diversified’
variety.comPatrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Hong Kong-Europe-Asian Film Collaboration Funding Scheme being launched this week in Berlin is intended as a major component of an exercise in rehabilitating and internationalizing the Hong Kong film industry.
In unprecedented fashion, the territory’s Film Development Council is getting ready to start giving cash grants to movie projects that don’t necessarily have to shoot in the city or even use one of its three official languages.
Whereas in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Hong Kong produced over 300 movies a year, for local, regional and international consumption, creating stars including Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, the 21st century has witnessed a downsizing and recalibration of the Hong Kong production system.
For much of the past two decades the city operated as a highly-skilled but smaller system that sat alongside and fed into the mainland Chinese industry during a period when the Chinese economy was expanding rapidly and film consumption was mushrooming.
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