How Japanese & Italian Producers Are Leveraging The New Japan-Italy Co-Production Agreement

deadline.com:

The Japanese and Italian film industries are set to enter a new era of collaborations, after the Japan–Italy film co-production agreement officially came into effect on August 9.

At the Tokyo International Film Festival, Italy featured as the key country in focus, with numerous events organized to foster networking opportunities between Japanese and Italian film professionals and promote projects under development. Next steps for the Japan-Italy co-production agreement Roberto Stabile, Head of Special Projects, Directorate General for Cinema and Audiovisual of the Ministry of Culture at Cinecittà told Deadline that the priority now is to create many opportunities for meetings between Italian and Japanese film professionals so that projects can get off the ground. “Politically speaking, it is very important to have a co-production agreement, but now in a practical way, we must create many occasions for meetings between Italian and Japanese producers and creatives,” said Stabile. “They must know each other, become friends and find the right story to shoot together. “With the co-production agreement, when they produce and work together, they can use the benefits from each country and the movie will be able to obtain Japanese nationality in Japan, and Italian nationality in Italy.

That’s very important, but the co-production agreement is only a tool. We need producers to use this tool,” added Stabile. Similar co-production agreement with Korea under discussion Stabile said that a similar co-production agreement is under discussion with South Korea.

This year, his team brought a delegation and set up an Italian pavilion for the first time at Busan’s Asian Contents & Film Market, held alongside the Busan International Film