1905 Film Network Special Article "The overall strength of the venture capital of this year's Beijing Film Festival is very strong, and we can't help but say a lot of suggestions, hoping to help young creators and make their works better. In 2023, screenwriter Zhang Ji, who will serve as a judge of the Beijing Film Festival, has turned into the artistic director of this year's venture capital Beijing market. He highly recognized the overall level of this year's entries.
Guan Jinpeng, chairman of this year's venture capital jury, and Dapeng, Liu Haoran, Zeng Guoxiang, and Zhang Mo, members of the jury, gave comments and optimization suggestions on the 21 final-reviewed works from different perspectives. On the evening of April 20, the venture capital review committee announced eight honors, and many projects returned with honors.
Among them, the feature film "Little Man" won the two honors of the most market-oriented project and the most innovative production team; "Target in the Dark" won the support of the Beijing International Sports Film Week Sports Special Support Fund; "Iron Pillar Mountain" and "The Boy in the Moonlight" won the MPA Best Creative Project and MPA Best Potential Newcomer honors respectively, "Years of Peace" won the honor of the most valuable investment project, "Prisoner's Game" won the most potential project, "Half-familiar Family" won the honor of the most commercially valuable project, "One Hundred and Fifty Seconds", " Four works, including "Little Cave Sky", won the honor of outstanding projects in production, and ten works, including "The Adventures of Rabbit Guagua: The Lost Deer", won the honor of excellent script project.
A collection of 769 works
More than half of the suspense crime films
Bring a story and go for another movie.
As the best incubator for outstanding new directors, the venture capital market of major film festivals has always attracted much attention from inside and outside the industry. On November 20, 2023, the 14th Beijing International Film Festival Beijing Market Project Venture Capital opened the solicitation activity, and a total of 769 entries were received.
On April 19, 2024, after the preliminary review and review of the jury, the final 21 works entered the final roadshow project. These projects are in different stages of production, and the specific roadshow demands are different. Among them, there are 10 script projects, 6 projects in production, 2 sports projects and 3 Hong Kong, China sub-unit projects.
"Under the Breath" became the first project to be displayed on stage at the 14th Beijing Film Festival Venture Capital Final Review Roadshow. Director Yan Wenxin said that the film is a crime suspense genre film, and the shooting location was initially set at an old industrial base in Heilongjiang, with a shooting period of 45 days and a duration of 120 minutes.
In terms of narrative structure, the film adopts the form of chapter back and flashback, based on presenting a personal life history with personal extension. Yan Wenxin admits that his 20 years as a criminal defense lawyer has allowed him to come into contact with all kinds of real cases, which has become a source of creative material and inspiration. At present, the film is still in the pre-financing and main creator recruitment stage.
Zhang Ji said frankly that among the 769 venture capital entries this time, more than half of them are suspense crime films, and there are also many works that reflect the relationship between people and the city. The narrative of this type of domestic film is becoming more and more mature, and the audience's aesthetic threshold is high, and how to grasp the audience's emotions has become the key point of creation.
In recent years, domestic suspense crime films have continued to be popular, such as "Disappearing Her", "Desperate", "Solid as a Rock" and other films, which are applauded and popular. Many commercial levels are led by small and large successful cases, and they have also set off a boom in the creation of such works in the venture capital market in the upstream of the film and television industry.
Among the 21 final roadshow projects in this venture capital, there are as many as 7 works containing criminal and suspense elements. For example, films such as "Alibi", "Prisoner's Game", "Iron Pillar Mountain" and so on.
Among them, Chen Ju, the screenwriter of "Prisoner's Game", who graduated from the Shanghai Theater Academy, has won the honor of venture capital at the Beijing Film Festival for the second time. In 2022, the work "Separated by a Wall" written by him won the honor of the most commercial potential project of the 12th Beijing Film Festival. It is worth mentioning that the inspiration for the creation of the two award-winning works came from social news.
The main appeal of this film to participate in venture capital is to find directors and producers who can cooperate, with an overall production budget of 10 million yuan. For winning the award again, Chen Ju also posted on Moments to express "Thank you to the teachers of the Beijing Film Festival".
"I was so excited to hear that I had won the award, but now I'm calm. I didn't expect the jury to have such a big recognition of myself. In an interview, Zhao An'an, the director of "Little Man", who graduated from Beijing Film Academy, still revealed excitement in his words. In 2022, Zhao Anan mortgaged the house and scraped together 800,000 yuan to start preparing for the filming. At the end of November of the same year, the film was launched in Beijing, and in January of the following year, it was completed in Foshan, Guangdong.
Currently, the film is in post-production. Zhao Anan hopes that a partner can join in to complete the post-production work such as color grading together, and then find a way to find distribution resources. His second work has already completed the first draft of the screenplay, and it is also a crime mystery film.
The theme of the final roadshow project is diversified
Dapeng sponsored 500,000 yuan on site
This year's 21 finalist roadshow venture capital projects have a wide range of themes, covering themes such as women, sports, and Tibet. These works allow the market and the audience to see the richness of the current Chinese film creation ecology.
Among the female-themed works, the production progress of "Years of Peace" is the fastest, and it just won the dragon mark last week. The creation of the film was inspired by a social news that "abandoned his daughter in order to give birth to a son, and his son suffered from leukemia and asked his daughter to donate bone marrow". The two leading actors in the film are actor Liu Weiwei, whose representative works include "Conquest", "My Captain, My Group", etc., and Duan Aojuan, "Rocket Girl".
In the face of Zhang Ji's question about how the two leading actors joined the film, the film's producer Liu Fan admitted that the project was first noticed by Liu Weiwei's company. Later, the two sides also worked together for the role and the script for more than half a year, and finally Liu Weiwei decided to play a very controversial mother. According to the film's director Zang Lianrong, the film was shot in Chongqing. The film is also Duan Aojuan's first work on the big screen.
A total of 3 sports-themed works were shortlisted for this year's venture capital roadshow project, namely "Donghua Football Team", "Target in the Dark", and "One Hundred and Fifty Seconds". Among them, "One Hundred and Fifty Seconds", which features two rhythmic gymnastics professionals and Wenwen as the protagonists, is the only documentary film among the shortlisted works.
In an interview, the director of the film, Yang Shaobo, said that the purpose of shooting this film is to convey a simple truth to everyone: hard work is not necessarily successful, and if you don't work hard, you will not succeed. Yang Shaobo believes that in competitive sports, people tend to pay more attention to the result and ignore the process. In fact, the process is also important. At present, the goal of participating in venture capital is to find theatrical and online distribution resources.
The film adopts a two-line character structure, with the characters driving the story. The beginning of the filming of the film did not go smoothly, because the two sides did not have contact for a long time, and the young gymnasts were more recognizable. In order to bridge the distance between the two sides, Yang Shaobo, who is good at photography, first used a camera to take pictures and share daily training photos of the team members to enhance mutual trust. After the team members became familiar with the presence of the lens, he changed the camera in his hand to a video camera for shooting.
"The Boy in the Moonlight" is a Tibetan-themed film, and director Wanma Tseden has participated in the revision of the film's script. Director Dajie Dingzeng has served as executive director in "Kill a Sheep", "Talo" and "Wanza's Rain Boots", and "The Boy in the Moonlight" is his first big-screen directorial work.
"Today we are here to talk about this movie, and I saw Mr. Wanma Tseden as the producer, who has been tracking this project before, and he also hopes that it can be completed, aren't you short of 500,000 yuan to do the post-production, and then I will help you do this post-production, and help you complete it. At the review site, Dapeng promised to fund the film with 500,000 yuan on the spot, and said that "it can be without any signature". At the same time, he also recalled the scene of working with Wanma Tseden at the Beijing Film Festival in April last year. For the departure of such an excellent filmmaker, he still feels sudden.
It is worth mentioning that in the award ceremony, Yang Zi, Gu Xiaogang, Xu Lei, Bai Zhiqiang, and Li Pu, five new directors of the previous Beijing Film Festival Venture Capital Plan, also returned with their masterpieces and blessings to thank them. The five directors wrote a sentence of encouragement to all the contestants on the posters of their representative works.
At present, discovering more new directors and helping more young directors grow has become one of the important missions of major domestic film festivals. In the future, after these fresh "blood" are injected into the Chinese film market, they will also give the audience more expectations and surprises.