Has the Messy Boom of the Past Few Years Made More Room for Niche Cinema? | 2017 Annual Report

More money and more talent pouring in is, on the whole, a good thing.

We met director Zhou Ziyang for the second time after his film Old Beast won two major prizes — Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor — at the 54th Golden Horse Awards. There, this portrait of life in a contemporary northern Chinese city drew wide praise from critics. In it, a grown man's children kidnap their father, the "old beast" of the title, to claw back surgical funds he has spent on himself.

As he had that July at the FIRST Youth Film Festival in Xining, Zhou returned again and again to the impulse behind the film and explained its surreal touches. When the interview ended, he opened a window for some air and mentioned that his schedule that day ran until 11 p.m. Old Beast was five days from release.

Zhou had finished the script in 2015, but half a year before shooting began the film still had no money behind it. In May 2016, after two film-investment companies turned him down one after another, a few friends scraped together a little cash — 20,000 yuan here, 30,000 there — and Zhou decided to shoot first and sort out the rest later. On a whim, he brought the script to the 10th FIRST Pitching Forum.

"I never expected that I'd make the cut from thirty projects down to twelve, and end up with Wang Xiaoshuai as my producer and his backing." In July 2016, Old Beast won the youth festival's investment fund at the 10th FIRST Pitching Forum, plus a US$10,000 "Alibaba Pictures A-Plan Script Development Grant" for the year. Old Beast wrapped in early 2017; in December, after taking its Golden Horse prizes, it opened in theaters.

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Alibaba Pictures counts Old Beast as a successful investment.

On October 28, 2015, Alibaba Pictures, together with Youku Tudou and other partners, launched the "A-Plan," a program to incubate young filmmaking talent, pledging 1 billion yuan over the next three years in dedicated funding. By 2017, the A-Plan's films — among them At the Wharf, Pursuit (《追·踪》), and Mountains Moved by Sunlight — had all wrapped. Pursuit also came up through the festival circuit: it had been selected for the Shanghai International Film Festival's project pitching in 2010. Alongside Old Beast's Golden Horse win, both At the Wharf and Pursuit were selected for competition at the Busan International Film Festival.

Beyond Alibaba, other "young filmmaking talent programs" are also backing emerging directors. One of the earliest is the Wu Tianming Young Film Fund, run under the China Film Foundation. After it was set up in 2014, the fund built a public-service platform and began running film selections and awards. The Looming Storm (《暴雪将至》), which won a prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival this year, had been shortlisted by the fund back in 2016.

Jia Zhangke, once hailed as the "godfather of independent cinema," has supported young directors in one form or another since 2006. That December, his "First Film Youth Training Camp" formally launched, using a workshop format to teach young directors to make short films and helping with post-production and promotion. In 2010, he founded the "Addwing Plan" to serve as producer and executive producer on young directors' new films.

To date, the Addwing Plan has produced seven films, including director Han Jie's debut Hello! Mr. Tree (《Hello！树先生》), which won the Jury Prize at the 14th Shanghai International Film Festival.

Unlike twenty years ago, when Jia Zhangke was shooting Xiao Wu, today's festivals do more than offer a competition slot. Through their pitching sections they also connect films to the industry upstream and help them find money.

Both the Shanghai and Beijing festivals have set up "Chinese Film Project" pitching sections. Shanghai has backed well-known projects including The Piano in a Factory and Black Coal, Thin Ice. Over the past decade, the directors who came through here — Yang Shupeng, Pang Ho-cheung, and Yang Qing among them — have generally been seen as working at some remove from mainstream commercial blockbusters.

Other festivals point their attention squarely at young directors. In an interview with QDaily, FIRST founder Song Wen said: "The market needs a mechanism that lets the most promising young filmmakers, at the earliest stage, find their artistic confidence and their voice as creators."

Now in its eleventh year, FIRST has become one of the most established youth festivals in China. Many of the standout new directors and debut films of recent years got their start here: Xin Yukun's The Coffin in the Mountain in 2014, Wang Yichun's What's in the Darkness in 2015, Ma Kai's The Haunted and Zhang Dalei's The Summer Is Gone — which later won Best Film at the Golden Horse — in 2016, and this year's The Widowed Witch.

These young directors will not necessarily stay in art-house and independent cinema for good. But run on a three-year cycle, the wave of programs to support young directors that began in 2014 finally produced a small-scale explosion this year. In 2017, more than 200 domestic films opened in mainland theaters, including 15 art films — up from 10 in 2016. Beyond the various foreign independent showcases, these films also turned up again and again at festivals at home and abroad, from Busan to the Golden Horse.

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Before he secured Alibaba Pictures' US$10,000 and Wang Xiaoshuai as his producer, Zhou Ziyang had been ready to take the same road as Bi Gan.

In 2013, Bi Gan cobbled together 200,000 yuan from relatives and friends — barely enough to start the camera rolling — and finished Kaili Blues, which later won Best New Director at the Golden Horse. The producer came on only after the film was done, stepping in to run post-production and distribution and to give the director financial backing.

Before 2014, this was the road most young directors had to take. Either they raised the money themselves, shot the film, and then looked for a company to handle post-production, or they took it to the pitching sessions at the Beijing and Shanghai festivals for a chance to talk to film companies and pull money and resources out of them.

But at festivals held once a year, only about thirty projects usually make the cut, and films with unconventional subject matter were often knocked out in the first round.

Youth festivals have opened up more chances, and local governments are glad to host them. Beyond Xining, the Zhejiang Youth Film Festival — organized by the province's propaganda department and other bodies — reached its fourth edition this year. By the third edition in 2016, its screening lineup already included Tharlo, Crosscurrent, and The Summer Is Gone. This year the pitching section partnered directly with the Wu Tianming Young Film Fund, and the festival ran alongside the "Wu Tianming Youth Film Summit."

More small production companies have moved into art-film financing, too. A handful of companies and institutions had long made a point of investing in young directors and art-house films. Fang Li and his Laurel Films is one: Li Yu, Lou Ye, and Wang Chao all got their first investment from him. When Kaili Blues opened in 2016, its box office barely cleared 6 million yuan, but against its very low budget, its return actually beat that of many big-budget films.

By 2017, directors had even more ways to raise money. Beyond the usual festival circuit, many large studios began backing serious low- and mid-budget films. Zheng Dasheng's Village Opera drew joint investment from Baicheng Yingxiang, Shanghai Film Group, and the Shenzhen Radio and Television film studio — largely because it took part in a literary-film production program co-run by Writers Publishing House and the CCTV movie channel. Dahufa, a 2015 animated film that ran out of money 60 percent of the way through, launched a Kickstarter campaign to finish it. By 2016 it had pulled in 5 million yuan from Youku Tudou, and at the distribution stage secured further backing from Enlight's Coloroom Pictures.

This owed something to the boom in the film market over the past five years. At a forum during this year's Beijing International Film Festival, Alang, editor-in-chief of Movie View magazine, went so far as to say: "Kaili Blues getting a theatrical release — I think we owe that to the audience of Tiny Times."

At the 2015 and 2016 Golden Horse Awards, first Kaili Blues beat The Left Ear and Our Times to win Best New Director, and then Zhang Dalei's The Summer Is Gone won Best Film. Both wins set off enormous public debate. Then, in May 2016, producer Fang Li knelt down to beg theaters for screen time for Wu Tianming's posthumous Song of the Phoenix (《百鸟朝凤》), an act that thrust the whole plight of art cinema into plain public view. Song of the Phoenix finished with 86 million yuan at the box office.

So by the time 2017 came around, as Village Opera director Zheng Dasheng put it: "This is the year, of the past three to five years, when films with genuine independent expression and real quality came together in a concentrated burst. The level of polish is also the most consistent of any year yet."

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Zheng went on: "This burst takes effort from everyone — the creators, the audience, the curators and critics, and of course the censors. It has pushed and struggled and refused to die, limping along a rough road, and along the way there's been renewal, upgrading, rising and falling. That's how it has been nurtured. What we're seeing now is just the start of something good. As long as nothing unexpected cuts it off, it will turn into a virtuous, self-sustaining cycle."

Take away any one piece and the whole thing collapses.

The companies willing to back art films keep multiplying. At the 2017 FIRST Youth Film Festival, besides lead pitching partner Tencent Pictures, 116 investors registered for the pitching forum, while nearly 1,000 investment firms across the related supply chain listed on IT Juzi claimed to be funding the early or actual production of film projects.

After Kaili Blues came out, Bi Gan turned notably upbeat: "Raising 10 million yuan for my next film, for instance, would be very easy now. With a producer and an executive producer handling that side, I can use the money to make the film I actually want to make — that's the upside of a hot market." In 2016, Xin Yukun's second film Wrath of Silence drew nearly 60 million yuan from four companies.

At this year's 67th Berlin International Film Festival, Have a Nice Day (《大世界》) — the debut animated feature backed by Nezha Brothers Pictures — earned a Golden Bear nomination for Best Film. In an interview at the Pingyao International Film Festival, Nezha Brothers founder Yang Cheng said: "For the first three years the company will focus only on low-budget films, and only three kinds: low-budget animation, low-budget narrative features, and low-budget documentaries." At their brand launch in December, they announced two new projects: Going to College (《上大学》), another film by director Liu Jian, and The Hard-to-Read Scripture (《难念的经》) by young director Yan Xiaolin.

Art-film marketing is becoming a business in its own right. Also at the Beijing International Film Festival, the director of Young Love Lost summed it up: "From a commercial standpoint, art films can turn a profit too. Real returns don't come from luck; they come from varied tactics and a businessman's mindset."

Because opening-day box office tends to feed back into screen allocation, art films lean heavily on unconventional tactics like generating buzz. In late 2016, the Japanese animated film Your Name., with 400 million yuan in ticket sales, was reckoned by industry insiders to be the most profitable film of the year. Yi Qiao, CEO of Enlight's Coloroom Pictures, said that to promote what was "a work not well known at home," they made a set of Makoto Shinkai film filters and uploaded them to social networks.

This year's Twenty Two and Paths of the Soul (《冈仁波齐》) both, without exception, drummed up attention through reposts by online influencers and celebrities. Su Beiqi of the marketing firm Shuoguo Lianlian said in an interview that, given a limited budget, they first built attention with self-produced content, then brought in celebrities to lend their voices. Feng Xiaogang's Weibo post recommending Twenty Two was eventually shared more than 100,000 times, and the film's screen allocation began climbing from 1 percent on opening day.

At the 7th Beijing International Film Festival in March, Mai Shengxi, director of Broadway Cinematheque, said: "You have to give art films a long breathing period. At the start you can even run just one or two screenings a day, and let the word of mouth build slowly — that's the only way to extend an art film's life."

So, as a dedicated art-house circuit, Broadway Cinematheque gives new directors more screenings and longer runs. The approach has paid off: in this art house, art films, with their longer runs and longer time to ferment, often out-earn commercial films. When Love in the Buff (《春娇与志明》) opened on the mainland in 2010, its total box office was 2 million yuan — and Broadway Cinematheque alone accounted for 200,000 of it.

This year, the practice of splitting theatrical release between commercial and art films is also catching on. In October 2016, the National Art Film Distribution Alliance formally launched in Changchun, with more than a hundred screens across 31 provinces and cities joining, each committing to at least three art-film screenings a day and at least ten prime-time slots a week. By 2017, 433 cinemas in 145 cities had signed up. On August 25, the Oscar-winning Manchester by the Sea screened through the alliance, drawing 210,000 viewers and 7.997 million yuan over one month.

Even so, Broadway Cinematheque itself is not on solid financial ground. In an earlier interview with the film site 1905, a Broadway Cinematheque distribution staffer noted: "Broadway Cinematheque once ran the numbers and found the ratio of art films to commercial films on its screens is 1:10, but the occupancy rate is only 1:3 — so essentially all the money comes from the commercial films."

Until a mature system of art-film marketing and split releases is fully in place, more people are pinning their hopes on online video platforms. At a December salon, "The Film Industry's Challenges and Opportunities in the Age of Big Data," Taopiaopiao president Li Jie said that the future of art cinema lies not in theaters, which care more about profit, but on the internet.

In 2014, Lou Ye's Blind Massage (《推拿》) went onto online video platforms after its theatrical run ended; Kaili Blues likewise chose online distribution, making the first attempt at a single-film pay-per-view model and racking up 7.75 million views in a week. Xing Jian's Winter (《冬》), despite very few theatrical screenings, drew 5 million views online. Mai Shengxi said: "Legally done, scattered online distribution also suits low-budget art-house films — it allows for an extended long-tail run."

Some films have tried other routes. After winning its distribution license and a Golden Horse nomination, Zheng Dasheng's Village Opera chose not to go straight to theaters, opting instead for the crowdfunding platform Daxiang Dianying. Domestic art films enter the Daxiang Dianying library for event organizers to pick from; screenings run at accredited partner cinemas, and the film then enters the regular revenue-sharing system, with organizers splitting the box office with the filmmakers and theaters — typically taking a 10 percent cut.

So far, Still Tomorrow (《摇摇晃晃的人间》) has finished its screenings through the platform, while Tharlo and The Verse of Us (《我的诗篇》), both of which had theatrical runs in 2016, are still circulating in the Daxiang Dianying library for extended-run screenings.

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In 2011, after several pushed release dates, director Zhang Meng's The Piano in a Factory finally opened. It had been a prize-winning project from the Shanghai International Film Festival's pitching section, and actor Wang Qianyuan won Best Actor at the Tokyo International Film Festival for his role in it. The film's final box office was 2.7 million yuan. Critics remarked at the time that had it come out a few years later, The Piano in a Factory might have met a far kinder environment.

In 2016, Mahua FunAge's second theatrical release, Mr. Donkey (《驴得水》) — a darkly comic film with the feel of a stage play — racked up 173 million yuan, a return of 476 percent.

In 2017, Paths of the Soul, made for about 10 million yuan, approached 100 million at the box office, giving its backers a 200 percent return.

As for Wolf Warrior 2 and its nearly 5.6 billion yuan — as we said in our annual box office roundup, it may be a remake of the 1980s' Shaolin Temple, an explosive one-off product with little bearing on how the industry as a whole is developing — it may point to something else: this messy boom has packed capital and talent into the film business, and differentiated products may turn out to be a beneficiary.

At 30 yuan a ticket, by the time a film reaches 2 billion yuan, nearly the entire mainstream moviegoing audience has seen it once; past that point, aside from repeat viewers, it has reached the latent crowd — people who don't normally go to the movies. As with the wave of older parents drawn to theaters by Youth (《芳华》) at year's end, these viewers may have seen just one film all year. But this broadening of who goes to the movies suggests China's moviegoing base still has room to grow — and for a Chinese market with 41,179 screens but stalling growth, that is unambiguously good news.

Of course, for cinema itself, the thing most tightly bound up with the prosperity everyone is hoping for is still the censorship system.

Cover images: Have a Nice Day (《大世界》), Dahufa (《大护法》), Paths of the Soul (《冈仁波齐》)