With Tencent Pictures naming the FIRST Film Festival, it is a long way to go to step into the capital market

Capital is fierce, and the new director's future creative path is still full of question marks. How the FIRST Youth Film Festival can express its attitude in the current impetuous film market while gaining more commercial support, and how to further expand its influence are all problems that need to be solved.

For fans, the FIRST Youth Film Festival is no stranger. This film exhibition evolved from the College Student Image Exhibition Festival launched in 2006. It was officially settled in Xining in 2011 due to government subsidies provided by the Xining City government, as well as conference, publicity, and venue support. This year is the 11th.

"This year is the 11th year of the FIRST Youth Film Festival, but the difficulties we have encountered are the sum of the problems in the previous 10 years." Li Ziwei, CEO of the film festival, said this at the opening ceremony of the film festival in front of a packed audience of the opening film "Hunting the Wind River Valley".

At the opening ceremony,

Li Ziwei was as excited as ever on the stage as she described the grand occasion of the movie that will be screened this year. It is difficult to summarize what the problems she is talking about, and can only guess from multiple perspectives. It may be that most of the main competition films have not received the "dragon label" from the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, it may be that the Xining City government has no longer provided an annual subsidy of about 1 million yuan after 2014, it may be that some films scheduled for screening cannot be screened due to temporary changes...

This screening lasts for 10 days. Compared with first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, Xining's fan environment can almost be described as a "vacuum". The vast majority of the audience at the film festival are practitioners, media, film critics from other places, as well as film fans who come to travel around. In Xining, there is not much publicity about the FIRST Youth Film Exhibition except near the screening theater line.

Although the FIRST Youth Film Festival has been held from July 21 to July 30 every year since 2011, many taxi drivers are not sure,"Is there a meeting related to movies?" They have a basic understanding of this grand event until they heard that Zhou Xun was staying at the hotel they had just parked in that they asked,"Is the one Zhou Xun came from interesting?"

Fortunately, this year's screening did not have the problem of low attendance last year. In addition to the opening and closing films, which are "hard to get a ticket", the director's meetings such as "The Little Widow Immortal" and "The Stupid Bird" are all completely sold out, and almost all other film screenings have 80% attendance.

The first screening of "The Little Widow Immortal" sold out before the opening of the FIRST Film Festival

. The FIRST Film Festival, which requires market-oriented financial operations, cannot make money through the box office screening. Before the award ceremony, each film will basically only be arranged for two screening opportunities. They will be divided into different units such as "Amazing First","Shortlisted Films","Xining Mirror","Planet Rotterdam","Intentional Reinvention", and "Ambassador FIRSTXONENIGHT Curated Exhibition","Academic Spirit", etc., expressing different themes through the curator's planning. Since most of the scheduled sessions are held in the middle hall that accommodates about 200 to 300 people, and many tickets are "sent" to filmmakers and media, in the end, each session may only earn a few thousand box office revenue, which may not be as good as the copyright fees of many films. Curator Wang Yishu said,"The cost of doing screenings is very high, and we can't get it back at the box office."

Even so,"income cannot make ends meet", screening is still the most valued part of the FIRST Film Festival. Among them, the "amazing debut" and "shortlisted films" can only be selected from among the films submitted for competition, which is relatively restricted."Competition is a matter of serving the film," Wang Yishu believes. "The screening may be more representative of our film festival's own expression." Of course, this expression is based on the continuous viewing of several films in the same unit. There are not many viewers who can feel it and it is extremely interpretable.

The main executive work of the FIRST Youth Film Festival is shared by more than 100 volunteers. The festival has only 8 full-time employees, including only 4 curators. They not only undertake the content of the entire film festival, but in a sense, the preferences of the four of them can represent the style of the entire film festival.

The most direct influence of some of the commended volunteers and Ambassador Zhou Xun, the curator of the 11th FIRST Youth Film Festival

, on the film festival is the screening part, while the indirect influence is the main competition awards part. Although the final result is chosen by the judges, it is up to them to decide who the judges are. Through understanding the judges 'preferences, they can even roughly predict the final result. In fact, their understanding of the temperament of the FIRST Film Festival only agrees with each other in a general direction, and they will also have different ideas on the temperament of more details. However, for such a young film festival, there is no constraint on the decades of history of other well-known film festivals. On the contrary, it is easier to find a position that suits you in a flexible and changeable film environment."Even tomorrow, if you change a colleague, the temperament of this film festival will undergo a slight change," Wang Yishu joked.

In the film industry, which is extremely hungry for talent, this joke is particularly realistic. Song Wen, founder of the FIRST Film Festival, said that in 2015, due to communication problems with sponsors, they had difficulty accepting the strong naming needs of some employers, and in the most difficult case, they were unable to pay wages. Li Ziwei also joked at the "Press Conference of the 11th FIRST Youth Film Exhibition" held in May this year that Tencent Pictures, which sponsored this year, gave money very happily and could finally give employees an extra month's salary during the Chinese New Year.

In addition to hosting a forum and a reception this year, Tencent Pictures also established a Tencent Pictures "NEXTIDEA Project" script development gold award in the venture capital segment, providing US$10,000. Obviously, Tencent Pictures is here to find good projects and good young filmmakers. Last year's low-cost domestic horror film "The Evil" gave it hope. Although this film, which is produced by Tencent Pictures and invites screenwriter Wang Hongwei and professional editors to "polish" it, there is still no clear deadline.

It is precisely because of the potential of films such as "Heart Maze","August", and "Evil", as well as the potential of the directors of these films in future creation that the venture capital unit of this year's FIRST Youth Film Festival attracted more capital than in previous years. Before the start of the film festival, 26 companies had made appointments to participate in the first industrial screening, and 116 investors had also signed up to participate in the venture capital unit.

Compared with those more commercially mature venture capital projects at the Beijing and Shanghai Film Festival, the filmmakers participating in the FIRST Film Festival relatively lack experience in dealing with managers and film companies. This is also the reason why the FIRST Film Festival holds industrial screenings. In the industrial field, seven films: "Old Beast","Xiliu Bay","The Man Sleeping on the Sofa","I Want to Run","The Little Widow Immortal","When Will You Come Again" and "Shanghai 1948" were screened in a concentrated manner within three days. Curator Duan Lian expressed the hope that he could "use this platform to build a bridge between the management and the film, provide standardized, accurate and effective interview space, and facilitate their subsequent cooperation."

The venture capital unit, which has been in operation for six years, has attracted 697 film projects to register. In the end, 12 projects entered the final proposal stage, and all 312 interview periods on the next day were filled. However, according to several management representatives, there were many interviews on the same day. However, considering that almost all of these film projects are directors 'debuts and are relatively authorship, they more express their intention to cooperate with the main creators. Very few signed contracts immediately.

Through the bridge established by the FIRST Film Festival,"Old Bastard", which won the script development fund for Alibaba Pictures Project A in venture capital in 2016, also won the "Best Drama" in the main competition unit of this year's FIRST Film Festival after changing its name to "Old Beast".,"Best Director" and "Best Actor" were nominated. In the end, the leading actor Tu Min won the "Best Actor" for playing Lao Yang.

Director Zhou Ziyang also said that before participating in the venture capital fair, the project had been in preparation for more than half a year, but there was no substantial advancement in investment. Until he attended the Venture Capital Fair and at the reception after the awards ceremony that day, Director Wang Xiaoshuai voluntarily expressed his favorite script of "Old Beast" and said that he not only wanted to be a producer, but also invested in his Winter Film industry. After returning to Beijing, Zhou Ziyang quickly confirmed cooperation with Dongchun, and the film project entered a normal track and began to advance. "We changed a few drafts of the script first, and felt that we had almost done the changes and were completely satisfied, so we started formal preparations." Zhou Ziyang said.

However, how the films produced through the FIRST Film Festival connect with the market and whether they can really directly connect with the market is still a question mark. Perhaps in the past few years, a few genre films such as "Heart Maze" and "Evil" allowed everyone to see the ability of these young directors to create high-quality commercial films, but more films still focus on personal expression, strong artistic and authorship, which is not completely consistent with what the managers and film companies who go to Xining to chase them now envision. For management and film companies, it is extremely necessary to get a return on investment in the market.

It is a pity that in addition to "Heart Maze", which scored 8.6 points in Douban movies, which earned 10.66 million yuan in box office in 2015, other nominated and award-winning films, such as "August","What's in the Dark","My Heart is Jumping","Sister Mei", etc., all only grossed hundreds of thousands or millions of box office results. Although its production cost may only be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, considering the publicity cost of being in theaters, such results can only be said to be unsatisfactory.

In this year's FIRST Film Festival main competition, there were almost no genre films among the nominated films, and most of the author films were films. Such a choice can be seen as the respect expressed by the FIRST Film Festival for directors, but it also means that it is actually difficult to find new directors who can shoot excellent genres at the moment. For example, director Gao Zehao, who won the "Best Editor" and "Jury Award" in the main competition of the 7th FIRST Youth Film Festival for his genre film "Witness" in 2012, won the "One Position" new film "Killing Melons" this year. The starring Dong Yong and Liu Hua are quite well-known, but they are a work that expresses meaning significantly higher than the complexity of the story.

The "Parallel Lab" program to help new directors balance their creativity and the film industry came into being. This is a plan jointly launched by the FIRST Film Festival and Bingchi Pictures. The purpose is to allow directors who have already produced excellent new works to "get close to the industry while retaining their own creative style" without being familiar with capital. In 2016, the first phase of the program signed contracts with four directors, Xin Yukun, Zhou Juhong, Shao Pan and Wang Yichun, who had achieved excellent results with their debuts at the FIRST Film Festival, to create their four works,"Violent Silence","City of God","Quiet People" and "Candy of Strangers". This year's closing film "Violent Silence" is the first film to appear in this plan. It can be clearly found that the production quality of this film is much better than that of Xin Yukun's previous work,"Heart Maze", while maintaining the director's consistent style.

Gao Yitian, the producer of "Violent Silence", is one of the four curators of the FIRST Film Festival. He is fulfilling the plan's promise of "providing a healthy ecosystem as much as possible for the director and using a complete industrial configuration to support the director's creation."

However, from the signing of the contract in January 2016 to now, this is the only film that the "Parallel Lab" has actually produced so far, and several other films are still in the early stage of script writing. According to Wang Yishu,"This is a privately customized job, very elaborate, does not pursue output, and there is no rule that the film must be released immediately after signing a contract." It is similar to giving new directors who have just "graduated" from the FIRST Film Festival an opportunity for an "internship".

In fact, for the FIRST Youth Film Festival, the "Parallel Lab" can only be regarded as an additional extension. It can only provide help within a limited scope. It can truly help new directors demonstrate their abilities and find funds to continue to support their creations. It is also an industrial screening and venture capital unit in the film festival.

However, the mainland film market has not yet formed a sustainable independent film production ecosystem. Through the well-known works and young filmmakers at the FIRST Youth Film Festival, only a small number of them can meet the audience on the big screen. In the future, there are even fewer directors who can produce second and third more excellent works. What's more, many of these talented film authors are not fully aligned with the commercial film talents urgently needed in the current film market. How to express its attitude at the FIRST Youth Film Festival in this slightly impetuous film market while gaining more Commercial support and how to further expand its influence are all problems that need to be solved.

Editor: Xiongwei