Variety
Date: March 18, 2018
By: Patrick Frater
This year’s edition of FilMart will be the last for Distribution Workshop as a Hong Kong-
CREDIT: COURTESY OF WELLGO USA
based sales company. At the beginning of the month, the company announced plans to relocate to Taiwan from the beginning of April.
Virginia Leung, who currently heads sales will leave the company, which is controlled by Jeffrey Chan and Nansun Shi, and which has a minority investment from China’s Bona Film Group. Sales operations are to be restarted in Taipei, with June Wu, who also operates her own sales firm Ablaze Image, acting as a consultant and recruiting a new team.
The move was brought about by both the cost of operating from Hong Kong and by wider changes in the marketplace for film. Chan told Variety that the change was part of an evolution.
“We are having a reconception and a new focus,” said Chan. “When we started 10 years ago we only looked at the markets outside China, but now business is pouring into China.” That reflects a widely observed phenomenon that as Chinese cinema becomes more successful, its films are increasingly local and inward looking. That makes them harder to sell abroad. At the same time, film makers from outside China are clamoring for a piece of the huge and still expanding China box office. [FULL STORY]
