Tapping the foreign film market

Photo by Jiang Dong / China Daily

Zhou insists that, to reach a global audience, we should not only tell stories about China, but more about Chinese people. "We have not learned how to penetrate the cultural surface into the depth of humanity. Our products are often made with what I call 'strong cultural discount', and that will hamper the acceptance of foreign audiences. Stories about human nature but with Chinese cultural characteristics, such as Wolf Totem, have the potential to succeed on the wider market."

Zhou uses the analogy of fish to explain his point. If a fish has too many bones, only people who are ardent lovers of fish as food will eat it. But if you remove the bones and make it into fish balls or fish fillets, even those mildly interested may choose it. A Chinese film has to go through a similar process to find a wider audience. "When we make a global film, we must preserve the flavor of fish, so to speak, i.e. the Chinese elements that culturally identify us. But if you examine any film that sells across the world, you'll find it does not contain things that will be stuck in your throat. It can always go down smoothly. Any race, culture, age, language group will be able to relate to it. In that sense, you have to tell a global story or even a story of the whole cosmos."

However, there can be endless gradations between total localization and total globalization in terms of a film's positioning. When it comes to the treatment of a film story and its details, there are thousands of decisions and each one will require a careful balance. Very often there is no right or wrong, but collectively a film may come across as heavy on one end or the other. Occasionally, a film may capture both the domestic and the outside market, but it may also be caught in the middle, failing to appeal to either side.

Debates like the one described in this story, which I moderated, happen every year as we move along - and up - the learning curve.