Toronto producer michael bockner of Michael Bockner Productions was invited to participate in the new Projekt Markt at the Internationales Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg in Germany last month. He files this report.

Mannheim, germany: The 46th Internationales Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg (Oct. 10-18) brought with it the second edition of its new component, the Projekt Markt, a coproduction sidebar which runs concurrent with the festival.

Last year the Projekt Markt was launched with coproduction meetings between Latin American companies and Western European coproducers. This year the market added to its successful Latin American participation the involvement of Eastern Europe and Canada/u.s., dividing itself into three distinct sections: Latin America-Western Europe, Eastern Europe-Western Europe, and Canada/u.s.-Western Europe, an ambitious attempt to bring three world sectors together to expand Western European film and television production involvement, the emphasis being on projects which have cinema potential.

Each section of the market was allocated two consecutive days of meetings (overlapped across a four-day block), with nine 45-minute meeting slots per day.

Selection process

Modeled in part after the successful Rotterdam CineMart, foreign producers were invited to submit project packages to Mannheim-Heidelberg for consideration. Each package consisted of a synopsis, an eight- to 10-page project outline, an aesthetic overview by the director, and budget and finance information.

On this basis projects were shortlisted and shown to a wide collective of producers around Western Europe. Those projects attracting the most interest from the largest number of producers were the likely candidates.

Final project approval was the domain of the festival organizers, primarily Dr. Michael Koetz, ubiqitous director of the Mannheim-Heidelberg festival, and Olaf Aichinger, the tireless Projekt Markt coordinator.

They selected the final 36 participating foreign producers (12 in each of the three sections), who were ultimately invited to the market.

Once this selection list was finalized, both the Western European coproducers and the foreign invitees were given an opportunity to request meetings with each other from the written project and company profiles supplied to each by the festival prior to the festival start date.

If you selected a particular coproducer or a coproducer selected your project, a meeting was scheduled between the two companies.

Intensive four-day agenda

My own project, a feature film scheduled for 1998 coproduction between Canadian and European companies, was one of the 12 Canada/u.s. projects in part two of the market, which included six Canadian, four u.s., one u.k. and one German project(s).

We had eight scheduled coproduction meetings and several others after-hours. The eight included one Spanish producer/distributor, one Belgian development company, two Finnish producers, and four German production companies. Of the eight, our most successful and promising meetings were those with the Germans.

European funding realities

This being a German festival, national production involvement was prominent, and desirable for the invited foreign producers. Germany has a highly developed film finance system which is based primarily around five main funding bodies which include governmental agencies and other private foundations.

One quickly realizes that there are very few European producers with cash on hand or access to private investment. This was indeed a rude awakening for the u.s. companies invited to attend.

The success of any European producer seems rooted more in its proven ability to successfully access government agency film funds than its ability to commit dollars to development and/or production. Private dollars are almost non-existent and rarely a serious topic of business conversation. In this regard, European production financing resembles our own producers’ habitual and ineffectual reliance on Telefilm Canada and other agency involvement.

But while we in Canada have one production hand in the public trough and the other (American-style) reaching out for disappearing private investment, the European countries with their long history of state film funding have almost altogether given up the search for private sector funds.

Time will tell

Our company has been involved in a new film finance experiment, the results of which can only be measured later this year as the business initiatives we commenced in Mannheim either dissipate or, with continued effort on both sides of the Atlantic, develop as expected into fully realized financing and production deals.

Right now there are three major coproduction markets operating on the world festival scene (in addition to the business which habitually operates at Cannes, Berlin and mifed); these are the CineMart in Rotterdam, iffcon in San Francisco, and the Projekt Markt in Mannheim, all of which present a funding basis for independent cinema and art film.

Perhaps these three are pointing the way to new financing structures for the future of non-mainstream cinema. Time will tell.

What is definite is that coproduction is the answer for the continuation of non-mainstream, international cinema since few countries, including Canada, are able to fully finance increasing production budget demands or meet required distribution guarantees within the confines of their own domestic film industries.