Now in its second year as an autumn event, the American Film Market expects toattract a record 7,000 attendees next month, at least 200 of them from Canada.

‘We have 525 screenings this year, up from 450 from last year,’ notes managing director Jonathan Wolf. ‘If you don’t attend, you’re conspicuous by your absence.’

This year has seen ‘considerable expansion,’ he says. ‘We have not yet hit critical mass. We have added five digital screens this year and expanded our exhibitor office spaces, due to the growth we’re experiencing.’

The self-styled ‘home of the independents’ market includes conferences and pitch sessions and is a meeting ground for filmmakers, exhibitors and distributors. It claims to have a hand in a half-billion dollars’ worth of deals per year.

This year’s AFM runs Nov. 2-9 in Santa Monica, CA, in partnership with the American Film Institute festival, Nov. 3-13.

Until 2004, AFM was held in the spring, when organizers moved the eight-day event to early November.

‘We recognized that this is what the industry wanted,’ says Wolf. ‘November is simply better for the international market. Now, the event is almost exactly six months away from Cannes – which means people can attend two major events in the year. Making both was more difficult when the events were so close together.’

Wolf says that the shift is but one of the changes he and AFM organizers have brought about to make the event more exciting.

When he took over the market in 1998, he explains, ‘We asked the producers who attended the AFM what they didn’t like about it. They responded that it was boring. We looked at all the rules and regulations that surrounded the event. For example, no outdoor advertising was allowed, because people were afraid it would become too much like Cannes if it were. In other words, we were inviting a whole load of people here who were experts in marketing and told them they couldn’t market their products.’

Wolf says the loosening of regulations, as well as active efforts to include film-industry members who might not be producers, has enlivened the AFM and made it a ‘must-attend’ function for serious producers and exhibitors.

Janis Lundman, a Montreal-based film producer and co-owner of Back Alley Films, will be attending AFM for a fourth time this year.

‘We found the experience at AFM really rewarding,’ she says. ‘I had been working on television up until the first time I attended, and at the AFM you get a strong sense of how different the film business is, who the solid sales agents are and what the demands of feature filmmaking entail.

‘The Toronto International Film Festival is a wonderful event, but the AFM is more centralized. You can basically go from floor to floor and set up meetings. It felt like one-stop shopping.’

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