Is making movies art or commerce?

Wrapping a Tuesday panel on international markets for domestic films, France-based producer Pierre Ange posed the age-old question, prompting a brief silence from the panel, a joking “Next panel!” comment and finally, a simple answer from Reliance Entertainment’s Sanjeev Lambda: “It’s show business, not show-show,” he said with a smile.

That question summarized some of the main messages out of the Local Stories, Global Films panel, held during the Toronto International Film Festival: Economics drives the global appetite for cultural stories. And films that achieve success on a global scale are craftily told stories with universal themes, buoyed by solid cross-border infrastructure and business practices.

The international panel, moderated by Variety‘s Patrick Frater, featured Rhombus Media’s Niv Fichman, Australian filmmaker Michael Lake, CEO of Pinewood Iskandar Malaysia Studios; Sanjeev Lamba of India’s Reliance Entertainment; Pierre-Ange Le Pogam of Paris’ Stone Angels and Hong Kong-born Shan Tam of Vancouver-based Holiday Pictures.

And while the panel agreed that there’s market potential and an audience appetite for global cross-overs, the delegates said that there’s still a way to go before the infrastructure is in place in their respective countries for these productions.

“Economics and culture are irrevocably linked,” Lamba told the audience, as part of a discussion about the cross-over potential for homegrown films into international markets. “We get interested in the culture of another country as it begins to impact us economically, in the same way we become interested in other stories as our economic status rises.”

He pointed to Japan and China as examples of countries that have grown in the global economic order, adding that India is following suit as an emerging player.

Local stories with universal themes have the most potential for cross-over success, the panel agreed.

“I believe you can’t build a bridge from the centre…we always say the best films that cross over are the ones that are very local and have a story that is rooted in a time and place. If you start to design a cross-culture film, usually people fail because it neither belongs to one or the other,” Lamba said.

Rhombus’ Fichman, who won as Oscar for 1998’s Red Violin, a co-pro with China, echoed the sentiment. He recalled working on the documentary Five Days in September: The Rebirth of an Orchestra for Ontario pubcaster TVO, about an amateur orchestra in the rural town of Cobourg.

“[The town] is known for its pig farming. The local baker was probably in the orchestra. They had this crazy conductor who just loved music,” Fichman said. The film won the audience award for best documentary feature at the 2006 Palm Springs International Film Festival.

The key to the film’s appeal, he said, was that it was a local story with heart. “If [films] have universal themes and heart, I think they would travel anywhere,” he said. 

Delegates said the current marketplace in their respective countries reflects development of their burgeoning industries first through pan-regional relationships. And serving their domestic markets first is still the priority. The Indian market, for example, is 95% domestic box office, and 5% from Hollywood imports.

Lamba suggested that industry professionals should think of India as Europe – not as one country, but as many different regions with different cultural practices and different languages, noting that the Indian film industry makes films in 17 different languages.

“The big cinema in the south of India is as foreign to me as Japanese or Chinese would be,” Lamba added. “When we talk about cross-cultural, I think Indians would first be better served by growing in their own country before going outside.”

The next step after pan-regional development is a global cross-over, and that requires a cross-border infrastructure that’s friendly to all potential producing parties involved.

Fichman emphasized that a global story is important, but producers should also look at the production from the ground up, to see how easy and feasible it is to have individuals travel to a region to work together.

Lamba said India, as an example, needs to build an internal economic structure for films to cross over. While the country has built systems to distribute Indian product to diaspora audiences all over the world, he said, “we haven’t really built a system that engages distribution from other countries that deal in cinema in other languages.”

Following the panel, TIFF artistic director Cameron Bailey said that while he can understand the hesitation in pursuing cross-border filmmaking, global film industries have to look ahead.

“Film is a global business. At a certain point, industries reach a certain level of maturity and there’s nowhere else for them to grow,” he told Playback.

Japan, he added, is a good example of a largely domestic market that needs to grow.

“If it doesn’t expand beyond Japan’s borders, if we don’t have more exchange between the Japanese industry and the outside world, things will begin to stagnate, and I think that’s true of most places…. It’s the nature of economies in general. I believe that it benefits from open borders, both financially and also creatively,” he said.

Bailey cited Life of Pi as an example of a cross-border collaboration that was successful both in North America and outside. The film had on board Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee, who was educated and had already achieved success in the U.S.; a story from Canadian author Yann Martel; Indian actors; and special effects done in different parts of the world.

“It’s that kind of hybrid that I think is going to thrive the most. That’s the future of filmmaking, as far as I’m concerned,” Bailey said.