Whistler’s China Canada Gateway for Film Script competition is starting to bear fruit.

At this year’s festival, Vancouver-based Massey Productions announced it has pacted with Face/Off producer Terence Chang’s Mannix Pictures to develop the bio pic The Eddie Zhao Story.

The project was one of three winning projects from the inaugural 2012 edition of the China Canada Gateway. The film will be released in China and other territories by Mei Ahi Media (Beijing) Limited, and financed jointly with Shanghai Ocean Sound Film Company Limited.

Production is currently slated to start in fall 2016, with a tentative 2017 release date. The film will be shot in primarily in British Columbia, with scenes also set to be filmed in Los Angeles and China. It is based on an English-language script by writer Guy Bennett, who will pass the English script to Chinese writer Na Jin for a Mandarin-language adaptation.

The Eddie Zhao Story is based on the real-life story of a 21-year-old man living in rural Chinese village who is drawn into a con scheme, where he ends up lending money he had borrowed to an American-Chinese “businessman.” The film follows his journey to recover the money and find the U.S.-based con man, which eventually lead to a successful career as a private investigator in California.

While the film will be shot in both Canada and China, it is not an official China-Canada coproduction and will feature a Chinese cast and director, said Raymond Massey of Massey Productions. As many others have discovered, it can be tricky navigating official coproductions between disparate cultures, Massey noted in an earlier panel about international copros.  

In the case of The Eddie Zhao story, the investors strongly believed the film was a uniquely Chinese story, and Massey told Playback Daily he felt it made more sense to not go the treaty route. He did, however, make a stipulation that his team needed at least six months to write the script. Generally, the turnaround time for scripts in the Asian film world is much shorter than that, Massey said.

“I can’t write a script in 30 days. If you want to finance the film, you have to finance a good one that we like,” Massey said he told investors.