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Jérôme Paillard • Executive Director of the Cannes Film Market

“10,000 participants seven days from the opening”

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- Cineuropa asked Jérôme Paillard to present novelties and trends for the 2013 edition

A few days from the opening of the Film Market, which will run parallel to the 66th Cannes Film Festival from May 15th to 24th, 2013, Cineuropa asked its Executive Director Jérôme Paillard to present the 2013 novelties and trends. 

Cineuropa: Firstly, what are the figures for participating countries and have you identified any trends?
Jérôme Paillard:
We are once again progressing compared with last year, with more than 10,000 participants seven days from the opening. We should end up with approximately 12,000 participants.
As for trends, there are never any major changes, but we have noticed a slight progression from the average for the United States and Asia, specifically Japan and China. In Europe, France and the United Kingdom continue to dominate (respectively 15% and 11% of the total number of participants). Due to its economic difficulties, Spain is showing a slight drop from 2.7% in 2012 to 2.3% in 2013.

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What are the trends from the point of view of professional categories?
As usual, there are many producers since it is the most widely represented activity (nearly 4,000 participants). As for vendors, we have about 20 more exhibitors in the Palais because we have managed to gain a little more space. We deal with rarity because there aren't enough rooms or space and we are limited by the schedules we are given. On a day-to-day basis, we have 39 screening rooms at our disposal. This limits the number of screenings on a practical level, but it still gives us a huge diversity of choice. If you add the official sections of the festival, it means that at any point in time people can choose from 45 films. That’s huge!

Are there more VOD distributors than last year?
In 2012 we had 70 VOD distributors and today, between aggregators and platforms, we have 248 participants linked to VOD including 80 for whom it is the main activity. This is a very clear progression.

Will the International Village host new stands?
The Village is extremely successful and our booking agenda is completely full. The new stands are Haiti, Indonesia, Kenya, the Dominican Republic, Lithuania and Portugal. The Film Commissions are also out in force on the Pantiero and we will notably have newcomers from Norway, Panama and Krakow.

What will the Market propose as this year’s novelties?
We have real novelties and quasi-novelties, such as the Doc Corner which was essentially a screening area last year and which will this year be used by sales companies specializing in documentaries, as well as festivals like Doc Alliance, DOXBIO, IDFA. It's clear to see that documentary cinema in general is becoming increasingly important.

Alongside the Doc Corner, mainly intended for distributors and programmers, we have created a Cross Media Corner which is mostly a place of discovery for all producers, where we will propose cross-media projects which we find interesting for the cinema. We want to show producers how they can integrate cross-media elements into their own projects. People will be able to experiment for themselves with different projects through installations. There will also be round tables and what we call the “cabinet des curiosités" or "curiosity room”, which is a presentation of a dozen cross-media projects selected from all over the world.

Also on the list of novelties, we are supporting the Works in Progress presentation organized by the Buenos Aires Lab (BAL) of the BAFICI (Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival). Instead of inviting vendors to come to Buenos Aires in April, they decided to show five films under construction in Cannes on Tuesday, May 21st, at 4 p.m. Works in Progress offer international vendors the possibility of getting involved at the editing level and are highly prized by the vendors. It is an initiative that we will follow closely and which we could eventually develop with other partners.

Another novelty scheduled for Monday, May 20th, at the Palais K is the ‘New Chinese Film Talents Forum’, a presentation of six Chinese directors invited to pitch their projects in Cannes. They will participate in a 3-day training session with a coach who will help them to present their projects. They will then be able to confront international professionals and the expectations of the international market. For Western producers, this is a source of curiosity too. There are very different projects: dramas, genre films, a musical...

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