The Circuit

by Ed Meza
The Rio de Janeiro Intl. Film Festival got down to business on Monday with the start of the RioMarket.

While the fest has become a huge hit among the city’s moving-going public - organizers are expecting to sell a total of some 300,000 tickets - the RioMarket offers attending industryites a window into the Brazilian market.  In a sign of growing cooperation between Brazilian filmmakers and European partners, U.K. Film Council reps Isabel Davis and Himesh Kar were on hand to discuss greater cooperation between British and Brazilian government agencies as well as the possible development of bilateral agreements between the two countries.

Fest organizers are enthusiastic about bringing Brazilian and European filmmakers together, and Europeans appear more than happy to make the flight across the Atlantic cinema, samba and caphirinas.

At a Sunday night dinner honoring Italian sibling duo Vittorio and Paolo Taviani, Ilda Santiago, the fest’s executive director, praised Italian and European filmmakers and their participation in Rio, underscoring their immense impact to cinema worldwide but also to Brazil. “Having you here is a dream come true.”

Celebrating its 10th year, the fest kicked off Sept. 25 in an all-new Pavilion. Instead of its traditional tent location at the Copacabana beach, the fest center is now housed in one of Rio’s oldest buildings, a warehouse dating back to 1871, now the Centro Cultural da Acao e Cidadania.

Twice the size of the Copacabana tent, the vast new Pavilion is equipped with state-of-the-art technology and also houses the RioMarket, the Cine Encontro venue for panel discussions and presentations and the Cine Mobile Nokia space set up to showcase cell phone productions, plus a bar and restaurant.

The move is part of an effort to promote Rio’s inner-city renewal program.

In one of the day’s more heated discussions, Jorge Peregrino, Paramount Pictures Intl.’s senior VP of distribution for Latin America and the Caribbean, took issue with a recent study by Rio-based research group MMGA that found the design of theaters had a strong influence on the public’s cinema-going habits. Unlike much of the rest of Latin America, which has seen impressive box office growth in recent years, Brazil has lost ground due to a number of factors, generally attributed to piracy and poor marketing among independent distribs.
Despite a slew of international award-winning films in recent years, the country has seen the market share of domestic films shrink, with local pics making up only 7% in the first seven months of 2008. Last year that figure reached 11.5% compared to 21.4% in 2003.