After the important experience of the film ” Coffee ” – the first official co-production between Italy and China – Orisa continued to expand its international vocation, with the support of Regione Lazio and the European Union, with the production of the movie ” The Italian recipe “, mainly oriented to the Chinese market, whose shooting took place in Rome between January and March 2020.
In spite of the difficulties caused by the pandemic, which led to the cancellation of important festivals such as Beijing or Shanghai, or to the online fruition as in the case of the Cannes festival, important networking objectives were achieved in 2020. Participation in the Berlin Film Festival was fundamental, as it allowed us to lay the foundations for future collaborations with important Chinese production companies and to have fruitful exchanges of ideas and projects with them.
These efforts helped to improve the company’s positioning as a partner of excellence for Chinese producers and were a further incentive to advance the slate of projects related to the Asian market.
In June 2020, negotiations began for the Chinese adaptation of an important TV project Orisa made in the 90s called “Directors on directors”. The original show, broadcast on Tele+, was based on an inter-generational dialogue between emerging directors and the great masters of Italian cinema. The success of this format led to an initial internationalisation of the project, which involved great American directors of the calibre of Altman, Arthur Penn and Michael Mann, and the huge growth of Chinese cinema, especially in recent years, has made the possibility of exporting this format to the Eastern market more tangible. In fact, the project has already met with the interest of one of the main Chinese VOD channels, IQiYi (a sort of local Netflix) and has allowed Orisa to interface with the most important directors of the People’s Republic to secure their participation. If successful, this project would represent a very important link with the Chinese market, because, although the focus is closely linked to local culture, the production and editorial genesis would still be credited to an Italian company.
November was a key month for Orisa’s expansion into the Chinese market; two important negotiations were concluded during this month:
- the agreement with Taiwanese publisher San Min Books for the film rights of the novel “The secret talker”. Yan Geling is one of the most famous contemporary Chinese authors and her novels have been the subject of numerous films directed by important directors, such as Zhang Yimou (“The Flowers of War”, “Coming Home”).
- the sale of the film “Red as the sky”, which will be distributed on the main Chinese streaming platforms.
In spite of the uncertainty and recession that, due to the pandemic, hit the film industry during 2020, the initiative “Incentive towards the presence on the Chinese film market – phase 2” implemented thanks to the Public Notice “Contributions for the support of the internationalisation processes of SMEs in Lazio 2018” of Regione Lazio and the European Union, allowed Orisa to reach the set objectives and to lay the foundations for projects and relationships that can foster further business growth.
