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The Korean Film Council (KOFIC) has organized three industry forum events during Busan International Film Festival’s (BIFF) Asian Film Market. Held in the Event Hall of the BEXCO Exhibition Hall 4, the first forum focused on the future of financing through crowdfunding. With this collective practice becoming more and more common, the four panelists discussed how each country’s system differs and what the options are when choosing the course to make films crowdfunding.

 

The session was moderated by MOON Suk, who is a consultant at Funding 21. As a branch of Korea’s well known film magazine Cine21, Funding 21 is a social funding website. It supports cultural artists (film, plays, music, and art) who have great ideas but do not have the funds to make them. Keynote speakers included Stephan Paternont, CEO of Slated, Alex Stolz of British Film Institute, LI Yansong of iQIYI Motion Pictures, and SHIM Hyun-uk of Popfunding Inc.

 

Slated facilitates high-value introductions between financiers, film projects, and professional film industry. Through tagging and ranking, Slated’s algorithm help search film projects, investors, and film professionals to find the right partner, catered to each member’s needs. It is a little different from crowdfunding sites such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter although they all have crowd as the source of funds, Slated investors would not necessarily be fans of a project, but professional equity investors.

 

 

In China, crowdfunding usually refers to Baifa Youxi, which is a new investment fund that lets users crowd-invest on projects. It was launched by the Chinese giant, Baidu, jointly with iQIYI this year. Although their start in crowdfunding was late compared to other film industries, they’re exponentially developing. It took the models that were preexisting and modified it for the Chinese industry’s needs. As China has a huge number of netizens and since Baidu is the largest Chinese search engine, there is a huge potential for Baifa Youxi to become even bigger. iQIYI is continuing its quest to find best models and to lower risks.

 

Korea’s Popfunding was founded in 2007. It is a loan-type crowdfunding website and also there is a crowdfunding donation-type called Goodfunding. In previous years, Popfunding has successfully raised investments for films sunch as 26 Years and Another Family. SHIM raised some issues with crowdfunding which are that they’re not always successful and can even bring a bad image to the film’s production for not being able to establish equity investor first. There are 3 ways of raising funds which are through loans, sponsors, and equity investment. The Korean government has been looking at legalizing equity investment crowdfunding but it has yet to be passed.

 

The crowdfunding system has only come to realization not too long ago, but with active markets especially with interest from fans, it has become an important part of the film industry. As it is still in the beginning stage of development, there are many questions to be answered such as how to lower risks, what models work most effectively, and how to instrument the connection between potential investors and projects. But what’s important is that the industry has begun to see the prominence of crowdfunding.