VIFF: US indies are chasing foreign public money, producer Giancarlo Nasi says
American independent filmmakers are now queuing for public film money in Canada, Mexico, Latin America and Europe.
That was the message from Chilean producer Giancarlo Nasi at the Vancouver International Film Festival on Oct. 2, during an Industry Masterclass titled “Exploring the Art and Strategy of International Co-Productions,” according to Variety. Nasi said private financing is drying up. Many United States independents now want to co-produce, a structure where producers in two or more countries pool cash and qualify for each country’s public support, in order to tap those foreign funds.
Nasi knows that circuit well. He is the founder of Quijote Films, an intellectual-property lawyer now based in Los Angeles, and has produced 29 features, many of them as co-productions. His latest, “The Smell of Apples,” is a South African film made with the Netherlands and Chile that recently premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
His warning was blunt. Distribution for American independent films is in crisis, Nasi said. Theatres are increasingly built around horror or huge studio films with superheroes, leaving little room for smaller titles.
The festival numbers tell the story. Nasi said many films in this year’s official competition at Cannes had no distribution in North America. A significant share of titles in last year’s Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes’ parallel section for adventurous work, had no sales agent at all, the middleman who sells a film to distributors territory by territory.
The flip side is demand. Nasi said many funds in Latin America and Europe are eager to back United States filmmakers, seeing a gap left by the domestic market.
He pointed to “The Settlers” as an example of how tangled, and how durable, that kind of financing can be. The film is the 2023 debut of director Felipe Gálvez, a period Western shot in the far south of Chile and produced by Nasi. It took eight years to finance.
Officially it was a three-country co-production. Unofficially it drew companies from eight or nine territories, including France, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Sweden, Denmark and Germany, plus equity investment from the United States. It premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2023, won that section’s Fipresci Prize from international critics, and later played Toronto.
What makes this stand out is the reversal. United States filmmakers once chased private cash at home. Now, Nasi suggested, they are looking outward for public cash, while foreign funds look back with interest.
