"It's difficult for people working in these companies to develop their professionalism, as they may frequently change their jobs to adapt to the everchanging Internet."
The Internet is changing the ways of making and watching films in China: the audience can even participate from the beginning of film production - by making investments.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group launched the investment platform Yulebao on March 26, in which an individual could invest in movies and/or games starting from 100 yuan ($16). The first four projects - three feature films and one game - are expected to draw investments of 73 million yuan through Yulebao.
China's film industry, according to Jia, remains one of the most popular recreational sectors.
"Investments are still flowing into the industry. More than 600 films were made last year, not including those indie films that were not calculated in official statistics," Jia says.
"However, lacking a marketing mind, Chinese indie filmmakers don't get much benefit from the film market's growth."
He calls for more exchanges between commercial and indie filmmakers in China because "actually they need each other's help".
"Some Chinese films get lost in content when they go all the way to meet the audience's interests. They need to learn from indie filmmakers how to speak out in a personal voice," Jia says.
Another concern about the Chinese film industry is the shortage of producers who are creative and capable of delivering the director's personal voice to the general audience. This lack shows "the immaturity of the industry in China", Jia adds.
"A director shouldn't think about how to sell the story to the market when he or she writes it. That's the producer's job. But when I cooperate with young Chinese directors, they are concerned about marketing - even more than me - which is really sad," he says.
Improving marketing is critical for Chinese films that want to reach overseas markets.
Twentytwo Chinese films hit the big screens in North America in 2013 and the total boxoffice was $7.84 million, almost double 2012 ticket sales, according to m1905.com, citing figures from boxofficemojo.com, a box office tracking website with more than 2 million visitors per month. Founded in 1999, the website was acquired by IMDb.com, Inc, a subsidiary of Amazon.com.
However, $6.59 million of that was spent for The Grandmaster starring Zhang Ziyi, while the box offices of the remaining 21 added up to only $1.25 million. Lost in Thailand, a comedy whose boxoffice in the Chinese mainland was nearly 1.3 billion yuan ($208 million), made only $57,400 in North America.
Cameron Bailey, artistic director at the TIFF, admits that kung fu is still the most popular element of Chinese movies for overseas audiences because "action can be understood beyond language barriers".
But he thinks that what tripped up Lost in Thailand in the North American market was more than the difficulty of understanding comedy in a foreign language and the lack of a global star like Zhang.
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