FILMARKET HUB ANNIVERSARY: 2020 A YEAR IN REVIEW
Let’s celebrate together a new year making projects happen
This has been a very complicated year for everyone, but also crucial for the present and the future of the audiovisual industry. These are times for changes and important decisions to make and, from Filmarket Hub, we have been trying to stay close to our goal and to make sure that our philosophy remains the same: bring together the top talent from the world to connect their projects with leading companies in the film and TV industry.
2020 has been a crucial year in the strengthening of Filmarket Hub as a player in the industry. In the last 12 months, we have reached many collaboration agreements with schools, associations, script labs, festivals, contests, and many other international film events. Our objective remains the same from its beginnings; build through our global network a path to show the most considerable quantity of emerging talent possible, and offer through our marketplace the possibility to establish their first contacts with the industry and proceed through their development process.
Nonetheless, this year we’ve also taken our role in the industry a step farther. Thanks to our platform’s digital resources and Festival of Malaga’s collaboration, we celebrated the Malaga Festival Fund and CoProduction Event (MAFF) as a virtual event from the 30th of March until the next 10th of May. A match-making space in which Spaniard and Latin American directors could get in contact exclusively with 40 Spaniard and European producers to evaluate business and co-production opportunities. What’s more, the online event facilitated access to the “Learning & Training” educational program, during which renowned experts of the industry gave seminars on Pitching and private tutoring sessions. In addition to offering discussions aimed at the directors and producers of the 30 feature film and documentary projects chosen to participate in MAFF.
This year we also had the opportunity to strengthen our role as a collaboration in the new VLC Pitch Forum edition by offering our expertise to the event. As a strategic partner, we provided our platform’s Script Score as a prize to the two winners as “Best TV Series Project on Filmarket Hub.” Thanks to this collaboration, our TV Pilot Contest’s finalist project in Spanish, “Compañeras de Metralla,” written by Nayade Gomez and Marta Gonzalez de la Vega, was one of the selected to participate in the VLC event.
We continue to expand our network of international partnerships even further and in 2020 the Filmarket Hub seal travelled throughout Europe Latin America and the United States thanks to our industry partners. During the last edition of the Berlinale, we organized a meeting on project packaging with ScriptEast members, a curated selection of scripts from Central and Eastern Europe. We also had the opportunity to meet with the European projects participating in the MFI Script2Film to introduce them to the online market tools.
Our efforts to search for the most promising projects in Europe continued thanks to collaboration agreements with entities such as The Luchino Visconti Civic School of Cinema in Italy, DocLisboa International Film Festival in Portugal, Film London in the United Kingdom and Gijón International Film Fest in Spain.
This year we have reached important agreements to promote development and co-production with the Ibero-American market, such as our collaboration with Mestizo Lab or Ibermedia, a space of cooperation in the audiovisual community that integrates twenty-one countries. We also continue to bet strongly on serial fiction thanks to our partnerships with Iberseries or The Series Lab.
America's leading emerging talent also comes to the Filmarket Hub from our industry partners. Our collaboration with The Writers Lab has enabled us to discover great projects written by women over forty years of age. We have also been collaborating since this year with PAGE AWARDS, a competition that brings together the promising new talents of Hollywood, and Stowe Story Labs, a project development workshop located in Vermont.
PITCHBOX & CONTESTS
The necessity to move our live events to the virtual world has not stopped our spirit to continue connecting projects with the industry. On the contrary, the new reality we find ourselves in has allowed our Pitchbox initiatives to reach farther than ever. Most importantly, it has allowed us to bring together a greater quantity of projects in only one year.
In July, we organized the UK Online Pitchbox; our major event celebrated in the United Kingdom to this date. With the invaluable collaboration of Film London as our leading partner, 15 feature film and series projects had the opportunity to pitch and meet with leading companies such as Curzon, Film4, FilmWave, Gaumont, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal International Studios, Protagonist Pictures, and Studiocanal.
In September, we celebrated our first virtual event in Latinamerica: LATAM Online Pitchbox, which focused on features and fiction series in development. The call held a particular focus on Mexico. Still, it assembled the region’s most promising projects and the leading sector companies.
We didn’t miss our date with the terror, fantasy, science-fiction genres, and the Sitges Festival in October. For the Sixth consecutive year, we presented a brand new edition of our long-lived Pitchbox. Sitges Pitchbox happened for the first time online and was open both to feature films and European TV series in the development stage.
The big moment for the Spanish projects happened in December with the celebration of Madrid Online Pitchbox, both for feature and series in development. For the first time, they shared a new edition of a very special initiative for the Filmarket Hub team, which accumulates more than ten editions for emerging creative talents in Spain’s industry.
However, one of the essential pieces of news from Filmarket Hub throughout 2020 has been the incorporation of our international Screenwriting Contests to our calendar of calls. An initiative we strive to keep offering to scriptwriters from around the globe and offer them a challenge to put their writing talent and the quality of their scripts to the test. This year, we’ve had four international scriptwriting contests on feature films and TV series pilots in English and Spanish. This new initiative has been a resounding success that has allowed us to amplify and improve our capacity of identifying promising stories in development in the entire world. We continue working to offer our screenwriters a platform that gives more visibility to their scripts and helps them obtain direct contact with the industry.
We allow our creators to interact with producers, distributors, networks, and our online platform connects with financing partners from all over the world, 365 days a year.
Stay tuned to hear what’s next on Filmarket Hub. Exciting news is coming in 2021. We promise!
