Derek Elley joins Film Business Asia

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Corporate News

Film Business Asia is proud to announce that it has hired the services of Derek Elley as its chief movie reviewer.

 Elley, who parted company with Variety last month, is among the world's foremost film trade critics and is a leading authority on film from South and East Asia.

"Derek Elley reviews are a brand. They carry real weight in the film trade. So I'm delighted that Derek has decided to throw that weight behind our company as we launch a serious, professional reference for and about the Asian movie business," said the company's CEO and co-founder Patrick Frater.

 Film Business Asia is a new web-based company addressing the need for data, reference and reliable business news about the film industry in the world's fastest growing region.

 The Cannes film festival, which starts next week, will be the venue for the launch of Film Business Asia's first data products and the publication of a one-off print edition that addresses many of the key issues covered in depth online.

Elley has contributed reviews of Cannes market films into FBA's Special Edition. And he will be delivering a daily stream of reviews on new festival and market titles throughout the ten day festival. These will be published at www.Filmbiz.asia

 After Cannes, Elley's next reviewing stint will be at the Shanghai International Film Festival in June.

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 About Derek Elley

London-born Derek Elley has been watching and writing about Asian cinema for almost 40 years, latterly as Senior Film Critic for US-based trade paper Variety, for which he worked for 20 years co-ordinating the international reviewing team. 

A regular attendee at the region's major film festivals, he has programmed many Chinese cinema events in the UK, US and Europe, and in 1999 co-founded the Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy, devoted to popular Asian cinema. In between travelling as Chief Film Critic for Film Business Asia, he now hopes finally to find the time to complete his dream project, an encyclopaedia of Chinese-speaking cinema.

 

About Film Business Asia

Film Business Asia is a new Hong Kong-registered company, created and run by some familiar names in Asian film trade reporting: Patrick Frater and Stephen Cremin.

 It is built around the ownership and exploitation of data about the Asian film industry.

 Data includes an incomparable database assembled over 15 years by Cremin; numerical and regulatory data gathered from public sources; and data from business partners. For the first time this information has been gathered together in one place, rendered comparable and made accessible in English and five Asian scripts.

 Initial products include

§  Database of film projects in development, production and releasing

§  Box office tracking and graphing

§  Online contacts management (repertoire of 70,000 people and companies)

§  News and analysis, of which films reviews are a part.

 Patrick Frater (CEO)

§  Over 20 years of experience as a journalist (formerly with Variety, Screen International and The Hollywood Reporter) and a commitment to improving the professionalism of the Asian film business media, have brought Frater to the point today where he launches Film Business Asia. Based in Hong Kong, Frater will spearhead FBA's publishing activities while also adding to the conference and training programmes.

 Stephen Cremin (Chief technical officer)

§ A 1992 graduate in software engineering, Cremin began his own database of Asian cinema in 1993, a project that he has kept in active development for the past 16 years. He also published an award-winning, bilingual reference book on Japanese cinema, created the Asian Film Library Bulletin, and has been involved with the London Pan-Asian Film Festival and the Udine Far East Film Festival, Europe's largest festival of Asian cinema. Based in Taipei, he has worked as correspondent for Screen International and has a regular opinion column in Korean film magazine Cine21.

 About the film industry in Asia

§  Three Asian territories (India, Japan and China) are among the world's five most prolific national cinema industries, by volume of films produced.

§   China's gross box office is forecast to reach $1.5 billion this year. That would represent more than 12x growth since its low point of approximately $120 million in 2001.

§  The film industry in Asia-Pacific was the fastest growing of any region, climbing 12% to $7.7 billion in 2009 according to the Motion Picture Association of America. The North American market was worth $10.6 billion last year.

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