China-South Korea film culture express

A scene from the martial arts film Bichunmoo, a joint production of China's Film Co-production Corp and South Korea's Taewon Entertainment in 2000.[Photo provided to China Daily]

"I don't see a great change after the agreement, but the gesture will bring a bigger market in the long term," he says.

Chinese-Korean film fest to focus on youth

Pop culture saves cinema

Still, according to the agreement, co-produced movies will be treated as domestic productions and will not be required to be cleared for screening through the annual quota of foreign movies. Approval procedures and the exchange of personnel in such projects will also be easier, trade analysts say.

Chinese and South Korean filmmakers have worked together in the past as well.

In 2000, China Film Co-production Corp and Taewon Entertainment produced the martial arts film Bichunmoo. The cooperation, however, has yet to yield influential works, says Fan Xiaoqing, a professor of cinema at the Communication University of China and an advisor of the Busan International Film Festival.

Most such past projects only witnessed shooting some scenes in each other's country and mixed casts.

"An ideal coproduction should be one with Chinese investment and South Korean technical expertise," she says. "To better attract the Chinese audience, the chief scriptwriter should be Chinese and most of the dialogue should be in Mandarin. But South Korean writers could be included because of their storytelling skills."

Fan cites Feng Xiaogang's The Assembly (2007) as one of the most successful Chinese movies made with a Korean technical crew. It created a new cooperative model for others to follow. She also points out to the failed Mr. Go. The co-investment venture from last year depicts a gorilla playing baseball, neglecting a basic fact: Baseball isn't a popular sport in China.