On September 16th for the fourth time in Ukraine the annual International Сonference “Film Business in Ukraine: challenges, features, opportunities” was held. Organized by Media Resources Management company, the one-day conference was dedicated to the burning problems of Ukrainian and international film industry. Core Ukrainian, Russian, Belorussian and European experts put the emphasis on the raising funds and film production investments.

Each of the Film Business in Ukraine speakers shared his experience of successful projects implementation and efficient finance system developing within the company or the country, as well as at the international co-operation level. Another hot topics of the conference were: the state support of film industry, problems and perspectives of Ukrainian movie theaters business, the importance of marketing component in the pre-release film project promotion.

Illia Neretin,  General Producer of Raccoon Cinema (Russia), was the first to speak at the conference’s “Film Finance and Investments” panel discussion, and made a retrospective journey into the history of the Soviet film industry, paying serious consideration to the state role in the art and business accommodation within the Russian film industry. Principals and mechanisms of the French cinema investing was described by Joël Chapron - Central and Eastern European manager for the promotion of French cinema abroad, UNIFRANCE. Russian and Ukrainian lawers - Konnov & Sozanovsky and MGAP representatives, having huge practical experience in film industry investing, told about investment schemes that do work. Managing Director, Completion Guarantor at International Film Guarantors Ltd. Luke Randolph in course of the conference gave a master class on the international film finance models, creation & measures of the project value, finance versus investment, different types of finance, risk management, return on investment, and how does a producer deal with all this.

Besides film industry investing issues, the conference’s participants had a great opportunity to discuss the problems of cinema promotion, as well as film distribution and cinema theaters prospectives in Ukraine. The results of film distribution market in Ukraine for the first three quarters of 2011 was highlighted by Artem Vakalyuk, Editor-in-Chief of Content Report and Media Business Reports publications, Media Resources Management (Ukraine). Victoria Gorenshtein, Chairman of the Board of Cinema Center cinema chain (the owner of the The Cinema City chain, Ukraine), delivered a speech about problems and perspectives of Ukrainian movie theaters business. Expanding their cinema theatres chain within the biggest Ukrainian cities, the Cinema Center company has faced such a problems like  lack of investments, repertoire poverty, accrescent expenses of the cinema, vital need of cinema halls modernization and digital technologies implementation, audience preferences tracking as well as the theatres location. A very active discussion was caused by the report of Anton Pugach – the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Multiplex-Holding (Ukraine). He has offered the opinion, that state support and financing of the film production is not at all a guarantee of its success in Ukraine and moreover – abroad.  Also Georgi Malkov, General Producer Enjoy movies (Russia) has shared his experience of development and implementation of his film project "Pregnant -man", released in early September.