China’s 5th Hainan Island International Film Festival (HIIFF) welcomed an esteemed roster of global movie figures including jury head and Palme d’Or-winning auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan when it opened on Dec. 16, with local state media hailing the event for building new platforms for filmmakers to “communicate and collaborate.”
But the festival continues to be shadowed by accusations concerning a distinct lack of communication — and the non-payment of hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money promised to young filmmakers at its past editions.
Chinese producer Yini Qian’s film Drop Your Cat won the festival’s 2020 Hainan Choice Award, which included a RMB1.5 million (about $212,000) production-support prize. But the filmmaker says only RMB225,000 ($32,000) was paid — and not until June 2021. Repeated attempts by Yini and her partners to follow up on the unpaid award have yielded nothing.
“From 2021 to 2022, the former festival organizer responded with acknowledgment of the debts, but they have delayed and failed to fulfill their contractual obligations to this day,” Yini says. “Their excuses included a shutdown caused by the pandemic and an internal dispute among shareholders.”
“Every now and then, between 2021 and 2023 — especially right before every edition of the festival — various staff members of the festival would contact us and inquire about the status of our production, leaving us wondering if the issue would be resolved shortly,” Yini explains. “But nothing was resolved at all in the end.”
Several former members of HIIFF’s senior staff tell The Hollywood Reporter that they are still chasing unpaid wages promised under their former contracts with the festival (the individuals asked not to be named out of concern that speaking publicly could affect their ability to reclaim the payment). Some of the claims stretch back years.
Set on China’s semi-tropical southern resort island of Hainan, HIIFF is part of a broad government-led initiative to help expand the destination’s attractions as one of the country’s top tourist hot spots — one that already welcomes more than 80 million visitors a year. When the festival was founded in 2018, hopes were high across the Asian industry that it could become a flagship film occasion for the region — with much of the excitement pegged to early buzz suggesting the event had both deep financial backing and the full support of the regional government, a make-or-break factor for cultural events in China.
The festival spent heavily on appearance fees for global stars to drum up attention, with actors including Ethan Hawke, Johnny Depp, Mads Mikkelsen, Isabelle Huppert, Nicolas Cage, Juliette Binoche, Aamir Khan and Jackie Chan all having walked the red carpet and participated in festival forums. Chinese star power at HIIFF has been just as impressive. HIIFF’s main competition jury this year includes international figures like Cannes regular Ceylan (About Dry Grasses), Iranian filmmaker Shahram Mokri (Fish & Cat) and French cinematographer Caroline Champetier (Holy Motors), along with major figures from the Chinese industry, such as actor-director Dong Chengpeng (Jian Bing Man) and actor Huang Xiaoming (The Message), among others.
But the growing scandal over alleged non-payment appears to have become an open secret among Chinese film industry insiders over the past few years. The country’s emerging generation of filmmakers has been particularly affected due to their reliance on cash awards and grants provided by such industry events — including Hainan’s formerly esteemed H!Action production fund initiative — to get their projects off the ground.
Chinese indie film project Gods Are Watching won the Sanya Focus Award at HIIFF’s H!Action Project Market in 2020, but the filmmakers say they have yet to see any of the RMB425,000 ($60,000) that was promised to come with the prize.
“The [lack of promised payment from] HIIFF disrupted our original plan for the use of budget, resulting in our lack of funds to complete the post-production of the film,” says Gods Are Watching‘s director and producer, Ye Qian, who also goes by the name Yesir.
Filmmakers and staffers affected by the festival’s failure to pay say the situation has been exacerbated by numerous management changes, as well as a shake-up of the event’s behind-the-scenes partners, which formerly included a local real estate developer, named in Chinese media reports as Hainan Yuehe Business Information Consulting Co., Ltd.
Yini, the producer behind Gods Are Watching, says her team pursued payment from the festival for two years before eventually filing a legal claim at the Beijing Arbitration Commission. The producer says the commission ruled in their favor, but during the intervening years the original legal entity that was behind the festival was shutdown and a new entity was created to replace it — while organizers continued operating under the same festival name and reputation.
“We still don’t know when we will receive the [money] that has been in arrears for three years,” Yini says. “As a low-budget artistic film, this funding is essential. The financing for this type of film is not easy. We started the pre-production with trust and with the expectation of the film festival’s commitment to their promised prize payment — we had a signed contract in hand.”
The festival’s former staff members say they also worry that their unpaid wages may have been lost in the grey area that exists between the event’s former and current legal entities.
Other filmmakers reached by THR say they also have won arbitration claims from both the Beijing Arbitration Commission and the Sanya Intermediate People’s Court against the Hainan festival — but no money has been paid yet.
In its current iteration, HIIFF is being organized by the state-run China Media Group, in partnership with the Hainan government and state broadcaster CCTV-6.
THR has sent several emails and texts to addresses and contact numbers associated with the festival but has not received a response.
While organizers this year have remained silent on the subject of the allegations, in 2022 a spokesperson stated the Chinese news platform YuLi, saying only that the matter was under investigation.
“We need to understand the situation before deciding how to handle it. There will be a response afterwards,” the spokesperson told YuLi.
Since then, Yini and other filmmakers have continued to look for answers — and the money they were promised — while calling for a legal investigation into the festival’s operations and a formal apology.
