More than 150 local and international film industry guests participated in two full and informative days of professional seminars and panel discussions at the fifth edition of Vilnius International Film Festival's industry sidebar Meeting Point Vilnius, moderated by journalist and filmmaker Nick Holdsworth , Eastern Europe Bureau Chief for The Hollywood Reporter.
The event was opened by Lithuania's deputy minister of culture, Darius Mazintas and festival executive director Algirdas Ramaska. Mr Mazintas emphasised the importance of the film industry in Europe, where it accounts for 4.5% of EU gross domestic product and employs 8 million people.
The first day focused on how film festivals could help promote and market films and build audiences.
Rolandas Kvietkauskas, director of the Lithuanian Film Centre, outlined the facts and figures locally.
Set up in 2011 the centre - which has a budget this year of 2.1 million Euros - last year the received applications for financial support from 87 Lithuanian projects; this year there had already been 117 applications.
This year the centre will support six national production (including four that are majority co-productions); nine documentaries; five animated films; three minority co-productions (with Latvia, Finland and Norway); and 17 projects in development.
Tax incentives that offer up to 20% rebates on local spend, introduced in January, had already attracted three projects from Lithuania, Finland and Russia and "intensive talks" were underway with producers from the UK, Japan, Germany and Spain.
Audience figures were healthy: in 2013 Lithuanian cinemas recorded 3.2 million admissions, with domestic productions accounting for just under 16.5% of admissions, an increase of 2.5% on 2012.
Three local films were among the top 10 box office hits and overall box office was 13 million Euros.
Lithuania's biggest ever box office film, a largely English language gangster comedy starring British actor Vinnie Jones, "Redirected", which was released in January, has taken more than 1.2 million Euros at the box office with nearly 290,000 admissions.
Baltic producers and directors presented 16 Lithuanian feature and documentary projects, three Latvian and three Estonian.
Nikolaj Nikitin, the Berlin film festival's delegate for Eastern Europe, outlined his recently launched initiative, SOFA - the School of Film Agents.
He and fellow guests Serbian producer Miroslav Mogorovic, Belgrade-based distributor Igor Stankovic and French/Belgian producer Pascal Judelewicz discussed the part festivals can play in marketing, promotion and audience building.
The day concluded with a Lithuanian-language discussion for local producers on legal issues in the film industry, presented by Dina Adomaviciute, a lawyer from Law Borenius.
Festival guests later enjoyed an industry party hosted at Vilnius' new movie production facility, the 1,500 m2 Vilnius Film Cluster, located in a refurbished and remodelled former Soviet-era sports complex six kilometres from the city centre and one kilometre from Vilnius international airport.
Day two opened with a presentation of MAIA Workshops, a European training programme for producers founded in 2006 by Graziella Bildesheim.
An advanced training and coaching programme for emerging European producers that is based around three annual intensive five-day residential workshops designed to help those starting out in the film industry.
British film industry consultant, Peter Buckingham, who runs Sampomedia, a company that specialises in "connecting creativity to audiences" talked about the challenges to finding your audiences in a world of ever expanding audio visual choices, platform and plunging prices for content.
Knowing your audience and understanding the difference between what you are selling and what they are buying, is critical, he said.
He outlined three opportunities to creating an audience for a film.
Exclusivity can help pull in an audience and increase a film's value, Mr Buckingham suggested. A film festival screening was one way of doing that.
An Event around a film -- like the UK's successful 'secret cinema' -- was another.
And enhancing Experience -- through building expectations and offering after viewing add-ons, could also play a part.
British producer, sales and marketing expert, Mia Bays explained the strategy for positioning a film in the marketplace and the importance of using film festivals to market, expose and find business partners -- particularly sales agents -- to monetise a film. She also presented Britain's Microwave scheme, a publicly-funded partnership between Film London and the BBC to help create new, innovative feature films made for budgets of less than £120,000 (145,000 Euros) -- about a tenth of the average UK feature budget.
In a closing session, Spanish movie marketing and promotion expert Alvaro Vega, who worked for distributors Vertigo before founding his own marketing, communications, events and training agency DobleSentido, detailed the secrets behind developing the "mentality to promote."
