The paradox of the Vietnam movie market Vietnamese movie “De Mai Tinh 2” had the highest ticket sales in Vietnam, exceeding many foreign blockbusters, on January 18 this year, according to statistics by CGV, the biggest cinema system in Vietnam.    A scene from De Mai Tinh 2 (Let's Hoi Decide). The film stars Thai Hoa, the country’s answer to Jim Carrey, as Pham Huong Hoi, a transgender entrepreneur whose dreams of building a business empire go disastrously wrong when he falls in love with a heterosexual artist and embarks on a convoluted mission to win his heart. Slapstick ensues. A total of 1,444,623 tickets were sold, collecting about VND99.3 billion, equivalent to $4.65 million. The film is still on local screens. According to CGV, movie ticket sales in Vietnam in 2015 may pass the landmark $100 million figure. Several years ago, film director Nguyen Quang Dung said it was not difficult to seek $2-3 million to produce a movie but the hardest part was convincing investors to see the feasibility of selling tickets. Recently, Dustin Nguyen said that to make an action movie, he needs at least $2 million. The amount is not much but not easy to find. "For many investors in Vietnam, this is an amount they can manage but they have to consider the break-even point and making a profit. For a $2 million investment, the break-even point is $4 million. Only several films in Vietnam could make it, so investors dare not pour capital in movies at this moment," Dustin Nguyen said. Two kinds of films Vietnamese films are produced by either private investors or from the state budget. For the first, the investors decide nearly everything; the personality and style of the director are maintained only a little. For the second, the state also decides the direction through the evaluation of scenarios before investing. However, the State does not care about ticket sales while private investors need to break even or make a profit. Some said that several Made-in-Vietnam movies with high revenue like Teo Em and De Mai Tinh 2 are not worth watching, and the audiences are "stupid" and Vietnamese viewers were cheated. Were they stupid in 2014 when Vietnam produced about 30 movies for screening at cinemas, and they only watched a few of these movies? For private-invested films, it is a failure to not be able to sell tickets, and for state-funded movies, films without an audience (very common) are a waste. Are the Vietnamese audiences easily fooled? Why do Vietnamese films said to be good and aggressively advertised have poor ticket sales? We can only guess that people decide to spend money to buy tickets for comedy movies like Teo Em and De Mai Tinh 2. The art films have to go to other audiences through different paths, e.g., pirated DVDs or be downloaded free. Of the total 200 movies coming to theaters in Vietnam in 2014, locally-made films accounted for nearly 10%. Of the total ticket sales of $85 million, local films contributed to more than 15%. That is good news because imported films in Vietnam are blockbusters or class A products, while domestic films are class C, with very low investment (usually less than $500,000) and low quality. It means that the Vietnamese people still love Vietnamese movies. Do “market films” and “art films” have any relationship? Yes, they have. A complete cinema must need diversity, with many different directions. High-quality films like Buffalo Boy, Bi, Don’t Be Afraid! and Flapping in the Middle of Nowhere were produced with foreign funds. Why did these movies receive foreign funds, and not local funding? Could films like Teo Em and De Mai Tinh be funded by foreign organizations? After answering these questions, you will see the different purposes and objectives of the films which explains the difference in investment and financing. But the more difficult question is where does the funding come from? Surely it must be partly derived from the cinema market, and that creates a relationship between “market” and “art” films. Therefore, a complete cinema needs to have more “market products” like Teo Em and De Mai Tinh 2 to stimulate investment and generate more money to form the habit of funding “art products”. T. Van, VNN