At Cannes, Filmmakers Explain How They Find Mainstream Funding for Culturally Specific Stories

At the 79th annual Cannes Film Festival, IndieWire and The American Pavilion teamed up to host a series of panels exploring the work that goes into bringing films to life in 2026. Sponsored by Asian and Pacific Islander non-profit Gold House, the panel Local to Global Storytelling saw filmmakers and producers dive into how to get stories with an international or culturally specific basis funded and greenlit in the Hollywood system.

Moderated by Gold House Chief Brand Officer and Co-founder Christine Yi, the panel featured director Bao Nguyen, The Dazey Phase founder Jake Casey, and Manifest Pictures founder Zach Glueck. The three talked about how to market and release cultural stories for an international or global audience.

Glueck said that, when looking at projects to produce and sell to distributors, one of the biggest drivers for him is genre. As he puts it, even a very culturally specific project can have a broader reach, thanks in part to the fandom and dedication that comes with subgenres like horror.

“If you’re kind of getting down the line on this, you’re talking about decreased film investment potentially in a certain category of film, oftentimes that film investment is chasing kind of a second order effect from, in my world, foreign sales,” Glueck said during the panel. “So the investors that I’m dealing with are largely coming to me saying, ‘What can you sell this for?’ And then backing into an investment from that. So I’m often thinking a lot about how I can sell this, in a business to business context with a distribution company, and they’re thinking about how I can sell this to a consumer. A lot of times, genre is one of the ways that you can really make sure that very specific storytelling is able to reach the broadest group of people possible. So if you’re telling a very specific and intimate story, but you’re putting it in the framework of a thriller, of an actioner, of a horror, of a romance, and you have those familiar beats that somebody who’s reading it can then imagine a trailer. They can think to themselves, ‘Oh, I know exactly the 90 seconds, 120 seconds of this that I would clip and, and sell it to an audience.'”

Casey agreed, adding that it’s important for a film to feel human and born out of an authentic artistic impulse rather than coming across prepackaged for sale.

“I love the audience, and I think the audience will respond to authenticity always, Casey said. “The more that we try to reverse engineer it to find that audience, the less organic it feels to me. So I think if I can approach it as a very specific lens of person and understand that, I think it makes a better movie.”

Ngyuen noted that in his work he often trojan horses the themes he’s interested in exploring into his work via digestible, easy-to-understand pitches. He used the documentary he made about BTS and the short film at Cannes he produced, “The Dream is a Snail,” which he described as inspired by Yorgos Lanthimos, as an example of films that are easy to understand from just a logline despite their specificity.

“My last film was about BTS, so that’s a very big, shiny object. But within that story, you have themes and things that are more intimate to the actual subjects and to the community, that you
don’t have to always make the most broad strokes when you’re approaching the film outside,” Nguyen said. “I have a short film that I produced that’s competing for the Short Palme d’Or, and that’s a Vietnamese film. It’s called ‘The Dream is a Snail,’ and from the outside, it can feel very local. It’s about a young actor. It’s sort of in the vein of a Yorgos film, but from Vietnam. Again, packaging something where someone can read a logline, and no matter where you’re from, it’s something that’s universal. But when you come into the cinema or watch it wherever you watch it, it’s something that’s unique and authentic.”

Watch the complete panel in the video above.