Panel with Maria and Liuying on International Sales & Festival Strategies
Speaker: Maria RUGGIERI, Head of Sales & Acquisitions at Asian Shadows; CAO Liuying, Co-Founder of Midnight Blur Films and Parallax Film
Time: Aug 14, 2025 · 7:30 AM-9:00 AM ET / Aug 14, 2025 · 7:30 PM-9:00 PM Beijing Time (including 30min Q&A)
Language: English, with real-time Chinese translation available
This wide-ranging conversation will cover:
- Building long-term relationships with filmmakers and production teams
- How to identify strong projects and curate a slate
- Festival strategy (premiere planning, building ties with programmers, etc)
- Shifts in China’s indie/arthouse scene and how to support new voices
- Practical advice for first-time filmmakers
Speaker
CAO Liuying
Cao Liuying is the co-founder of Midnight Blur Films and its international sales agency Parallax Film. Over the years, she has been working with feature and short films from Asia and brought them to prestigious festivals and sold them to major territories around the world. In 2021, she was listed as one of the “Future Leaders” of the industry by Screen Magazine.
She is also a film critic and curator. She co-founded the film critic platform DeepFocus, which now boasts over 500,000 followers across the Chinese-speaking territories. She serves as the co-director of Red Lotus Asian Film Festival Vienna, and artistic director of Chinese Film Festival Munich. She works continuously for Shanghai International Film Festival, Berlin Critics’ Week and First Cut Lab.
Maria Ruggieri
Maria A. Ruggieri is a Sinologist, a Beijing Film Academy Alumni and a Berlinale Talents Alumni. Since 2001, she is program consultant on Chinese Popular Cinema of Udine Far East Film Festival. She was China-correspondent for Venice Film Festival (2006-2009) and Locarno Film Festival (2015-2020), and program consultant on European Cinema for Beijing Film Festival Forward Future (2015-2016). She worked as producer for Secret Garden by Emily Tang (2015) and as creative producer for Marlina The Murderer in Four Acts by Mouly Surya (2017). Since 2018, she is the Head of Sales & Acquisitions of International Sales Company Asian Shadows.