How this configuration happened
Nobody designed this structure. The director trained in Hong Kong and lives in Berlin. The executive producer runs a production company in Hong Kong that has operated since 2010. The subject matter is European. The result is a production with its creative centre in one city, its corporate and accounting spine in another, and eight time zones between them.
We are writing this because almost everything published about co-production assumes a scale we do not operate at — official treaty structures, minimum spend thresholds, national funds with dedicated co-production windows. Below a certain budget, none of that applies and there is very little practical guidance.
What actually took the longest
Not the creative alignment. Not the schedule. Banking.
Moving money between a Hong Kong company and European suppliers, in three currencies, with a crowdfunding platform in a fourth jurisdiction as one of the inflows, produced more delay, correspondence and unrecoverable cost than any other part of setting this production up. Two intermediary banks required documentation about the nature of the payments that took weeks to satisfy.
What we would tell anyone in the same position: open the accounts before you need them, budget explicitly for FX loss and transfer fees rather than absorbing them into contingency, and expect every first payment to a new supplier in a new jurisdiction to take longer than the contract allows.
The eight-hour problem, and what fixed it
Hong Kong is seven or eight hours ahead of Berlin depending on the season. The overlap where both parties are awake and working is roughly two hours in the European morning.
For a year we treated those two hours as meeting time. It was the wrong instinct — it turned the only synchronous window we had into a status update, and everything requiring actual thought got pushed to the next day.
What works: decisions asynchronously, disagreements synchronously. Anything that can be resolved by one person writing clearly is written and answered within one working day. The overlap is reserved for the things that genuinely need two people talking — which is a much smaller category than it feels like.
One shared drive, one naming convention
Every document lives in one place with a date-first filename. No attachments in email, ever. This sounds trivial and it is the single practice that has saved us the most time across two years.
Contracts across two legal cultures
Hong Kong contracting practice and German contracting practice differ in ways that are invisible until they cause a problem. The one that caught us: expectations around detail. A Hong Kong-drafted crew agreement that felt appropriately concise read, to a Berlin crew member, as alarmingly vague about working hours and overtime.
Neither party was wrong. We now draft crew agreements to the stricter of the two standards on every point — working time, overtime, holiday, notice, credit — regardless of which entity is contracting. It costs a little more and removes an entire category of misunderstanding.
We are not lawyers and this is not advice. We paid for a small amount of legal review at the right moments, and the cheapest of those reviews was the most valuable: an hour spent on the crew agreement template before we had used it eleven times.
Who owns what
Chain of title in a two-entity production needs to be settled at the start, in writing, when everyone likes each other. We did this and it was still the most uncomfortable conversation of the first year.
The structure we landed on: the underlying rights sit with the director as author; the production entities hold a licence for the term of production and exploitation; contributions from each side are documented as they occur rather than reconciled later. Recoupment order is agreed and written down before any money moves.
The unglamorous point: a financier’s first substantive question is almost always about chain of title, and a production that cannot answer it cleanly in one paragraph looks unfinanceable regardless of the film.
What a small co-production actually gains
Given the friction, it is fair to ask what the arrangement buys. Three things, and they are real.
Two funding ecosystems. Asian and European schemes have different criteria, different calendars and different appetites. A project with a genuine foot in both is eligible for conversations that a single-territory project is not.
Two labour markets. Post-production capacity in Hong Kong at rates that make our sound schedule possible; European crew and locations for a European story. Neither side subsidises the other; each does what it is placed to do.
Genuine outside perspective. The most useful notes on this script have come from the Hong Kong side, precisely because they are not from within the European conversation about this war. Distance is not always a deficit.
A working week, concretely
Abstract advice about asynchronous work is not much use, so here is what the week actually looks like.
Monday. Berlin writes the week’s decisions document before lunch: what needs deciding, the options, a recommendation, and a deadline. Hong Kong reads it at the start of their Tuesday.
Tuesday to Thursday. Written responses, in the document, threaded. Anything resolved in writing is closed and does not reappear in a call.
Thursday. The one scheduled synchronous hour — European morning, Hong Kong afternoon. Agenda is only what the document could not close. If the agenda is empty, the call is cancelled, and it is cancelled roughly one week in three.
Friday. Decisions log updated by whoever made the call, in one line each, with a date. This takes ten minutes and is the most valuable ten minutes of the week.
Money: the practical checklist
Everything we wish someone had written down for us before we started moving money between two jurisdictions.
Open accounts months before you need them. Corporate account opening with cross-border activity is slow everywhere and slower when the beneficial owners are in another country.
Budget FX and fees as a line, not as contingency. On a small production the cumulative cost of transfers and spread is a visible percentage, and hiding it in contingency means it silently eats your buffer.
Pay in the supplier’s currency. Letting an intermediary convert on your behalf is consistently the worst available rate.
Expect the crowdfunding payout to be the hardest inflow. Platform payouts crossing into a corporate account in another jurisdiction attract the most documentation requests of anything we have handled.
Reconcile monthly. Two entities, three currencies and a six-month gap between reconciliations produces a week of work and at least one genuine disagreement about what was agreed.
Credits and territories
Two questions cause disproportionate friction late in a production, and both can be settled cheaply at the start.
Credit order. Which entity’s card comes first, how the production companies are described, and what appears on marketing materials versus on the film itself. Settle it in the co-production agreement with an actual mock-up of the card, not a description of one.
Territory splits. Who controls exploitation where, what happens in territories neither party has a relationship in, and who has the authority to accept a sales agent’s offer. Our arrangement gives each party a home territory and requires joint agreement everywhere else — slower, and it has prevented one decision that would have been a mistake.
Would we do it again
Yes, with the caveat that we would not choose this structure from scratch — it exists because of where people live, not because of a strategy.
What we would tell someone considering a similar arrangement: the friction is real, front-loaded and mostly administrative rather than creative. It is at its worst in the first year and largely disappears once the accounts, the templates and the working rhythm exist.
The creative benefit does not diminish. Two years in, the most useful reader of every draft remains the one furthest from the subject, and that is not a coincidence — it is the whole argument for building a production across a distance.
What we would do differently
Set up the banking a year earlier. Agree the recoupment order before the first supplier invoice rather than after. Write the crew agreement template once, properly, with a lawyer, at the beginning.
And keep a decision log. We started one eighteen months in, and the six months before it are now genuinely unclear to both sides — not because anyone disagrees, but because nobody wrote down why. For a production separated by eight hours, the log is not administration. It is the shared memory.