Unusually hot weather in London recently made me think that we picked the wrong time to be busy!

Met with all the Festival 2011 team, some new members for the first time and had an induction over a few drinks (also met with one of the graphic designers for the first time from our awesome agency WHAT IS BOBO).

And in between the madness of organising a festival (meeting staff, working on brochures and website proof-reading, organising Guest flights) we have to finish the marketing on SPARROW theatrical release (SPARROW in cinemas Friday 15th April!!!) and the QC of the DVD release. Luckily we have a new intern on hand to share the duties, the wonderfully named 'Zu'.

Zu has joined us as our previous interns have now moved up: Richard Geddes is now Product and Events Manager and the Claire Marty has become our Press Officer. Both Richard and Claire have put in an enormous amount of effort and joined us to do what we love - bringing quality Asian films to UK audiences.

Well back from HK FILMART (thanks to KLM for bump up into Economy Comfort - first time we turned left on entering a plane!) and straight into planning for upcoming Terracotta Festival (5th - 8th May).

We were delighted to have met so many people, Clement Cheng, dir. GALLANTS, fantasia fest organisers, New York Asian Film Festival organisers, Todd and James from twitch, Marc Walkow from Sushi typhoon (karaoke next year guys, ok?!), our secret Hong Kong director bloggers who will contribute to our monthly newsletter, cast from SEX AND ZEN 3D (and no, we didn't go to the SEX AND ZEN 3D after party!), organisers from Udine Far East Film Festival (one of our favourite festivals!), and upcoming director Daniel Chan who is set to make Jiang Hu 2.

We love the look of a lot of films and looking forward to donnie yens LOST BLADESMAN in particular. Aaron Kwok and Oxide Pang are teaming up for THE DETECTIVE 2. catch our release of THE DETECTIVE this month! you can pre-order on Amazon - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Detective-DVD-Aaron-Kwok/dp/B00450AFL0.

Back onto our festival and we are delighted to announce a tie up with the heavyweight SCI-FI-LONDON, a festival for all things, well, sci-fi, manga, anime and generally genre/ fanboy related. We will jointly market each others festival AND we get to show a film in each others festival.

This year TERRACOTTA FESTIVAL will present GANTZ, based on a smash hit Manga, at SCI-FI-LONDON in April, then in May, SCI-FI-LONDON presents YAKUZA WEAPON (part man, part machine, all yakuza!) at TERRACOTTA FESTIVAL, with Tak Sakaguchi on hand to introduce the film and hold a Q&A afterwards.

Finally, we are also happy to announce that FACT, Liverpool will be playing Johnnie To's SPARROW on 19th - 21st April.

good news all round.

third and final day (for us - it's a four day thing but we are super efficient) spent meeting a few more sales agents and hearing about more upcoming productions.

grabbed a beer with Gallants director Clement Cheng who is super chilled and will be coming over to Terracotta Festival in May to introduce his film and....we might even organise a film directors Masterclass hosted by him, so stay tuned all you film makers.

Talking of the festival, the market here is also a good place to meet fellow film festival organisers from around the world (not just a place to buy rights) and we met with people from italy, croatia, US, who all run asian film fests or fests that might have a special asian section. good to share ideas, and how things are going. theres a lounge inside the market where you can get dim sum and coffee (which is particularly bad coffee, i have to say, but when it's free...who's complaining! as long it's got caffeine in it) and seemed like a good hub this year to chat to people.

after lunch, to catch up on a bit of admin, we turned our hotel room into a mini office with the three of us from terracotta who came out here, huddled around our hotel room desk. thank god we were given free wifi with the room!

seemed liked everyone was at the launch party of CAR, a new distribution outfit in the US to focus on releasing asian films there (evangelion 2.0, Confessions, Murderer) where we were treated to drinks from our friends from Eleven Arts (thanks Ko!).

and some good news to end on - we acquired the rights to documentary JOHNNIE GOT HIS GUN, directed by long-time Terracotta friend, Yves Montmayeur. This documentary about Johnnie To will be included in our upcoming release of SPARROW in May, along with the Bonus CD soundtrack from Xavier Montmayeur and Fred Avril. So for Johnnie To fans, this is a MUST have collectors item (we are making a limited number only, so make sure you pre-order a copy).

it's JOI GEEN from us, and thanks to HKTDC for their hospitality!

Join us for a special Valentines day preview of SPARROW at our new MeetUp group venue, Barrio Central, London.
for details, location, synopsis, please register at:

http://www.meetup.com/asianmovies/

End of another good week at Terracotta and we are making great strides with both the Festival in May and with Terracotta's release of SPARROW and THE DETECTIVE.

More cinema's have expressed an interest now in SPARROW and we have some very good original UK poster art, and a very special collector edition, more on which we can tell you about next month.

Ended a powerful week with a dinner in Spitalfields Market with the Terracotta PR & Marketing team where we hatched a plan to attend Berlin Film Festival next month - our first time! There's increasing number of Asian films and industry members there now, so it's definitely worth going.

We also confirmed this week, another screening venue for our ever growing MeetUp group - Barrio Central, Poland St. London. Barrio decor and happy hour beers and cocktails, with a large bar and screening area downstairs. Perfect!

If you haven't signed up for our free Asian Movies club and want to see undiscovered and hard to find, as well as the latest advance previews on MUST SEE films, then join up via:
www.MeetUp.com/AsianMovies

well, what could be a better way to round off our year than the news that we are about to sign with an airline sponsor for Terracotta Festival 2011, and that we are in the midst of designing a great product configuration for SPARROW for the UK to make it a really collectible edition.

you heard it here first!

merry christmas and wishing you lots of good things for 2011!

We kicked off our release planning for SPARROW and DETECTIVE with an in-house meeting, discussed the marketing of the title and set a date for both to be early 2011 - likely to be April.

Off to Paris to meet with the creme de la creme in the Asian movie scene over there - eurostar and snow willing.

And yesterday we watched Nanking! Nangking aka City of Life and Death....on a Sony TV and a Sony Playstation - the irony wasn't lost on us!

Finally, we've hit December and the Terracotta Christmas Tree is up!

This week we announced exclusively on twitchfilm.net that we have acquired the rights to two new titles:

SPARROW starring Simon Yam and Lam Kar Tung is a comedy caper about a group of pick-pockets who get outwitted by a rival gang.

Oxide Pang, one half of the Pang Brothers who directed global smash hit THE EYE, sees Aaron Kwok as a private detective on the case of a missing person, which gets more and more complex and sinister and seemingly supernatural, the further he digs.

More news on these titles to follow soon.