As the expansion of Chinese cinemagoing and production continues at a striking pace, a movie focusing on Chinese and American agents foiling a midair heist looks to be heading to Australia.

Called Money Plane, it is expected to start shooting in September with a $US25 million ($32 million) budget.

According to Variety, it's an air-to-air heist movie that will have Chinese Interpol forces teaming with American FBI agents to catch a high-tech multi-ethnic gang.

The director will be David Hackl, best known for Saw V and the John Travolta-Kate Bosworth action movie, Life on the Line.

Money Plane is expected to be structured as a Chinese-Australian-Canadian co-production – Hackl is Canadian – and shoot in Australia and the Chinese island province of Hainan.

China's remarkable cinema expansion continues

Hardly a week passes without a Hollywood film company announcing a new deal with a Chinese partner or a movie that, like Money Plane, features Chinese characters, stories or settings.

Australia has been involved, too, with Kimble Rendall finishing work on The Nest, a Chinese-Australian action-adventure movie shot on the Gold Coast about a team of scientists who battle through a swarm of man-eating funnel webs in Beijing's underground palaces.

A batch of figures released over the past fortnight shows exactly why.

As global box offices hit a record $US38.3 billion last year – up more than 6 per cent over 2014 – China was a key contributor.

On figures released at CinemaCon, the annual gathering of cinema owners in Las Vegas, North American box offices recovered to $US11.1 billion.

But the big mover was China, the world's second-largest market, which grew by a stunning 49 per cent to a record $US6.8 billion – up from $US1.5 billion just five years ago.

In the first three months of this year, China's box office is reportedly up 50 per cent again.

The number of cinema screens around the world was up 8 per cent to 152,000 last year, with China adding a phenomenal 16 new screens a day.

Box office results for The Jungle Book last weekend show why the country matters so much for movies that can get a release there.

The Disney movie took $US50.8 million in its opening three days in China with, according to Variety, an incredible 225,000 screenings.

And at a conference devoted to China-American business in Los Angeles, 20th Century Fox chief executive Jim Gianopulos said there was still huge growth to come in China, given it still only has 23 cinemas per million residents compared to 100 per million in the US.

New festival on American cinema

Fresh American cinema ... Royalty Hightower in The Fits.

It's hard to believe Australians lack the chance to watch American films, but the artistic director of a new festival believes there is a yawning gap in the market.

"We see a lot of a certain kind of American cinema," says Richard Sowada, who is launching Essential Independents: American Cinema Now around the country next month. "It's not all popcorn and choctops."

Sowada, a former ‎head of film programs at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, wants the festival to reflect the longstanding American tradition of "experimentation and subversion and politics and social criticism – really hard-nosed feature films and documentaries".

He says these types of films don't make it into festivals any more, let alone get a cinema release.

"The risk-taking – going all the way – is falling away," Sowada says. "The film distribution and environment in Australia and around the world is getting increasingly conservative as exhibitors and distributors really struggle to find where their audience is.

"Because of that, they tend not to be taking risks because they feel they can't afford to, when, in my view, exactly the opposite should happen. It's the time to take risks."

The festival, which includes 32 feature films and documentaries, opens with Oren Moverman's drama Time Out of Mind, which has Richard Gere as a mysterious man living on the streets in New York.

Sowada is particularly enthusiastic about screening Anna Rose Holmer's The Fits, an enigmatic coming-of-age story centring on an 11-year-old tomboy.

"It's so fresh and new in its style," he says. "It's made by a first-time filmmaker and I don't think there's a white character in it. It's all African-American characters. It's really beautiful and very dreamlike."

If mainstream Hollywood is struggling with diversity, Sowada says the independent sector has no such problem.

"In putting the program together, I didn't have to look for diversity. I didn't have to go, 'I need some films with women in them' or 'films directed by women'. They're just there and they stand out.

"And I had no problem finding racial diversity or gender diversity or lesbian and gay and transgender films."

The festival includes debut films from Richard Linklater (Slacker), Jim Jarmusch (Stranger than Paradise), Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark), the Coen brothers (Blood Simple) and Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides), as well as such "essential New York" films as Cruising, The French Connection and Midnight Cowboy.

The festival starts in Palace cinemas in Sydney on May 17, Melbourne on May 18 and Brisbane and Canberra on May 19.

Cannes short of Australian selections

In competition ... Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga in Loving.

Australian representation at the Cannes Film Festival next month extends to just George Miller heading the jury and various actors in selected films.

With the Director's Fortnight lineup announced, it's a rare year for not a single Australian film in any official category.

But the official competition does feature two films with Australian actors – Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga play an interracial couple in 1950s Virginia in Jeff Nichols' Loving, and Abbey Lee and Bella Heathcote are in Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon, which has Elle Fanning as a young model preyed on by jealous rivals.

Russell Crowe's new movie with Ryan Gosling, Shane Black's The Nice Guys, is screening out of competition, as is Steven Spielberg's The BFG and Jodie Foster's Money Monster.

Woody Allen's Cafe Society, with Jesse Eisenberg as a young man who arrives in Hollywood in the 1930s, opens the 69th festival on May 11.

Asylum doco gets a Q&A tour

It worked brilliantly for Damon Gameau with That Sugar Film and the likable combination of Jeremy Sims and Michael Caton for Last Cab to Darwin last year.

With a good film, touring the country for Q&A screenings pays off at the box office.

Director Eva Orner, who won an Oscar and an Emmy for Taxi to the Dark Side, is hitting the road next month for a growing list of screenings of the documentary Chasing Asylum, about the impact of the country's offshore detention policies, many with the backing of human rights and refugee support groups.

After a world premiere at Hot Docs in Toronto later this month, the film has its Australian debut at the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival in Melbourne on May 5.

Orner's Q&A tour includes Amnesty screenings, the Melbourne Jewish Writers Festival and refugee sector fundraisers before Chasing Asylum opens on May 26.

Diversity helped Fast and Furious 7

A hit with a diverse cast ... Fast and Furious 7.

Australian director James Wan's Fast and Furious 7 was not just a box office smash that took a high-octane $US1.1 billion around the world last year. It was the benchmark for how diversity can pay off for Hollywood blockbusters.

According to the chief executive of the National Association of Theatre Owners, John Fithian, the movie called just Furious 7 in the US showed how diversity of casting helps at the box office.

"The more that movie casting looks like the world, the more the world goes to the movies," Fithian says. "In the US, a majority-Caucasian country, white folks accounted for only 40 per cent of the tickets sold for the movie. And globally, the diverse cast of that franchise has helped to drive record sales."

According to Variety, American ticket buyers to Furious 7 were the most ethnically diverse for any Hollywood blockbuster last year – 25 per cent Hispanic, 22 per cent African-American and 8 per cent Asian.

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