Local to – At Cannes’ 79th Film Festival, a Gold House–sponsored panel explored how filmmakers can fund, greenlight, and market culturally specific stories in Hollywood—arguing that genre and authenticity can turn tight, local loglines into international audiences.
The room at the 79th annual Cannes Film Festival was built for a high-stakes question: how do you take a story rooted in one culture—and get it financed and greenlit inside a Hollywood system that often moves slowly, and only swings big when it can predict what sells.
IndieWire and The American Pavilion teamed up for a Local to Global Storytelling panel sponsored by the Asian and Pacific Islander non-profit Gold House. The discussion zeroed in on the practical work behind bringing films to life in 2026. with filmmakers and producers talking through how international or culturally specific projects can win attention with distributors and audiences.
The conversation was moderated by Gold House Chief Brand Officer and Co-founder Christine Yi. The featured guests were director Bao Nguyen, The Dazey Phase founder Jake Casey, and Manifest Pictures founder Zach Glueck. Together. they mapped the path from first pitch to release—especially the moment where a highly specific concept has to survive the business math of fundraising.
Glueck started there, laying out how investors often ask for a sellable outcome before greenlighting a project at all. In his view, genre can be the bridge between something intimate and something widely reachable.
“When 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.”.
He added that the logic is simple: genre gives audiences familiar coordinates, even when the story itself is deeply particular.
“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. ” Glueck continued. “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 didn’t dispute the need to reach people—he just argued against making that reach feel engineered. For him, authenticity comes first, and the audience follows when the work doesn’t read like a product packaged for a checkbox.
“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.”.
Nguyen brought the discussion back to packaging. but in a different way—using the building blocks of a pitch without losing the specificity of the story underneath it. He said his approach often involves “trojan horses. ” slipping themes he wants to explore into work he believes can be understood through clear. digestible pitches.
He pointed to a documentary he made about BTS and the short film at Cannes he produced, “The Dream is a Snail,” describing it as inspired by Yorgos Lanthimos.
“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 youdon’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.”.
Then he emphasized how a logline can travel farther than the borders of a particular place.
“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.”
The panel’s message left the same impression from three different angles: culturally specific stories don’t have to be watered down to be sellable, but they do need to be presented in ways that match how money moves and how audiences discover films.
The full panel is available in the video above.
Gold House. the nonprofit that sponsored the event. describes itself as a leading cultural ecosystem uniting. investing in. and championing Asia Pacific creators and companies. It operates under a nonprofit umbrella and runs programs and platforms that include membership systems and events to fortify relationships among the Asian Pacific community and other marginalized communities (#StopAsianHate). investment vehicles and accelerators such as Gold House Ventures and Creative Equity Fund. and industry research. consulting. and marketing including Gold Story Consultation. Gold Open. Gold List. and A100 List. More information is available at www.goldhouse.org. and updates are posted on @GoldHouseCo across Instagram. Facebook. X/Twitter. Threads. and LinkedIn.
Gold House Cannes Film Festival Local to Global Storytelling IndieWire American Pavilion Christine Yi Bao Nguyen Jake Casey Zach Glueck Manifest Pictures The Dazey Phase BTS documentary The Dream is a Snail Short Palme d’Or Asian Pacific creators
So they just gonna make more movies about Asians now? Good.
Cannes panel sounds like marketing talk. Like okay “local stories,” but will it actually get funding or is it just vibes.
Wait this Gold House thing is the one pushing authenticity or whatever? I kinda got lost. How does a panel at Cannes even help with “greenlighting” in Hollywood—like the studios just watch and then decide?
Honestly Hollywood moves slow unless they already know what sells, so “tight local loglines” getting international audiences makes sense. But also… aren’t they just packaging the same stories differently for distributors? I don’t know, Cannes is always weirdly confusing to me.