This year, leading Italian sales agents Intramovies, Istituto Luce and the newer Fandango/Portobello Sales are not attending the AFM. Instead, they launched their new titles at the Rome International Film Festival's film market, The Business Street, in October.

"The AFM is a market concerned only with English-language commercial movies, with almost no interest in arthouse foreign-language movies," says Jeff Nuyts, sales agent for Intramovies. "For the new arthouse films we concentrate on festivals with markets attached such as Berlin and Cannes, and for library titles we attend specialised markets like Mipcom and Mip-TV and business is often simply done by e-mail."

Of the Italian companies that are attending the AFM, Rai Trade will showcase Matteo Rovere's feature debut A Game for Girls (Un Giocho Da Ragazze), which screened in competition at Rome. It follows the lives of three wealthy but bored girls in a provincial Italian town.

Adriana Chiesa Enterprises is presenting Luigi Cecinelli's Visions, an English-language psychological thriller about an FBI profiler whose attempts to capture a serial killer leads to horrifying results. Film Export is bringing Paolo Bertola's 3D animation Melita The Last Guardian, about a battle waged between humans and aliens, which is available in three versions - French, English and Spanish.

Minerva Pictures is selling Gabriele Albanesi's edgy DVD project Last House In The Woods - a throwback to Italy's 1970s slasher-film heyday. It has already been picked up by Lionsgate Home Entertainment's Ghost House Underground label, and has been released on DVD in Japan.