Columbia Tristar, the world famous film company based in the United States, has decided to fund a new domestic movie production and distribute it in worldwide markets. The U.S. film company signed an investment and distribution contract with Hanmack Films on Friday for the new movie "Silmi Island (tentative)." This development has been dubbed "exceptional" and "unprecedented" for the domestic industry, in that it is the first ever full investment in a domestic movie by a major film distributor targeting global markets. Industry sources said....the deal also reflects the recent domestic film industry boom. There have only been a few rare cases where local branches of major film companies invested in video copyrights and theater distribution rights for domestic films. Silmi Island will be based on the novel of the same title, published in 1999. The story is about secret agents trained to be dispatched to North Korea in Silmi Island, an unmanned island some 20km southwest of Incheon, and an uprising by them after being stranded on the island due to the cancelation of a secret plan in 1971. The production cost of the new movie is estimated at 10 million dollars (about 13.5 billion won), though the exact amount has not yet been fixed.