feeding frenzy swimming

[Bushwhacker]

Please, meaning for "feeding frenzy swimming" at following sentence on movie buyers at great festivals like Cannes:

"We've seen an international buyers' feeding frenzy swimming around "The lives of others"

Can it be understood for "A frenzy battle between buyers to first buy the movie?

Is it a kind of metaphorical expression? What's the meaning of feeding here? Notorious, remarkable?

Thanks for your help. :-D

 

[Anglika]

"We've seen an international buyers' [feeding frenzy] swimming around The lives of others."

Sharks and other carnivorous fish have feeding frenzies when they smell blood and find their prey.

The sentence is using this to describe the hyper-excitement of the buyers when they find themselves in a bidding war over distribution rights.

I think it is not a well expressed sentence, since the feeding frenzy is not swimming around the prey, but the participants of the frenzy are - but that's journalism for you!

 

[vil]

Hi Bushwhacker,

Here are some more explanatory words concerning the expression in question:

Piranha, equipped with the dental weapons and digestive capabilities of a top carnivore goes for anything that’s flesh and meat. Absolute No no to Veg food, Piranha usually go in huge schools and hence take on large swimming mammals (that includes humans too) as a mob and hence with considerable ease. Piranhas are odorously famous for their feeding frenzy. The speed at which a school of 100 piranhas can finish off a single sheep is absolutely amazing.

Feeding frenzy is an ecological term used to describe a situation where oversaturation of a supply of food leads to rapid feeding by predatory animals. For example, a large school of fish can cause nearby sharks to enter a feeding frenzy.

"Feeding frenzy" is also a metaphor often used in a non-biological sense to describe excited involvement by a group over some focal point of attention. An example would be intense and sometimes excessive media coverage of a story of great interest to the public, like the O. J. Simpson trial .

In my humble opinion, the sentence in question is in perfect working order. As a matter of fact, to come back to the subject, in this case is speaking of the first feature from German filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck “The lives of others” which won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film had earlier won seven Deutscher Filmpreis awards including best film, best director, best screenplay, best actor and best supporting actor, after having set a new record with 11 nominations. Hence the film “The lives of others” is the coveted “swimming around prey”.

Regards.

V.