© Photo from the film The Piano
Tel Aviv-based Cinephil has been making waves in the Marché this week with a slate of new docs, among them Julie Bertuccelli’s feature Jane Campion: The Cinema Woman, which has been screening in Cannes Classics. The archive-based doc looks at the life and career of Campion, the director of Power Of The Dog, The Piano and An Angel At My Table.
Unusually, sales duties on the title are handled both by Cinephil and by London-based WestEnd Films (better known for handling dramatic movies than documentaries).
“It’s a co-operation,” Cinephil M-D Olivier Tournaud says of the partnership with West End. “They have some clients and we have other clients. We try to see what is the best for the film. We don’t mix territories. It is all about relationships and trying to expand.”
Cinephil has seen the work that WestEnd has done on some very high profile films including Oscar winners like Blue Jasmine. WestEnd, meanwhile, can’t help but have noticed the spectacular success Cinephil achieved last year with Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated doc Flee, which it guided all the way from Sundance to the Academy Awards.
It’s an ongoing collaboration which should expand the reach of all the titles on which the companies work together.
Another title on Cinephil’s Marché slate that has done strong business is Danish director Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made Of Splinters. This is a heart-rending film set in an orphanage in the Donbass region of Ukraine. Of course, since the project won the World Cinema Documentary Directing Award in Sundance, war has broken out in Ukraine.
“We don’t speak a lot about them but they [the residents of the orphanage] have been moved to safe places,” Tournaud states of what has happened since the Russian invasion. “It was a huge work, very, very tense.”
The film community has rallied round, trying to raise funding for the orphanage. Festivals have asked to screen Simon Lereng Wilmont’s previous film, The Distant Barking Of Dogs, in support of Ukraine. Cinephil doesn’t take screening fees but asks for the money to be sent to the Ukrainians.
Here in Cannes, Cinephil has also been screening Cesario Evora, a new doc from Ana Sofia Sonfeca. A deal has now been closed for its Portuguese theatrical distribution through Alambique.
The company is also continuing sales on Nina Menkes’ “festival darling,” Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, which was sold earlier this week to Kino Lorber for North America. The film takes as its subject the male gaze in cinema – and the oppression of women within cinema on many different levels.
“It feels like the mood is high,” Tournaud says of the atmosphere in the Marché as distributors and sellers come face to face for the first time (for many) since the start of the pandemic. Sundance this year was again online. Berlin was a mix. CPH:DOX was an important staging post in the spring but Cannes marks the real return of the industry to its usual way of doing business.
“There is an appetite for film but audience-wise, we are all asking what can be done,” the Cinephil boss tacitly acknowledges that cinema going numbers haven’t yet fully recovered. “But I think we are all optimistic. The market is quite vibrant and dynamic.”
The sellers ar
e trying to be “reasonable” to ensure that prices for MGs don’t scare away potential buyers. There are now also more places that are acquiring docs – streamers, TV channels and theatrical distributors. When films don’t make it into cinemas, the distributors are open to alternative release strategies. The net result is that films now enjoy a longer shelf life across different media.
“We are really looking for the next Flee, the next Collective, the next Gunda, the next Advocate,” Tournaud rattles off the names of recent international hits on the company slate.
New projects include Nishtha Jain’s Farming The Revolution, about the protests in India against the government’s farm laws. This is a co-production with Valérie Montmartin for Little Big Story. “It says a lot about the world changing, about the population of India. More than half the population depends on agriculture for revenue.” The doc follows three main characters over a period of around a year in which the protests convince the government to re-think its polices.
Cinephil has also taken sales rights to Canadian-Greek doc Queen Of The Dust, about a character born in very humble circumstances and who started her work career selling hot dogs, but rose to be a hugely successful businesswoman.
Tournaud, who has been at Cinephil for six years, has been running the company since last year when company founder, the formidable Philippa Kowarsky, left Cinephil to take over as head of BBC Storyville in London.
“[Now] it’s me, Shoshi and Noa,” Tournaud namechecks his colleagues Noa Levy and Shoshi Korman. “We know the job…we get better each time we bring a project!”
