At Sunny Side of the Doc 2023, BDE caught up with Catherine Le Clef, CEO and Head of Acquisitions and Sales of Paris-based sales agent CAT&Docs.
According to Le Clef, the type of content the CAT&Docs team seeks to acquire includes “original documentaries, investigative documentaries, portraits of men and women both renowned and unknown, in fields as varied as history, society, justice, the environment, the economy, politics, art and culture, but always associated with a high standard of content and form.”
“[These have to be] pertinent…films on topical questions and timeless subjects; documentaries that are carefully researched; documentaries that rigorously explore the subject matter, that are audacious, open to the diversity of the world and that have their place on the international scene; documentaries that question the world and propose new ways of looking at it,” she added.
Le Clef further emphasised how “rigour, respect, curiosity, diversity and innovation” underline the company’s editorial policy and commitment “to meet the demands of national and international markets.” Currently the firm’s team includes four full-time employees who handle acquisitions, festivals, pre-sales and sales.
At Sunny Side, CAT&Docs brings a raft of award-winning titles. One of them is Lea Glob’s Apolonia Apolonia, winner of the Best Film Award at IDFA 2022. The critically acclaimed Danish picture revolves around Glob and artist Apolonia Sokol’s convoluted life paths and explores a number of themes including art, love, motherhood, sexuality, representation and the fight against patriarchy.
Another award-winning title repped by CAT&Docs is Christian Einshoj’s The Mountains which scooped the prizes for Best International Feature & Best Emerging Filmmaker at Toronto’s Hot Docs in May. In the film, Einshoj offers a “sensitive self-portrait on the men in his family and the devastating tragedy that led to the distance between them.”
Coming up next are Tünde Skovran’s Who I Am Not, winner of the Silver Alexander Award at Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival and the Silver Horn for High Artistic Value at Krakow, and Vlad Petri’s Between Revolutions, which received the Fipresci Award in the Forum section of this year’s Berlinale. Skovran’s doc zooms in on two people born male and female within one single body, namely male-presenting activist Dimakatso and former beauty queen Sharon-Rose. Meanwhile, Petri’s film follows two women, from Romania and Iran, who were separated by political revolutions but who found connection through letters, defying distance and turmoil. Even though the epistolary conversations between the two friends are fictitious, they are based on real documents in the Romanian Secret Police archives.
Another festival hit handled by the Paris-based company is Aurora’s Sunrise. Inna Sahakyan’s animated doc, an Armenian-Lithuanian-German co-production, world-premiered in the Contrechamp section of Annecy 2022 and later scooped several other prizes at Movies that Matter, Genève’s FIFDH and Tallinn Black Nights, amongst others. The movie centres on Aurora Mardiganian, a survivor who becomes a silent movie star. After losing her family, escaping slavery, and enduring Hollywood greed, she journeys far to tell the world of the Armenian Genocide.
Moreover, the slate is enriched by After Work by Erik Gandini, The Flag by Joseph Paris, The Last Seagull by Tonislav Hristov, and Hawar, Our Banished Children by Pascale Bourgaux.
Le Clef touched upon the main activities the CAT&Docs team will carry out in La Rochelle: “As we are always looking for new strong stories, we are meeting many producers from all over the world and we are attending the various pitching sessions. And as sales agents, we are meeting our clients.”
Speaking about the current climate for sales, Le Clef has little to say. So far, 2023 for CAT&Docs has been “a pretty good year” with “sales adding up,” and festivals and audiences enjoying their offer. “No complaints,” she ends.
