Anais Clanet’s Reservoir Docs has added a new title to its slate. The French sales outfit is set to handle world rights on Swedish director Manal Masri’s new jazz-themed feature doc and series Legacy.
The film follows leading black American jazz stars who came to Europe in the 1950s and 1960s to escape racism and oppression in the US. The log-line further describes how Legacy “is a documentary film that becomes a societal portrait and music documentary all in one. A movie about family and politics, about complicated father and kids’ relationships that span continents and skin tones. The nucleus of all of their stories is their love for, and faith in, the music.”
“It’s a mix between I Am Not Your Negro and The Black Power Mixtape,” Clanet suggested of the new doc which is in production and is supported by SVT and the Swedish Film Institute. It will be available as a feature film and as a 6 x 30-minute series. Filmmaker Masri is able to draw on SVT’s archives of TV jazz shows featuring figures like Miles Davis and Don Cherry.
Clanet discovered the project at the Nordisk Panorama last autumn.
“I am always looking for that kind of topic. When I found it, I immediately jumped on it and called the producer,” Clanet said. She is positioning the film now, alerting streamers and distributors to it and also sounding out potential co-production partners. The aim is to launch Legacy at a festival early next year.
Legacy takes its place on a Reservoir Docs slate which also includes such titles as Salome Chasnoff’s fast-selling Code Of The Freaks, which tells the story of Hollywood’s exploitation of disability, and Yoruba Richen’s The Sit-In, about the week Harry Belafonte hosted The Tonight Show.
At the upcoming online Filmart, the company will be offering Hans Lukas Hansen’s The Quest for Tonewood. The Norwegian/Dutch film has already sold to Swallow Wings (Taiwan), Cinema Delicatessen (Netherlands), Neue Visionnen (German-speaking territories), Urban Distribution (France), Cineworx (Switzerland), Discovery D.O.O (Former Yugoslavia), Filmtrade (Greece) and Blue Ice Docs (Canada).
Founded in June 2020, Reservoir Docs is part of the Urban Group and handles the Wide House catalogue. The first year of the company’s existence has been challenging because of the pandemic.
Clanet expresses her frustration at the slow-down in the theatrical sector. “It is much easier for us right now to sell to TV. It is quicker and it is also more efficient. But when it comes to theatrical distribution, it is really a dead market at the moment,” she commented.
Both distributors and sales agents, she points out, currently have big backlogs of titles. “There are projects from 2020 that probably will not see the light of day because other titles are similar and more successful or there is just not enough space for them. People now, after a year of Covid, need brand new titles.”
However, Clanet is optimistic that the market will pick up as cinemas re-open. Reservoir Docs has a number of strong projects in production that will be ready for 2022. “To me, the world as we knew it in terms of sales and distribution will start again in 2022,” Clanet predicted.
