Swedish documentary production outfit Sisyfos has a taste for Scotland. The company has opened up an office in Edinburgh and has several new Scottish projects on the boil. These follow on from its first project, the 2019 feature Scheme Birds, a gritty but poetic doc about young motherhood in a deprived part of Motherwell.
Ask CEO Mario Adamson, who runs Sisyfos with Ashley Smith, just why the company has established its new Scottish outpost and he explains it is not just because of the heather and the whisky. The producer points to “shared sensibilities” between the Scots and the Swedes.
“[With Scheme Birds], we got to know a lot of great professionals in Scotland and there is something in the Scottish mentality that we Swedes like in a way. Maybe it’s some kind of underdog/outsider fighting spirit,” Adamson suggests.
The Edinburgh office is run by Clara Harris, a Scottish producer who used to work for Sisyfos in Sweden, but recently moved back to her homeland.
“We really wanted to work with her,” Adamson remembers. “We thought ‘why not try to make collaborations?’” Harris herself is set to direct the documentary The Chaplain, which is about a female chaplain working for a Scottish football team. This is in early development.
Another doc coming through the Scottish office is Greyhound, which looks at what happens to racing dogs when their careers come to an end.
This week, Sisyfos received the news that its skateboarding doc The Scars of Ali Boulala (pictured) by Max Ericsson, sold by Charades, has been selected for Tribeca.
Adamson comes from a sound and music background. In 2010, he helped his sister make a clay animated short which he eventually ended up producing and directing. He continued to make animation shorts alongside his sound and music work. Then, in 2017, when he became involved in Scheme Birds, he decided to set up the production outfit. He was introduced to Ashley Smith by Ruth Reid, his fellow producer on Scheme Birds. “It’s hard to find people who you’re on the same wavelength as so you don’t need to explain everything,” he says of Smith, who is from an academic background. “I am more practical and she is more theoretical so we match up. Also, she’s American and so her English is much better than mine.”
Both Adamson and Smith refuse to rush their projects. “We think documentaries take time,” Adamson says. “I think time is essential for a project to grow and to grasp what it is actually about.”
The company frequently works with first-time directors – another reason to allow projects to gestate slowly.
Among the new films from Sisyfos expected to be released this year are My Funny Quarantine, billed as an account of “the lockdown life of an Italian at the time of coronavirus” and which is directed by Sebastiano Luca Insinga. It’s a portrait of the filmmaker’s family including his mother who “has a really difficult time – she has this claustrophobia she has to deal with.”
The company is also co-producing another of director Insigna’s projects, Pure Unknown.
Also due for release this year is Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s How To Save A Dead Friend. “I immediately fell in love with this because it’s a really, really personal and beautiful film about being young in Russia,” Adamson says of the doc on which his production partner is Ksenia Gapchenko for Docs Vostok. “In Russia, it is impossible to finance films like that. That is why we stepped in.” The film is now in final editing and is likely to surface at a festival in the coming months.
Also nearing completion is Motherland, the feature documentary by Hanna Badziaka and Alexander Mihalkovich, about a mother’s desire to end injustice and abuse in the Belarussian army.
Another new project, Charlotte Hayes’ Don’t Make It Easy, promises to go “deeper” than ever before (than in other previous docs) into the life and times of folk blues singer and poet, Karen Dalton, portraying her “as a person in a bigger picture” and moving away from depicting her as a victim. (Dalton died in mysterious circumstances of an Aids-related illness in the early 1990s).
The company is also pushing ahead with the Middle Eastern project Depot-Vente from Cherine Karam, a doc about the most celebrated vintage shop in Lebanon that ‘sticks out as a buoyant island of hope that seems insulated from the reigning gloominess.’
Meanwhile, Sisypfos is one of the partners on Hot Docs project Blix, about Hans Blix, the UN’s former chief weapons inspector during the build-up the Iraq war, which is being put together as a Czech-Swedish co-production.
