Paul Daly’s Mirrors
Doc Society will be a major presence at Sheffield DocFest this week. The UK not for profit foundation, which has run the BFI Doc Society Fund since 2018, will have 10 films screening in the festival, including the world premiere in competition of Kim Hopkins’ crowd-pleaser A Bunch Of Amateurs, sold by MetFilms.
A Bunch Of Amateurs is one of the first titles backed by the Fund. It also took part in Doc Society’s inaugural “Creative Lab” held in Scotland in 2019. The film is set in Bradford and is about Bradford Movie Makers, one of the oldest amateur film clubs in the UK. It is executive produced by Simon Beaufoy, screenwriter of The Full Monty.
Other world premieres include Paul Daly’s Mirrors and Carola Fuentes and Rafael Valdeavellano’s Breaking The Brick, about recent social and political convulsions in Chile.
The festival also features the European premieres of Doc Society-backed titles Fashion Reimagined by Becky Hutner, Joseph Curran and Dominic Aubrey de Vere’s A Story of Bones and Karl Malakunas’ Delikado; and UK premieres of the much-heralded The Territory by Alex Pritz and Nothing Compares by Kathryn Ferguson. The New Perspectives Fund titles No Simple Way (Akuol de Mabior) and I Didn’t See You There (Reid Davenport) also screen in Sheffield.
Alongside the completed films, the festival will also be holding work-in-progress screenings of extended material from six diverse Doc Society-backed titles. This is an invitation event at which industry delegates (broadcasters, funds, streamers, sales agents, distributors and festival programmers) will be in attendance and will have the chance not only to watch the early material from the film but to meet the filmmakers too.
The titles being showcased include Ross McClean’s Beyond the Fold, about a young man nearing the end of a stint inside a Belfast youth prison who starts caring for a flock of sheep as part of a rehabilitation programme. The film is currently in production.
Kit Vincent’s Red Herring is an intimate and humorous doc about a young filmmaker diagnosed with terminally brain cancer, and his very complicated relationship with his divorced parents. Cinephil are sales agent on the project, which is in post-production.
Ed Sayers’ Super Nature is a wildlife doc with a difference, shot in freewheeling fashion on Super 8. The project is currently in production and looking for further finance and distribution.
San San F. Young’s Hong Kong MixTape (now in final post) looks at how underground Hong Kong artists, including the filmmaker, are coping with China’s crackdown on freedom of speech.
Leo Regan’s My Friend Lanre is about the life and death of the director’s close friend, British-Nigerian photographer, Lanre Fehintola. Produced through Mike Elliott’s EMU Films, this is preparing for post-production ahead of a theatrical release.
Also in the works-in-progress event is Jeanie Finlay’s new doc Your Fat Friend, about what it means to be a fat woman in the world today. This is at rough cut stage with Cinetic handling world sales.
This is the first time that Doc Society has done works-in-progress screenings. “It’s an opportunity for those funders and partners to really get insight into what to get excited about and what is being made right now,” Doc Society Head of Film Shanida Scotland told Business Doc Europe of the thinking behind the initiative.
“It is also a way of buyers getting to know the fund as well,” added Doc Society Director Sandra Whipham.
Another initiative which Doc Society is promoting at Sheffield is the Ripple Effect Fund launched last year to support innovative and essential documentary community activities in the UK with diversity and inclusion at the heart. The Fund was inspired by groundbreaking work done by international organisations like Brown Girls Doc Mafia! and the Asian Documentary Filmmakers’ Collective.
“What we were able to do was to award almost £200,000 to 10 organisations across the UK,” Scotland explains. Outfits backed through Ripple Effect include the Amber Film Collective in the north east of England, Cables and Camera based in the Midlands and DocuMentality run by Rebecca Day and which addresses mental health and well-being in the doc sector.
On Monday June 27th, a special panel, Beyond Centres Of Power, will be held at which organisations supported by the Ripple Effect Fund will discuss the importance of grassroots, community-led documentary networks and initiatives.
This Friday (June 23), Doc Society will also be holding a drop-in day at which anyone (including non-delegates) can sign up for 20-minute meetings with Doc Society representatives.
This event will also include “mini-presentations” on different aspects of the Fund, for example how to create audience strategies and impact campaigns for films. The day culminates with a panel on Alex Pritz’s The Territory (produced by Darren Aronofsky). The film, a UK premiere at the festival, is about a contested territory within the Amazon rainforest and deforestation by illegal settlers. The Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau people themselves were intimately involved in the making of the film (which premiered in Sundance and has been acquired by National Geographic).
The BFI Doc Society Fund has supported 51 feature documentaries since 2018 out of which 18 are already in distribution. “It’s entirely bespoke. It is based on the film team’s needs at the point of application. We fund at any stage. We fund development, production and completion. We fund micro-budget films and £1 million plus films. Our investment ranges from £20k to £100K plus. The proportion of the budget that we can contribute to is everything from 2% to 76%…we really offer the full range of support across a broad range of different kind of documentary projects,” Whipham explains the expansive way in which the Fund works. In 2021 the Fund granted over $4.8 million to global storytellers.
“I think people are really excited about Sheffield this year. They want to meet all their colleagues and see what films have been made and really be a community again,” Whipham said of what she expects over the coming days. “It is a great meeting place for documentary talent, whatever level you are coming in at.”
