“This is the place to be,” First Hand Films CEO and founder Esther van Messel enthuses about CPH:DOX. “There is something about having another IDFA in the spring…all in all, I really feel this place is taking care of film as an art but also as a marketplace.”
Van Messel likens the festival under managing director Katrine Kiilgaard to the “early days of Sheffield [DocFest]” under Heather Croall when every edition seemed to bring innovations. “You could really feel that she was listening to people and improving things that didn’t work, letting things go that didn’t work and introducing things required by the professionals. I feel a similar vibe here now. They really have their ear to their ground.”
Nonetheless, the First Hand Films boss sees continuing stresses in the doc sector even as memories of the pandemic recede into the distance.
“I think it is still very much in shock. I encounter a lot of people that are afraid,” van Messel observes of a nervousness which afflicts broadcasters and streamers in particular. She cites as an example her film Homecoming, a Nordic doc directed by Suvi West and Anssi Kömi that screened in Toronto. This is a “very accessible and topical story” about the return of artefacts — long held in a museum — to the Sámi people. Six months later, the well-received film is yet to secure meaningful sales.
The First Hand Films boss believes that the broadcasters and streamers are “quite unpolitical these days.” They’re not eager to get behind movies that deal with the post-colonial legacy.
“I don’t know where they are,” she says. “We used to sell to Benelux’s and Scandinavia’s public broadcasters one to three films a year…” Now, these outlets have all but dried up as TV channels focus on increasingly bland and mainstream fare, and on local productions.”
First Hand Films is successfully doing business with global streamers like Al Jazeera English and BBC Africa. The former has picked up Palestinian director Mohamed Jabaly’s IDFA award winner Life Is Beautiful (about how the filmmaker ends up stranded in Norway).
“It’s a gorgeous, sharp, constructive film, a beautiful film, and it could not be more topical. It should sell all over,” she adds, but only a few European broadcasters have made an offer on it, a state of affairs which leaves van Messel “baffled.” She acknowledges that public broadcasters are losing slots for documentary and are under intense pressure – but still is disappointed by this new conservatism.
However, in Switzerland (where she also distributes fiction and docs to theatres), van Messel is orchestrating a theatrical release for the movie involving special screenings and intense Impact campaigning.
When First Hand Films gets behind a film, the company is often there for the long haul. For example, van Messel and her team have been involved in The Perfect Meal – The Secrets Of The Mediterranean Diet for over seven years. (The film, narrated by Jean-Marc Barr, explores just why eating plant based foods like vegetables, grains, nuts, legumes and fruits is so much better for human health than devouring animal-based products).
“It’s selling well,” van Messel says of the doc on which she is also Exec Producer, but not easily. It’s helpful to have the story in various formats, as a series, a one hour, and a feature – playing here in Copenhagen.
Esther van Messel is developing three new projects with Hanka Nobis, the Polish prodigy behind Polish Prayers. One is Songs of Sisterhood, about the young women in Poland who earned instant notoriety by spray painting a police van.
For van Messel, the priority is always to do whatever works best for the visibliity of the doc in question. “This is not a very high finance industry. We have to work together to make it work.”
When asked about using festivals as political platforms, she makes clear that she believes festivals to be “places for dialogue…you can express your protests but mostly we are here to watch films, talk about films, to get to know each other – and maybe to get to know aspects and viewpoints we haven’t considered yet. Film is a wonderful medium to do that.”
Will she be picking up new docs at CPH? The question makes van Messel pause. “We are positively swamped,” she sighs. “My in-box is full of submissions and I am just a small sales company. Really, I wonder how the bigger buyers handle this. I have about 20 projects for every buyer who reacts!”
She is therefore becoming ever more selective. New projects on the slate that she has high hopes for include Ice Women from Jens Becker and Dorothea Braun. This confronts the “male-centric narrative of Arctic exploration,” focusing instead on resilient and adventurous women “in history and today.” She describes this as “an incredibly multi-faceted and rich project.”
Also new on the slate is The Srebrenica Tape directed by Chiara Sambuchi and produced by multi-award winning Antje Boehmert of DOCDAYS Productions. This will be released in 2025, 30 years after the Srebrenica massacre. It follows a young woman as she goes on a journey to uncover her father’s fate and what happened leading up to the genocide. He had left her a letter in form of a VHS tape.
As well as being a sales agent and distributor, van Messel also remains very active in production. She is the producer of Kalari – the Female Power of Martial Arts, following four young Indian women on their journey towards self-empowerment through their embrace of the world’s oldest martial art. (The directors are Maria Kaur Bedi and Satindar Singh Bedi). The production financing has just completed and van Messel is pitching the title in Copenhagen.
Whatever the challenges in the marketplace, van Messel continues to pick up only projects that excite and inspire her. “I come from a merchant’s family. I know what it is to work commercially. If I would try to be commercial in the documentary business based in Europe, it would be the celebrity [films] and the wedding shows. That’s not my passion. Things need to make sense, people need to earn a living, and still, the only way out is if we stay true to ourselves and we keep telling the stories we need to tell and that need to be told. We also need to be wakeful and keep reinventing the formats. The job at hand is also a political job, to make sure our documentaries still have a space,” she makes her mission statement.
