This year VdR Industry offers up 29 new projects/works-in-progress (from 650 submissions) to lighten the wallets of international investors (whether sales, distributors or co-producers), and an extensive programme of talks that interrogates the processes of doc funding and finance as well as getting down to the nitty gritty of creative docmaking.
Fifteen projects in development comprise the VdR–Pitching programme, while six projects at finishing stage will be presented during the VdR–Work In Progress session. Four projects have been selected for both the VdR–Rough Cut Lab and the VdR–Development Lab respectively. Separate programmes at VdR Industry are SWISS FILMS Previews, a presentation of 6 local doc projects on the verge of completion and release, and the Prix RTS de soutien à la création documentaire pitch competition that promotes creative documentary filmmaking in French-speaking Switzerland.
New Head Alice Burgin explains to Business Doc Europe what sets VdR Industry apart as a pitch event. “Firstly, the heritage of the Visions du Réel brand and what the organization represents, and how it is so established as a festival, I think already offers something extra as a unique selling point in its own right, as opposed to markets that just exist on their own [without a festival component],” she says.
“On the other hand, a luxury of VdR Industry is that we have such a niche cinema that we are nurturing, this idea that we are working in a space for creative documentary that has almost nowhere to go now,’ she emphasises. “Financing is more and more difficult, but we know there are still big hungry audiences. So to actually be able to use your market as a platform to find these projects, but also to tailor buyers or financiers to that content, I think that is one fundamental thing we can do.”
Burgin’s selection criteria runs, unsurprisingly, closely in line with the festival’s auteur vibe. “The creative stamp of the filmmakers themselves is really important as is the capacity for the project to travel internationally. We’re a co-production market, so it’s very important that we feel like projects can kind of exist within that space.” And the content must be riveting, she underlines, both “captivating and engaging.”
She cites two project examples from the 2024 selection. “On The Way is by Natalia Dolgowska, a first time Polish filmmaker but she’s working with a very established company in Poland (Kijora Film) and it’s beautiful. Everything about this film kind of epitomizes what we love at Visions du Réel. It’s a film that explores the impact of tourism on the environment in Poland, but it’s told in a beautiful creative observational way that looks at the kind of interactions between humans as tourists and nature, but beautifully shot, quite quirky, a little bit funny. It’s sort of a way for us to see ourselves within what we are seeing, but also rethink some of our impacts on the land and the environment in which we live without being didactic.”
The Swiss project To the Moon and Back, by first-timer Elisa Gomez Alvarez, is about three friends in their 20s who collectively want to become astronauts. “There’s this program that’s happening in Lausanne and they’re all trying to get in, and [the film] is one of those coming-of-age, intricate, intimate looks into an institution that’s often closed to the general public. And it’s got a level of energy and excitement and almost competition it. Space exploration is such a huge topic at the moment, but told in this film in a really accessible, engaging way through these young people.”
The VdR Industry focus is trained exclusively on the creative feature doc, Burgin underlines, which means that both pitchers and investors are singing from the same hymn sheet from the word go. “We are not broad. We are not trying to do factual tv, we’re not trying to do interactive, we’re not trying to do premium box sets. It’s very much we focus on feature,” she confirms. “What we do is specific but there is a lot of [professional] people looking for and trying to support that content…So we’re really looking to [determine] who is actually going to have an interest project by project, and make it worthwhile for the project holders…what makes it valuable for them to come when they’re traveling, when they’re paying for accommodation, when they’re putting time and energy into this market? How do you make sure it’s going to be a valuable experience for them?”
Burgin answers her own question with a list of top decision-makers that she and her team will be looking to unite with project rights holders, from broadcasters such as the BBC, Arte or POV; a slew of leading sales agent that includes Cinephile, Autlook, Deckert and Square Eyes; funders such as Doc Society, The Whickers, CNC and IDFA Bertha, or festivals in the form of Cannes, Sundance, Ji.hlava, CPH:DOX and IDFA.
VdR-Industry Talks
Elsewhere at VdR-Industry, alternative funding streams are very much on the agenda. “We have a whole strand in our industry program that’s a knowledge building element, is a focus on external funders such as private funders, philanthropic funders, people who have not always traditionally played in the space, but who are now coming into step up where we are starting to see gaps either from cuts in public broadcast financing, which we know is happening all over the world, and the kind of contraction of the streaming investment, which we also know still has money, but it’s definitely not going to the same places as it was five years ago,” says Burgin.
Across a series of five talks, industry professionals will be invited to engage in conversation with funders from across the world, some of whom are perhaps not so well known, and who include: Bruni Burres, (Sundance Film Institute, USA), Isabel Arrate Fernandez, (IDFA-Bertha Fund, The Netherlands), Lisa Kleiner Chanoff (Catapult Film Fund, USA), Milton Guillén (Points North Institute, USA), Khalil Benkirane (Doha Film Institute, Qatar), Jane Mote (The Whickers Foundation, UK), Sabine Fayoux Cantillo (Chicken & Egg, USA), Amanda Clarke (Minderoo Foundation, Australia), Fabienne Hanclot (CNC, France), Madeline Robert (visions sud est, Switzerland), Corinna Marschall (Media Desk, Switzerland) and Patrizia Pesko (Federal Office of Culture, Switzerland).
The talks programme will open April 14 with an “intimate and personal” In-Conversation session with the multi-award-winning, Academy-Award-nominated Brazilian director/producer Petra Costa (Olmo and the Seagull; The Edge of Democracy), during which she will explore “the impacts of interweaving her family life and her political obsessions into her cinema, drawing on past and future projects to explore everything from family relationships to the current state of financing in the industry.”
Burgin reflects on how she hopes her first edition as Head of VdR-Industry will play out. “I think what attracted me to this role was the intimacy. I think that is, again, another selling point we have to celebrate, which is that we want to create environments that everyone feels they have access to,” she outlines.
“We want to foster – ‘networking’ is such a terrible word – but relationship-building and exchange and dialogue. Obviously I hope that project holders come away with wads of cash to go and make their films, but when I think about the industry holistically, I think we want every single guest to leave feeling that they were looked after, that they were inspired and that they had at least one or two conversations that elevated them. I think that is kind of what we’re offering and those are the things that just keep you pushing through during the hard times,” Burgin ends.
