“We live and breathe documentary,” enthuses Rise and Shine World Sales managing director Stefan Kloos as he describes the passion that has sustained the company since it was founded in 2008.
At CPH DOX this week, Berlin-based sales company Rise And Shine is handling sales on Ai Weiwei’s Turandot by Maxim Derevianko. The film follows the legendary Chinese artist as he directs the opera at the Rome Opera House. Other titles on their current slate include The Helsinki Effect from Finnish director Arthur Franck (looking at the far-reaching legacy of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, held in Helsinki in 1975) and Leila Amini’s A Sister’s Tale, about the director’s sister’s dreams of becoming a singer in repressive, patriarchal Iran.
Meanwhile, the company is offering the first Rise And Shine Award, worth €3,000 to the best pitch project with international potential and no sales agent yet attached, at CPH:Forum.
“We know how much effort, time and financial resources producers put in to developing a project to a point where you pitch for the first time to an international audience. The idea for the award was to shed some extra light on those developments…we wanted an award with no strings attached,” Kloos explains why there is no requirement for the winning project to be represented by Rise and Shine.
“We always felt connected to CPH…maybe it’s because I have Danish genes,” co-founder Anja Dziersk jokes. She believes the festival has grown in significance since it switched its dates from the autumn to the spring.
Dziersk and Kloos talk of the “very modern approach to documentary” found in Copenhagen and of how the event foregrounds films which, even when dealing with the toughest subjects, still try to entertain audiences.
It has already been an encouraging start to the year for Rise And Shine. At Thessaloniki earlier this month, the Berlin-based outfit’s new feature doc Child of Dust received a special mention in the festival’s main competition while another of its titles, The Day the Earth Stood Still, won the festival’s audience award.
Dziersk first spotted Child Of Dust at dok.incubator last year and was immediately struck by its strong emotional impact. Directed by Weronika Mliczewska, the film is about the tribulations of Sang, a Vietnamese man tracking down his gravely ill American father. For years, since the end of the Vietnam war, Sang has felt isolated and abandoned (“like a house without a roof”) but now has a chance to heal old wounds.
“I fell immediately in love with the whole story because it is so heart-wrenching,” Dziersk says.
“I remember Anja returning from dok.incubator raving about the film. I discovered it a little bit later,” Kloos describes how he first encountered the project. “When you are able to reveal something like a legacy of a war that is ongoing for generations, that is something that has the potential to work on a universal level…I was pretty sure this was a film that could be broadcast and shown at festivals around the world.”
The Day the Earth Stood Still was brought to Rise and Shine by acquisitions manager Diana Karklin. “The American director and the Icelandic writer and producer, I think that was the magic combination,” Kloos says of Pamela Hogan’s film which tells the story of how, on an October day in 1975, 90% of the women in Iceland refused to work, cook or take care of the kids in protest against entrenched sexism.
“It was not one of those films that had a home run at the first festival…it was only a couple of months later we realised there was really a momentum going on,” Kloos notes of a crowd-pleaser that launched at Hot Docs and has now taken off with audiences everywhere from the US to the Nordics and South Korea.
Rise And Shine Cinema, the company’s distribution arm, is releasing The Day The Earth Stood Still in German cinemas this month. At preview screenings tied to International Women’s Day, the doc has been doing roaring business and is already a hit across the border in Austria. Distributed by Poly Film, it has been outperforming even Mickey 17 in screen averages. The Rise And Shine bosses are heartened that younger audiences have been turning out for the movie.
The company also did well in cinemas recently with E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea, about the Irish designer, architect and style icon, Eileen Gray.
Despite these successes, Kloos is wary about saying that the theatrical audience for documentary has fully returned. Both Eileen Gray and The Day the Earth Stood Still are titles that leave the “audience with a smile on their faces.” However, he suggests, “tougher” films still face an uphill battle to attract spectators to cinemas.
Kloos notes that he and Dziersk had their baby daughter just before they launched the company almost 20 years ago. Since then, it was been “almost like a second family.”
In 2002, they set up their own production company Kloos & Co Medien GmbH, and that also continues to run side by side with the sales outfit. The two founders work alongside Karklin (who has been with the company for 15 years). “It’s a very committed team,” Kloos says. He and Dziersk come from the world of journalism. They first met in the late 1990s, gradually moving into the world of creative documentary together.
The Rise and Shine team will generally recommend directors they work with to provide
a TV cut of their movies “for the reason that 95% of the broadcast slots are 52 minutes.” Even so, they fight to protect these directors’ visions. “We are the happiest if we are able to release theatrically and have the theatrical version also on television or on platform but the reality is often different. Broadcasters will say they love the cinema version but only have a one-hour slot.”
You’ll find one of the team at most major documentary events – and all three will usually be at IDFA. They have another new film opening Visions Du Reel in a few weeks, Christian Frei’s Blame (which combines an investigation into the origins of COVID-19 with a probing look at the role of science in the face of political pressure).
“You can’t be involved in every film but there are so many films out there where you can help make the film rise and shine…that’s our mantra,” concludes Kloos.
