First Hand Films CEO and founder Esther van Messel has unveiled the seven recipients of support from her First Hand Diversity Fund which she created to acknowledge “25 amazing years” of First Hand activity.
“The idea [for the Fund] came before the horrible time; before the war in Ukraine, before Gaza, before Trump,” the First Hand boss says of the initiative. Interestingly, it wasn’t targeted purely at directors and films. The eclectic list of winners reads:
- We Are The Granddaughters. A documentary about witches, rebellion and breaking the patriarchy from young Polish filmmaker Magdalena Puzmujzniak
- Palarctic: A joint initiative involving six young filmmakers from Norway and Palestine overseen by Mohamed Jabaly. (Tromso is a sister city to Gaza).
- Another Story by Basel-based Loreley Films, “reviving female filmmakers’ legacies…through festivals, workshops and research”
- Aditi Sharma: Travel stipend support for a fast-rising young Indian filmmaker whose project Songs Of The Unsilenced has already been showcased at major festivals
- Wheel on Fire by Anna Snowball: a doc project exploring systemic injustice in a Brazilian neighbourhood based on the site of an old sugar plantation
- Seera Films: Backing for a Berlin and Cairo based production outfit championing underrepresented voices
- Be-In: a platform enhancing visibility, networking and accessibility in the film community for those with disabilities
Van Messel describes First Hand is a “small team” comprising only eight people, but they work across theatrical distribution, sales and production. “Together, there’s s a lot of knowledge around the couch.”
Instead of having a large scale 25th anniversary party (“I’ve witnessed several companies do that and then end up going out of business a year or two after”) , van Messel and her colleagues decided to use their combined expertise to help others within the industry.
“We didn’t want to celebrate ourselves. That seemed so presumptuous,” she stresses.
Van Messel isn’t looking to keep the Fund going. “It’s so much work. I would need to have a separate business for that,” she jokes as she looks back on the Herculean task of sifting through the Fund applications at the same time as continuing with the company’s regular activities.
“At First Hand Films, I assess around 1000 projects a year that are submitted to us and we pick around 10, so it’s extremely competitive,” van Messel reveals the workload that already exists.
As CPH:DOX gets underway in earnest, van Messel has mixed feelings about the current state of the market. Dealing with broadcasters, she says, remains very tough indeed. “We work with the BBC, we work with TRT, we work with Al Jazeera…but the way the business ran for so many years, it doesn’t run any more. It’s not like you sell your film to Scandinavia and Benelux. Every broadcaster is under too much pressure.”
One upside, though, is the increasing opportunities online for older titles. “While it has become harder for new films, there are new opportunities for old films. We actively acquire library titles now: very few, very selective but we are talking to producers we already work with,’ she says. “This is a huge opportunity.”
First Hand recently put together a package of older titles from Gaza including Gaza’s Strawberry Fields from 2006 and Mohamed Jabaly’s 2020 short, My Gaza Online.
Another title from 2022, The Negotiators – How To Make Peace by Rosalind Bain and looking at peace-making initiatives everywhere from South Sudan to Bosnia and Mexico, has an obvious topicality in today’s marketplace.
“But of course, it is very hard to kickstart [new] projects. It is very hard because the subsidies often still require cinema releases of films. Cinema releases cost a lot of money and hardly ever pay for the filmmakers. It’s debatable whether it makes sense to release documentaries theatrically,” van Messel notes one familiar challenge.
Nonetheless, First Hand Films has its usual packed spring line-up of titles for CPH:DOX, Visions Du Réel and beyond.
New on the slate is Palestine Comedy Club by Alaa “Regash” Aliabdallah and Charlotte Knowles, following six Palestinian stand-ups as they explore the complexities of Palestinian identity. This should have its festival premiere in the coming months. “It is a wonderful, wonderful way to look at the pain of the world through humour,” van Messel says of the film.
Also sparking interest is the First Hand production Spies Against Their Will by Aldo Gugolz and Res Strehle. This looks at the Swiss encryption scandal and how, despite so-called Swiss “neutrality,” Swiss technology was used to funnel information to the CIA.
Among the other documentaries that have been cutting through are Najiba Noori’s documentary Writing Hawa, which premiered to great acclaim at IDFA, has since gone on to screen at 25 festivals, and is showing in Copenhagen this week, “It is doing amazing and is still out there. We are getting a TV version soon and will hopefully be making some sales.”
First Hand is co-producing Matriarchy (working title), the new film from Zara Arrehed about a young woman torn between her Christian Orthodox family and her Muslim girlfriend.
“This, of course, is our wet dream, that we can co-produce films from fantastic filmmakers – and bring our knowledge of international sales to the table. We also have knowledge from our theatrical and business-to-consumer work in Switzerland,” the First Hand boss emphasises the depth of market knowledge and creative experience that the company possesses.
Another of the company’s titles, Kseniya Halubovich’s I Made A Mistake Coming Here which won the East Doc Platform Award in late 2023, is now fully financed. This looks at how Belarus was falsely promoted as an easy gateway into Europe for refugees stuck in camps. “It’s a fantastic film with an incredible twist in the storyline – that I will not talk about!” van Messel states.
First Hand will be pitching new projects in Munich and Barcelona. It has four films in Movies That Matter, and, as ever, will be a major presence in Copenhagen over the coming days.
