Producer Maarten Schmidt doesn’t have a project at the Flemish showcase this year, but is nevertheless a very active participant within the Belgian doc scene (and the European scene with DAE), specialising in films for youth. He talks to Business Doc Europe.
Maarten Schmidt set up his company Storyhouse in 2013 after working with Dutch doc doyen Pieter van Huystee for four years. Schmidt had graduated from film school in 2009. Since 2013 the company has produced 16 films, has worked with all major European broadcasters, he points out, and has picked up awards at major film festivals, such as the 2018 doc Breathless (2018) which won the Flemish Film Industry Award for Best Documentary. Other notable Storyhouse titles have been Saints (2016), which was broadcast by the BBC and Fien, Jip and Fien (2019), selected for Thessaloniki IFF, Dok Leipzig and Chicago International Children’s Film Festival.
“Storyhouse specializes in developing and producing documentaries for the international market, we focus on bold investigation, ‘youth in focus’ and author signature films. We’re currently doing mainly documentaries, but as of 2021 we will start to produce youth fiction,” Schmidt underlines. “I’m also teaming up with the Belgian production company and service provider Everstory to co-producer bigger international documentaries and fiction films.”
Success came early to Storyhouse as co-producer on Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koevorden’s highly lauded documentary Ne me quitte pas, which world-premiered in IDFA Competition in 2013 and which subsequently won major prizes at Hot Docs, Tribeca and doc Aviv.
“I met Niels when he graduated from film school and I strongly connected with his graduation film,” says Schmidt. “[When] they’d got Ne me quitte pas in shape and funded by the Dutch Film Fund I came in as a co-producer and financed the Belgian part. It was a weird experience because they had the Dutch Film Fund but no Dutch broadcaster, and the Film Fund was, like, if you don’t find a broadcaster we might pull back on our investment.”
“I had the Flemish Film Fund and Flemish broadcaster on board but once the film was picture-locked there was immediate interest from the Dutch broadcasters,” he continues of the averted crisis. “It was always clear to me that it had a lot of potential and that Niels and Sabine together were very capable of pulling it off, but because it was such a character-driven story, that is such a hard sell. They had great footage and development but in a certain way you have to trust as a financier or a broadcaster or a producer the abilities of the team. I was always, like, this is going to be great. And it turned out in the end to be even greater than we expected. It was amazing.”
Storyhouse is currently working on two projects for the ‘Ket & Doc’ programme of Ketnet and VAF (Flanders Audiovisual Fund) which co-funds 5 youth docs each year. In production is Angry, by Sundance-selected director Frederike Migom, an animated youth documentary about kids in mental healthcare, and Camp Kato by young directors Renate Raman and Joren Slaets, described as an intimate look at how young kids cope with the loss of someone close to them. Storyhouse helped initiate the ‘Ket & Doc’ programme after producing the youth doc Si-G by Frederike Migom in 2017.
The company also has three projects in development. Rainbowkids by established Belgian directors Mieke Struyve and Pieter De Graeve asks, what if it turns out that your gender identity does not correspond to the body in which you were born? Schmidt will set out therefore to produce “an evolutionary film spanning 10 years and following three eight-year-old children in their search for their identities. We observe them growing up from childhood through adolescence.”
Schmidt is developing the doc series The Last Frontier with producer Quentin Noirfalisse and journalist Laura Cole, which he describes as going “behind the scenes of the new race to mine the ocean and outer space. What’s to win and what’s to lose in opening these new frontiers for exploitation?”
In addition, Porto Central by Ensor Academy-awarded director Daniel Lambo tells how fishermen have to make way for the largest port in Brazil built by the Port of Rotterdam Authority. “It is a story of David versus Goliath in which man and nature have to make way for one of the most polluting industries in the world: the oil industry,” Schmidt comments.
The producer is also an active member of the fledgling DAE (Documentary Association of Europe) for whom he organises regular online sessions (or “hangouts”. At IDFA 2020 he will do a joint session with the festival on funding and support mechanisms for youth docs.
