The recent Oscar nomination for Austrian-based doc sales outfit Autlook for Writing With Fire continues the company’s impressive awards run. It follows on from such other Autlook titles such as For Sama and Of Fathers And Sons which have been prominent in past awards campaigns.
Being part of the Academy Awards is both an opportunity and a challenge for an independent European sales agency like Autlook. They’re up against the major streamers and US studios – and don’t have the budget to invest a huge PR campaign.
“In our case, for all of our films, it is a very slow build-up. We always need around a year to build up the buzz, to create awareness within the Doc Branch of voters,” Abdalla suggests. “We have in the strategy to work with strong festivals. If we feel that the film is getting the attention and strong reviews, and getting awards, then we are supporting the team 100% with their ambitions to go to the Academy campaign.”
Writing With Fire, which premiered in Sundance in 2021, is the first Indian doc ever to have secured an Oscar nomination. It tells the uplifting story of Khabar Lahariya (KL), a digital news agency in Uttar Pradesh in India, run by women journalists from the low-caste “untouchable” Dalit community.
The Autlook boss believes that independent docs like Writing With Fire are benefiting from changes in the membership of AMPAS, the organisation which votes for the Oscars.
“With this new diversity of Academy voters, it is not only the US anymore,” Abdalla says of where the attention is now coming from. There has been a shift in the type of documentaries vying for awards. More political work is now being acknowledged in a way it wasn’t before.
As part of the campaign, Autlook and its partners have organised Q&As for the filmmakers and subjects behind Writing With Fire (directors Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh and journalist Meera Devi) with high-profile figures like Gloria Steinem, Orwa Nyrabia and Asif Kapadia.
The Oscar visibility has helped Autlook with the final part of the sales drive. “We are closing every single territory in the world now,” Abdalla says.
Another of Autlook’s recent titles, Myanmar Diaries, recently picked up the Berlinale Documentary Award – and the €40,000 prize that goes with it. (In the same week, it won Berlin’s Amnesty International Film award and the Tony Elliott Impact Award at the 26th Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London).
“For us, it was an immediate pick-up,” Autlook CEO Salma Abdalla says of the film which was brought to the company by Corinne van Egeraat of Dutch production company Zindoc. “There were not a lot of discussions internally. We were convinced from the first second.”
The film chronicles life in Myanmar in the wake of last year’s brutal military coup. It was made anonymously by the young Burmese filmmakers in the Myanmar Film Collective.
“Of course, we would like to see it released as soon as possible. It is more than just a reflection of what is happening. It is also a call for support and help from the international community and governments. This is one of the reasons we are looking for partners who are able to show the film soon,” Abdalla says of the film, which is receiving “massive interest” from festivals.
However, as the industry slowly emerges from the pandemic, Abdalla is noticing a bottleneck effect in theatrical distribution. With so many films still to be released, “most of the cinemas are booked out until November.”
Autlook will now be beginning its sales campaign on Rita Baghdadi’s Sirens, about a Beirut-based, all female heavy metal band. The film premiered in Sundance last month. Meanwhile, Abdalla and her team are already looking to next year’s Oscars with another of their titles, Dutch director Bianca Stigter’s Holocaust documentary Three Minutes – A Lengthening, which has already screened at many top festivals from Venice to Toronto and Sundance, and which top distributors are vying to buy.
The Autlook boss has also confirmed several pre-sales on Tania Anderson’s new film The Mission, about young missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) trying to preach their gospel a very long way from home. Arte, Al-Jazeera, SVT, YLE and various other partners are aboard.
There is also big anticipation building around Autlook’s Loving Highsmith, a recently completed feature doc based on lesbian crime writer Patricia Highsmith’s recently published diaries. The aim now is to secure the film a prestigious festival premiere later this year or in early 2023.
