Look at the top grossing documentaries in UK cinemas in 2022 and one title leaps out. Number 2 in the list, with ticket sales worth £327,000, is Margy Kinmonth’s Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War. The film, about the modernist British watercolorist, designer and wood engraver who died during the Second World War, was released by doc specialists Dartmouth Films.
The only documentary that out-performed it at the box office last year was Brett Morgen’s David Bowie doc, Moonage Daydream, and that had the might of a Hollywood studio, Universal, behind it.
So just how did Dartmouth manage to find such sizeable audiences for what looked at first glance like a small and esoteric art film?
“It was a confluence of factors all working together to create that kind of success,” says Matt Hird, Head of Distribution at Dartmouth. “Part of it is getting word of mouth going very early on with preview screenings and building those very personal relationships with the Eric Ravilious fan clubs which were a few thousand people we identified on Facebook. Then you also had a director and producer, Margy and Maureen [Murray] who had been building their audience over the years…then you had a great publicity campaign and a very focused and targeted booking strategy.”
Dartmouth’s small staff plan each release of a new feature documentary as if it is a military campaign. They have a new film in cinemas across the UK and Ireland next month to which they are devoting their familiar painstaking attention. Alastair Evans’ A Crack In The Mountain looks at what happens to a small, Vietnamese community when an astonishing new cave passage, Hang Son Doong, is discovered nearby. Observers immediately call the cave the eighth wonder of the world. Scientists and tourists flock to the area.
Evans was put in touch with Dartmouth by film marketing guru and distribution consultant, Peter Broderick.
“It [A Crack In The Mountain] is definitely our kind of film,” says Christopher Hird, founder and managing director of Dartmouth Films. “Nearly all of the films that we both produce and distribute are films that have a purpose. What was interesting about this film was…that it reflects very well the struggle any country has, and in this case Vietnam, with how it manages the wish on the one hand to persevere its sites of natural beauty but, at the same time, to ensure there is sustainable economic development. Getting to grips with a tricky issue is what we like.”
The trick with this documentary, as with Eric Ravilious, is to “identify the core audience” and find a route to that audience. “If the core audience likes it, they spread the word to a wider audience,” Matt Hird explains.
With A Crack In The Mountain, there are various key groups Dartmouth will be targeting, among them cavers, “adventurous travellers” and audiences interested in “defence of the environment.”
And, yes, this is a lot of work for a small distribution company. “It is a labour-intensive activity. You can’t just say to a cinema ‘here’s this film. Please will you take it,” Christopher Hird says. He set up Dartmouth Films in 2008 having held senior editorial positions at such publications as The New Statesman and The Sunday Times, and worked as a television reporter and producer. “It’s true that I was getting progressively disappointed with television. It wasn’t really interested in the sorts of films that I was interested in making.”
At his previous production company Fulcrum, Hird had been involved in the successful feature documentary Black Gold(2006), made by the Francis brothers and looking at ethical coffee production, and in the production of Belonging (2003), about independent filmmaker Li-Da Kruger’s search for her family roots in war-torn Cambodia. He had the sense that “there was an opportunity here for documentaries that started their lives in cinemas.” By then, Hird was tiring of trying to “second guess the prejudices of television commissioning editors about what the next six-part format series was.”
Dartmouth (the name comes from the street in north London where Hird used to live) was set up a few years after Dogwoof, the first company in the UK to think in terms of a business built around theatrical documentary. This was a period when BAFTA had considered abolishing documentary awards because there were so few feature docs being released in cinemas.
The company’s projects aren’t just shown on the big screen. Dartmouth recently sold Ithaka, its documentary about the battle to free hacker and activist Julian Assange from prison, to UK broadcaster, ITV, and has also sold its documentaries to most of the major streamers.
The company tends to board projects at an early stage. “The vast majority of the films that we handle are films we’ve known about for quite a long time. Some of them I am executive producer of and even if that is not the case, I’ve seen [them] in very early rough cuts,” Christopher Hird explains Dartmouth’s desire to be involved in the documentaries it releases from their earliest gestation.
Hird always looks to provide filmmakers with practical and realistic advice about what their documentaries might achieve.
“We like to think we’ve put ourselves in the position where we can provide the best possible service to the filmmaker,” the company founder observes of the central position Dartmouth now has in the eco-system of UK documentary making.
The company doesn’t just measure success in financial terms. Some of its films have had an immediately measurable social impact. For example, Resilience, a documentary about a dangerous biological syndrome caused by abuse and neglect during childhood, helped changed medical policy in the Scottish Parliament.
“That is the perfect model for us, to give a film a unique theatrical life, build on the press and word of mouth, and then cross that over into outreach and partnerships with very decent income alongside it,” Matt Hird says of a film which did well at the box office and also changed lives.
Forthcoming releases include Josh Appignanesi’s very personal climate crisis doc My Extinction, which will be released in late June, and Someone’s Daughter, Someone’s Son directed by Lorna Tucker (who also made Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist) and which is about homelessness in the UK. “We are grassroots, that is what we are,” Matt Hird says of the Dartmouth philosophy of building big audiences with innovative, locally focused release campaigns that don’t rely on big marketing budgets or celebrity support.
