Yoruba Richen’s The Sit-In
Anais Clanet’s Paris-based sales outfit Reservoir Docs, which earlier this week picked up international rights to new CPH: DOX and Hot Docs title Dark Blossom, has announced a raft of new sales on other titles on its current slate, including the Harry Belafonte doc The Sit-In.
Two titles which have caught the imagination of buyers are Yoruba Richen’s The Sit-In, about the week that entertainer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte hosted ‘The Tonight Show’, and Salomé Chasnoff’s The Code Of The Freaks, which looks at the dark and tragic consequences of Hollywood’s exploitation of disability.
The company has just finalised a deal for the The Sit-In for the UK with Phil Hunt’s adventurous new distribution outfit Bohemia, which will give the film a limited theatrical release as well as putting it out digitally. (Bohemia also recently released Reservoir Docs’ Swedish title Always Amber). The Sit-In has also gone to SBS (Australia).
Meanwhile, The Code Of The Freaks has been sold to BeTV in Belgium and to new French VOD platform Brut (“they release smart documentaries,” says Clanet). It has also gone to Canal Plus in Poland and is in final negotiations with SBS for Australia.
Another of Clanet’s docs, The Prophet And The Space Aliens, directed by Yoav Shamir, has been bought by RTS in Switzerland.
Dark Blossom, directed by Frigge Fri, is about three teenage Danish Goths living in a backwater town. When one of them falls in love, it threatens the harmony of the group.
“It’s comedic and extremely brilliant. It really goes into our catalogue because it’s punk but, at the same time, it is very cultural,” Clanet said of the film, which was produced through Made in Copenhagen. Reservoir Docs is handling global rights excluding Denmark. The company had been tracking the project since Nordisk Panorama last year and finally came on board in late March.
“The mood seems to be improving slightly,” Clanet said of the current state of the market. Although selling theatrical rights remains an uphill struggle, the Reservoir Docs boss has seen TV stations “buying more of the art and culture documentaries we have, timeless and archive-based.”
While waiting for the theatrical market to recover, Reservoir Docs is currently focusing on TV pre-sales. “That’s our main priority as that is where the money is – and then the theatrical world will start to pick up again in the Fall, I would say,” Clanet predicted.
