Anna Berthollet of Swiss sales house Lightdox announced July 5 sales on three of its four Cannes market titles.
The Witches of the Orient has been picked up by Berthollet’s “main focus territories” of the US (KimStim), UK and Ireland (Modern Films) and Italy (Just Wanted Cinema). Additionally, the film will be released in France by UFO Distribution and in Japan by Uzumasa in the autumn. The film also has been sold to RTS Swiss Television for broadcast in July.
The doc is particularly pertinent right now as it focusses on the heroic endeavours of the Japanese women’s volleyball team at the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, who were known as the ‘Witches of the Orient’ because of their seemingly supernatural powers on the courts.
The Cannes ACID title Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege was sold to Restart for the Balkans region, and Berthollet has “high hopes” for further Cannes sales. Between 2011 and 2015, Abdallah Al-Khatib and his friends documented the daily life of the besieged inhabitants of the enormous Palestinian refugee camp at Yarmouk (Damascus, Syria), who decided to face bombing, displacement and hunger with rallying, study, music, love and joy.
Lars Edman and William Johansson’s Arica, which recently prompted critical intervention from UNHRC rapporteurs was picked up by Docs Barcelona Distribution in Spain and was sold to Why for worldwide broadcast within their Why Stories strand. Berthollet says that she is in “the final phase of talks” with all rights distributors in Chile and Mexico, and the UK.
Arica exposes the scandal of how a Swedish mining company exported 20,000 tonnes of toxic waste to the Chilean desert town of Arica, leading to thousands of people becoming ill and many dying of cancer.
The other film on the Lightdox market slate is Looking for Horses by Stefan Pavlović (The Netherlands, Bosnia & Herzegovina), described as a film about a friendship between the filmmaker and a fisherman. One lost his mother-tongue because of a stutter, the other lost his hearing during the Bosnian civil war. They look for ways to communicate, while the camera mediates their growing bond.
Berthollet will be pushing two further films, yet to be completed, at Cannes. The 80-minute Bulgarian film No Place for You in Our Town (Nikolay Stefanov) is in post-production, while Happy Pills by Arnaud Robert and Paolo Woods takes us on “a journey through six different countries and characters into a world where chemistry is the ultimate response to human pursuits of well-being. From antidepressants to opioid pain or stimulant medication, the film questions our whole consumer society and the so called Eldorado of prescribed happiness.” The film marks Lightdox’s fifth collaboration with Intermezzo Films, Geneva.
Berthollet reminds Business Doc Europe of her company’s raison d’etre and its dedication to “powerful documentary storytelling. We are passionate about high-quality author-driven documentaries with a distinctive cinematic language and emotional impact.”
“Our catalogue is smaller, but is getting better and better,” she adds. “When we started the company, we didn’t have any differentiation strategy in relation to other sales agents, [we were] just taking our role as a curator very, very seriously. And what we notice today in our development as a company is how that was really the [best] strategy, because now our editorial profile is very much recognized and praised.”
“It’s very easy for us to make acquisitions,” Berthollet continues, “because, we don’t have any other criteria than just falling in love with a film. And sometimes people ask us, what are you looking for – history? current affairs? – and I say, I don’t know until I see it.”
