MIA 2021 Archives - Business Doc Europe

MIA keynote: RJ Cutler – Dispatches from the Golden Age

Nick Cunningham — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 08:56:23 +0000

Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry by R.J. Cutler (courtesy: Apple TV)

Acclaimed producer/director R.J. Cutler (The War Room, American High, Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry) came to MIA to assess the current state of the documentary landscape and to look forward to what the non-fiction filmmaking community has in store, all the time referring back to his ground-breaking body of work. “Neo-verité is the future and the future is now,” he maintained.

R.J. Cutler kicked off the keynote with reference to the first documentary he produced, Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker’s Academy Award-nominated documentary The War Room (1993), about the two (then) unknown figures who ran the strategy of bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign from an office in Little Rock, Arkansas.

“These filmmakers had a singular conviction,” said Cutler of Hegedus and Pennebaker, also citing fellow cinema verité pioneers such as the Maysles brothers, Barbara Kopple and Charlotte Zwerin. “They believed that documentary filmmaking and narrative filmmaking were not all that different. That if narrative films starring Marlon Brando or Elizabeth Taylor could command our imaginations reflecting off a 40 foot screen, so too could documentary films about Jagger or Bob Dylan, or a pair of distant cousins of the former first lady of the United States in a film called Grey Gardens(Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer, 1975) or some coal miners on strike in Harlan County USA (Barbara Kopple, 1975). If Robert Redford could be a movie star, so too could Jimmy Hendrix, and they believed in an approach to documentary filmmaking that, at its foundation, was empathic.”

That said, there was little by way of distribution interest in the film back then, Cutler noted. “There weren’t a lot of distributors who released documentaries in the first place, but those who did – Miramax, Sony Classics, Fine Line – were all certain that audiences had no interest in going to the movie theater to see the story of a campaign that ended a year earlier. ‘Everyone will know the ending,’ one exe said to me. On top of that, the first year of the Clinton presidency, wasn’t a particular triumph. His poll numbers were low and distributors were certain that would mean our box office numbers would be low too.”

Documentaries were having a hard time across the board then, with only one featuring in the previous year’s US top 200 (Brother’s Keeper, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, 1992). But the War Room team weren’t to be put off.

“Someone said, HBO is interested in acquiring The War Room, but Pennebaker wasn’t interested in HBO,” Cutler remembered. “’We made this film to be seen in theaters,’ he said, but if you put it on HBO an adviser told us, hundreds of thousands of people will see it on TV. ‘Perhaps,’ Pennebaker said, ‘but I don’t know any of those people. The people I know will go to the movies. That’s where they’ll see The War Room.”

Eventually the fledgling outfit October Films picked up the film. “[They] agreed to give us a hundred thousand dollars for a film that when all was said and done had probably cost us a million dollars to make,” said Cutler, reflecting on how nobody made much money out of the release. “All of which is to say that 30 years ago, there was no financial ecosystem for documentary films. Every film had to find its own business model. Making a film basically required you to volunteer your time. On The War Room none of us were paid. The Pennebakers deferred the cost of their cameras, the cost of their editing equipment, their rent, and their phone bills.”

But nevertheless the film performed well, confirming “what people like D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus and the other pioneers of the cinema verité movement knew. If you build it, they will come [citing the character of Ray in Field of Dreams, 1989]. The audience for the films existed. When October films put The War Room in theatres, it ran for months. Lines wound around the block and people went again and again, to see the unlikely matinee idols, [strategists] George Stephanopoulos and James Carville capture the presidency against all odds.”

At this point in his keynote Cutler zoomed forward to describe the current documentary landscape as he saw it.

“So here we are in 2021. And indeed documentaries have proven to be just as popular as narrative features. And just as big business feature docs are routinely commanding eight figure deals in the marketplace, filmmakers are enjoying lifelong careers and getting paid for their work. Some of them have even risen to the status of doculebrity. Most importantly, the art form itself is thriving,” he pointed out.

“And audiences are flocking to their work as never before. In a time where truth itself is under siege, our art form, which uses real life as the raw material to tell powerful stories that examine the complexities of truth is engaging with audiences more than ever before. The 2020s are indeed the decade of the doc. It took a changing technological landscape driven by the advent of streaming, the success of Netflix is nonfiction programming and the fierce competition posed by those who seek Netflix’s audience and awards for the vision expounded by the pioneers of the cinema verité movement to fully come to pass.”

So how did this all come to pass?

“To be honest, the rise of Netflix as a transformational driver of non-fiction didn’t come as a total surprise to me because I had some inside information for years when Netflix was still a DVD company that mailed viewers red envelopes of their favorite films,” Cutler said. “I would run into Ted Sarandos (CEO) at film festivals. And every time he would tell me that The War Room was one of the most popular DVDs on his service. ‘Our audience loves documentaries,’ he would say, so it made complete sense to me that when Netflix transformed to a streaming service and then began producing original content that the audience’s passion for nonfiction would continue to form a key element of the streamers success. If it works on Netflix, that meant it would work on Amazon, Hulu, Disney Plus, Apple TV, HBO… It didn’t happen exactly the way the Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker envisioned it, but it happened. Streaming services finally made their dream come true. If you build it, they will come.”

In 1998 Cutler was called to a meeting with a studio executive at Touchdown Studios who explained how network television business was in a crisis, with viewers rejecting network repeats in favour of first-run shows on cable outlets like HBO, such as Sex in the City. “’We need low cost, original programming we can air during the summer,’ he said. ‘Scripted shows are too expensive, do you have any ideas?’”

So Cutler immediately pitched the idea of non-fiction drama series. “I said, we take the same process we used on The War Room, but we fill more storylines. Then we edit in the way scripted drama series are edited. A, B and C storylines, self-contained episodes with continuing relationship dramas that carry us through the season. We could set it in a law firm. We could set it in a hospital. We get set in a high school.”

He was commissioned to make American High, a kind of non-fiction Beverly Hills 90210. Cutler tells how when he was meeting resistance from a high school superintendent who wanted to know what was in it for the schools and the kids, he had a light bulb moment. “She was right. We needed not only to film these kids, but to teach them to film themselves. Our documentary would also be a class that students would take in documentary filmmaking. Our crews would film them cinema verité style, but we would also give them all cameras to film themselves,” he says. “They would answer questions like who am I? And what do I want? They would become documentarians of their own senior years in high school… And when it was over, we donate the cameras and editing equipment to the school for use.”

The series premiered in the summer of 2000. “Critics raved, they said it was dramatic, emotional, revelatory. One said it was as significant a moment in television history as the moon landing,” Cutler says, but it wasn’t a hit, at least not initially. “Fox programmed us against the first season of Big Brother. And we got trounced in the ratings and eventually pulled off the air. But then PBS public broadcasting across the United States came to the rescue, picking up the series and airing it multiple times in succession so that it was on the air for 26 consecutive weeks. And come awards time we received the very first Emmy for non-fiction series. Take that Big Brother. If The War Room had been just like a real movie, American High turned out to be just like a real TV show.”

Then came Military Diaries in 2002, set in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, and Freshmen Diaries (2003) for Showtime, set at the university of Texas in Austin. In 2004, Cutler made The Residents for Discovery, set at the UCLA medical center in Los Angeles. “For the better part of the [early 2000s] we produced TV series that endeavored to push the envelope of cinema verité filmmaking by giving cameras to our subjects,” he says, before underling the gamechanger.

“Then in 2009, the future caught up to our vision. That’s when Apple released the iPhone 3GS, the first iPhone with video recording capabilities. Suddenly we no longer had to give cameras to our subjects.”

“I remember realizing the potential of this when I first saw Asif Kapadia’s brilliant film Amy, which told the tragic life story of Amy Winehouse,” Cutler stresses. “Kapadia was able to tell Winehouse’s entire life story because her entire life story was captured on video. This is the age we now live in and the smartphone makes it so for every one of us.”

Self-shot footage is core to his Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry (2021), which “tells the story, both of a remarkable young artist coming of age and a remarkable young woman coming of age.”

“It’s a film I’m deeply proud of,” Cutler said, acknowledging the work of cinematographer Jenna Rosher and editors Greg Finton and Lindsay Utz. “Also among my collaborators were Billie’s mother Maggie Baird O’Connell who started shooting Billy’s life on an iPhone in 2009, when she was eight, and Billy herself who started shooting her life on an iPhone just around the same time.”

“We are living in a time I would like to call neo-verité which offers remarkable opportunities for documentary filmmaking,” Cutler concluded. “Every subject offers the chance to go more deeply into their personal experience than ever before. And verité crews in combination with subject-shot footage will, I believe, become the new wave. This is the future of intimate, emotional access-based cinematic, verité filmmaking. The principles of the cinema verité movement will still hold. More than ever these films will be just like real movies and both the business and the art of documentary filmmaking are ready to carry that mantle. But the form has evolved. Cinema verité has merged once again with technology, and the artform has been driven forward. Neo-verité is the future and the future is now.”

The post MIA keynote: RJ Cutler – Dispatches from the Golden Age appeared first on Business Doc Europe.

MIA Doc Awards 2021

Nick Cunningham — Sun, 17 Oct 2021 13:23:27 +0000

The awards were handed October 16 during closing ceremony of MIA 2021, with two documentary projects featuring highly.

The Lazio Region once again presented the Lazio Frames Award to a project that best enhanced the Lazio Region and its productive potential via its talent, creative use of location, impact production, potential for international development and use of local resources. The prize went to Marina Cicogna, The Producer by Andrea Bettinetti, produced by Riccardo Biadene for Kama Productions:

Jury Citation: “A young Roman production house that explores artistic expression in various forms. The work retraces the career of a woman like Marina Cicogna who has given voice to great filmmakers thanks to her personal and passionate journey within the universe of production and the history of worldwide cinema. The documentary fixes cinema and its history on screen as a tradition par excellence to be remembered and made known to the younger generations”. The award was presented by the President of Lazio Innova, Nicola Tasco.

For the fourth year National Geographic sponsored the NAT GEO Award for Best Pitch, which underlines the desire of MIA Unscripted Category to pinpoint projects that combine solid artistic and productive qualities with commercial potential. The winning project this year was Massimo Brega’s Odyssey: Behind the Myth, produced by Camilla Tartaglione for Kepach Production.

Jury citation: “An engaging historiographical project deeply in line with the research and exploration values of the National Geographic brand. We believe that applying modern methods of investigation to studies, and telling the story of Odyssey in a popular and at the same time authoritative way, can help to better understand the past and consequently the present, taking into account that as we all know, this story is one of the most important of our history, a true pillar of our civilization. We rewarded the ambition and courage of Massimo, Camilla and their team because the story of Odyssey: Behind the Myth’ has great potential to become a documentary of great impact, capable of narrating the wonderful journey of Ulysses, which is basically the history of man, to a wide-ranging global audience.” Paola Acquaviva, Programming sr. Manager Factual for National Geographic presented the award.

The seventh edition of MIA takes place in Rome from October 13 to 17, 2021 in the city center’s historical venues of Palazzo Barberini, Cinema Moderno, and Cinema Quattro Fontane, and on the MIA Digital platform online.

The post MIA Doc Awards 2021 appeared first on Business Doc Europe.

MIA feature doc pitch: Sunken Memories by Luca Manes

Nick Cunningham — Sat, 16 Oct 2021 16:30:06 +0000

In Luca Manes’ feature doc project Sunken Memories, a concave object being used as a flower pot turns out to be part of a US plane that crashed and sank in the Mediterranean during the crucial 2WW Battle of Anzio in 1944. The discovery of the object’s provenance changes irrevocably the lives of three men who previously had no idea of each other’s existence.

The highly dramatic and emotional film will engage audiences on two fronts. First of all there is the story of the B52 bomber, its role in the conflict and its shooting down. Then there is the story of three men; Valerio who, at the age of 14, picked up the strange concave object only to discover some 40 years later its true significance; Casey, the son of a surviving crewman from the stricken plane, and Philippe, a French expert on the recovery of ship wrecks and who was involved with the team responsible for locating the plane in which French novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was flying when he was shot down over the sea close to Marseille.

Each has a stake in the story that unfolds and which will conclude in a boat on the Mediterranean in Summer 2022 as an attempt will be made to locate and recover the sunken bomber.

“In the end each one of them is actually chasing his own father, hidden in the depths of the sea,” says producer Leonardo Baraldi. “I think the fatal relationship between father and son is in fact the main theme of my film [and] the personal relationship they all have with the event will bring them closer to the viewers and eventually provide them with an emotional and universal message.”

The €331,942 budget doc already has a partner in Italian Rai Doc. At MIA, Baraldi is looking for international co-producers, distributors and broadcasters. The shooting locations are Italy (including Rome and Anzio), Marseille and Seattle. “We have to find the budget abroad,” says Baraldi, adding that other funding options include tax credits in Italy and public funds for production. “What we really want to at least have is a bilateral co-production, or a trilateral one is better for us.”

Baraldi tells how Valerio felt a freedom to investigate the subject of the sunken ship after the death of his father, at which point he threw himself into the project with gusto, making it “his passion.” His research formed the basis of his university master thesis. He was, Baraldi says, “in a way of reconnecting with his past, with his father.”

American Casey became part of the project after Baraldi posted a teaser on a US vets You Tube Channel. “Casey replied and said, ‘hey, I’m the son of one of the guys who was in the bomber – Jonah Armstrong.”

“We realized that he had a very strong relationship with his father,” adds Baraldi, relating how Casey was his dad’s favourite and confidant when telling his war stories. “But then after the death of his father some years ago, his family disbanded and he had problems with his siblings. So he’s looking at this story and the research around the bomber as a way to unite his family and siblings, trying to get back the memory of their father.”

Philippe plays more of a figurative father role in the documentary. This is “probably the last mission of this man, and so he wants this last mission to be a success, to find the bomber and to give this satisfaction and joy both to Casey and to Valerio,” says Baraldi.

With a mooted delivery date of Autumn 2022, the project may have started life as a historical document concerning the downing of a plane during the Battle of Anzio but it soon evolved into something altogether more engaging and universal. “It has completely changed into a feature documentary dealing with very human stories,” Baraldi concludes.

The post MIA feature doc pitch: Sunken Memories by Luca Manes appeared first on Business Doc Europe.

MIA feature doc pitch: Slave Island by Jimmy Hendrickx, Jeremy Kewuan

Nick Cunningham — Sat, 16 Oct 2021 06:33:00 +0000

“Slavery is despicable, yet the objective is to offer a multifaceted view,” write the directors of the Belgian project Slave Island, pitched at MIA. “A film that reflects on the universal mechanisms in which there are rulers and victims, in which religion is both a danger and a solution whilst our own moral judgement is an endless project under construction.”

The personal dilemma in the documentary project is stark. Jeremy Kewuan, co-director of the film and an activist for over a decade on the remote Sumba island in Indonesia, faces the ‘invisible power of ideology and faith’ as he combats traditions of present-day slavery on a remote island. Because what he also realises is that even in his own life, he is stuck in that same pattern of tradition.

The project notes tell how Jeremy’s girlfriend is unable to marry him due to an unfulfilled dowry payment hanging over his head. Trapped by cultural principles on both sides, Jeremy ‘victimizes’ his girlfriend through his activist ideals. To end slavery, structural support is needed, Jeremy realizes. Although he achieves some breakthroughs, the mere size and complexity of the problem require more than his video-activism…

The project started quite by chance, producer Van der Heyden points out. Co-director Jimmy Hendrickx, who lives ‘part-time’ in Jakarta needed a break and decided to go to Sumba island as he heard it was very beautiful, a place he could practice his photography.

“But the moment he arrived on the island, he got into a car with these nuns and Rina, the victim [of slavery, seen in the film trailer] was sitting in the back of the car. So that’s actually the very first footage he shot. He was surprised that this girl was coming back from like slavery in Malaysia,” says Van der Heyden. “He just stumbled into this story. So he reached out to me and said ‘look at this footage, I met these nuns and they’re dealing with local slavery, there’s something going on on this island we should investigate.’ And so as soon as I saw the footage, I was like, okay, clearly this is our next film.”

Together with local activist and co-filmmaker Kewuan, Hendrickx travels the island, following the personal stories of five side characters, including that of Rina, a traumatized teenager whose father sold her to Malaysia when she was just 11. Jeremy interacts with these characters as they suffer “bouts of anger and refusal, but sometimes also consideration and recognition,” while describing the practices of injustice each from their own perspective.

The film notes further stress how what starts as an investigative documentary develops into a psychological portrait of an activist. How so?

“Well, the thing is that it sort of flows organically because the [anti-slavery] activist is Jeremy who’s also a co-director of the film, but he becomes a main character,” explains Van der Heyden. “The two directors become friends and they’re discussing about how do you deal with this situation. [But] Jimmy is a foreigner on this island and it’s hard to tell people to stop doing what they’ve been doing for so long, like how do you preserve a culture or a tradition, but take away the sort of things that we find morally wrong? And [there is] this whole discussion around what is morally right. And are we the ones to tell others how to behave or how to live their lives or how to treat people?”

The €605,000 budget production has Estonia, France and Taiwan on board as partners. Production shooting is planned for 2022 and the ultimate goal is to present the completed doc during the first quarter of 2023.

In terms of Impact, at the Kyoto Peace conference in October 2021 Van der Heyden will propose a fundraiser program partnership with an NGO to focus on mental health care for orphan children and teenagers on the island, and help improve the conditions of the children who have been conditioned to slavery. As the film is intended for international roll-out, audiences will be able to donate to the program through a QR code integration at the end of the film as well as on leaflets.

The post MIA feature doc pitch: Slave Island by Jimmy Hendrickx, Jeremy Kewuan appeared first on Business Doc Europe.

MIA feature doc pitch: Live Till I Die by Åsa Ekman, Gustav Ågerstrand, Anders Teigen and Oscar Hedin

Nick Cunningham — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 19:39:00 +0000

Co-director Åsa Ekman talks to Business Doc Europe about Live Till I Die, set in a Swedish elderly home and telling of the deep and emotional relationship that develops between Monica, an activity coach still grieving for her grandmother, and Ella, a 99-year-old resident who is facing her final days.

“Me and my co-directors, we were just fascinated about the people who are working with these old people who are going to die,” Åsa Ekman says of the reason why she and colleagues Gustav Ågerstrand, Anders Teigen and Oscar Hedin embarked on their vital documentary project set in an elderly care home. “How is it to really connect and take care of people that you know are going to leave you? Also because we’ve had relatives living in care homes, and have had some really depressing experiences with personnel…within this kind of the physical area that was really boring and without life. And we were sort of thinking, I don’t want to die like that. Does it have to be like this?”

The experience at the Kyrkbyn elderly home suggests no, absolutely, not, especially after the arrival of carer/activity coach Monica, who has rejuvenated the residents, turning them into a playful and vigorous gang ready to enjoy spa sessions, boxing lessons and themed dinners, all the time enjoying their new-found passion for life.

But at the heart of the ‘direct cinema’ film is the relationship between Monica and the cheerful but very poorly Ella, whose health deteriorates even more rapidly as she approaches her 100th birthday. Monica is determined that Ella makes the most of her last days, which becomes an emotional marathon for the carer, albeit a rewarding and fulfilling one, and imbued both with humour and love. In the film Ella also begins to say her final farewells to her friends in the home.

“To watch a film that handles death and pain and agony, you really have to also fill it with heaps of love and laughter and joy,” says Ekman of the documentary project which was shot before the pandemic, budgeted at €343,474 and is at final cut stage.

“So it’s a really like an emotional roller coaster with a lot of humor in it. And Monica is really a larger than life character. She would do crazy things with the old people, go to spas or go snow sledging…childish but funny things that make them laugh, but they also cried together. I mean, when they all get to know that Ella has passed away, she’s the one bringing the bad news to all the other old people living there, and they sit there and they cry together. So it’s really about how it is to be able to be a full person in this kind of institution.”

Ekman also explains the effect of such close observation of life and its passing on the filmmakers themselves. “It was painful, but it was also very, very beautiful. When Gustav [Ågerstrand ] was shooting the last moments, you know, he was really addressing her saying, ‘Ella are you sure that we can film now?’ and she’s like, ‘yes, I really want you to film now.’ And then Gustav and the guy with the sound, they sat the whole night holding her hand, taking turns with Monica, sitting by her bed because they didn’t know when Ella was going to pass away. So it was also a very beautiful experience to connect and to be so close.”

The filmmakers underline the necessity for such loving care within a western world undergoing profound demographic change. “Today, the world’s average life expectancy has increased to 72 years. In the industrialized world – such as the Scandinavian countries – studies show an even higher average of 81 years,” they note. “We live longer. But how will old age feel and look like in this new context? In the next ten years there will be a severe shortage of caregivers in Sweden, with a deficit of up to 200,000 qualified personnel. Europe and the western world are in the same situation and many people will be asking the same question we do: who will take care of our parents, and ourselves, when we grow old?”

The film, of course, has even greater resonance post-Covid, a time when care for the elderly within homes was stretched almost to breaking point, and during test screenings Ekman has seen the emotional response that Live Tell I Diegenerates in audiences. “I noticed that people are carrying a big collective grief from the pandemic, how we’ve treated the old people and how they were isolated in that system. When people see this film, it’s kind of therapeutic or kind of trauma-healing for them to see those old people that are touching each other, being very close.”

The post MIA feature doc pitch: Live Till I Die by Åsa Ekman, Gustav Ågerstrand, Anders Teigen and Oscar Hedin appeared first on Business Doc Europe.

MIA docuseries pitch: Radicals by Matteo Ferrarini

Nick Cunningham — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 16:47:37 +0000

Why do Italians love the causes that the country’s Radical Party espouses, but pointedly refuse to vote for the same party during general elections. Matteo Ferrarini’s new doc ponders this question as he assesses the history of political protest, centring on party leader Marco Pannella, considered by some a genius and a prophet, by others an impostor and a buffoon.

“Their battles were the right battles,” explains project producer Matteo Pecorara as he addresses the dilemma at the heart of his film. He points out while most other European countries rarely hold referenda, Italian politics is rife with them, at which point the Radicals assume a temporary potency before inevitably playing the wallflower at the next election.

“Everybody loves their battles for divorce, abortion, euthanasia, legalization of drugs, legalization of prostitution, you know, there are always some battles that you fall in love with, or that you can understand and can support,” the producer agrees. “But on the other hand, they never receive any support in the general election. You know, they never pass two or three per cent. So the question is why.”

“The Radicals were complex and compromising, a hope and a disappointment,” director Matteo Ferrarini further underlines in his notes for the film. “Telling the story of the Radical Party is therefore a fascinating and complex challenge, knowing that [leader] Marco Pannella and the Radicals, at least once, have wrung a gesture of approval from everyone.”

The project is at very early development stage with €15,000 of its €830,000 budget in place. The core idea is to produce a 4 x 50-minute series but the producer stresses he is flexible, and can even produce a 100-minute if that’s what the marketplace demands.

Meanwhile, Pecorara offers his own explanation as to why the Radical Party have thus far failed to gain any political traction and why the voting public have consistently placed their collective X elsewhere. “For right wing or centre voters they always seem like freaks, you know, hippy-like with drugs and so on, while for the left wingers they are just not left wing enough. They seem to be too connected with the bourgeoisie. So in the polarized war of Italian politics they are stuck in the middle.”

At MIA, the producer wants to attract international interest in the form of co-producers and distributors, but his main goal is to secure home support via an Italian broadcast deal. That said, he has an initial, more pressing and not so radical objective. “The first target is to have a good pitch,” he says.

The post MIA docuseries pitch: Radicals by Matteo Ferrarini appeared first on Business Doc Europe.

MIA feature doc pitch: I Don’t Forgive by Simone Spampinato, Elisa Faccioni

Nick Cunningham — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 14:22:33 +0000

In Simone Spampinato and Elisa Faccioni’s rhetorically titled documentary I Don’t Forgive, pitched this week at MIA, Claudia and Irene are bound together by a tragic event. Irene’s son killed Claudia’s husband at a police checkpoint.

After months of loneliness and grief, they decided to meet each other and, against all odds, embarked on a journey of reconciliation. Their bond soon became a profound friendship.

“We already made three feature documentaries with a similar thematic to the documentary that we want to do now,” explains Faccioni. “Because we’re fascinated by stories of people who even in the most tragic situations are able to find beauty in life.”

She gives the example of their 2018 doc Koi, about people in Japan who are trying to keep alive the memory those who died in the tsunami. “We followed the story of a man who dived into the water every day to search for his wife. And even though he knows he won’t ever find her he says that this is the one thing that gives him hope.”

A third component in I Don’t Forgive is son Matteo who is serving time for the murder, and who is undergoing rehabilitation within an association (Amicainoabele) founded by the women primarily to support the families of victims and offenders. They launched the initiative to transform the pain they were experiencing into something positive.

In the film, as the two women embark on a journey to see Matteo in jail, past and present intertwine to create a dynamic narration made of flashbacks, archive footage, interviews, present time footage, and animated sequences to delve deep into the characters emotional journey.

“We want to investigate Matteo to get his persective,” adds Faccioni. “We didn’t want to tell the story only from the women’s point of view, because we think that giving him a voice is equally important. We never take sides.”

The budget is small (€85,000) but costs are kept in check as everything will be done in-house, say the filmmakers. “We have our own equipment and our own film crew and post-production [facilities],” says co-director Spampinato, adding that the pair are looking for partners especially for the ‘distribution phase.’ He adds, however, that they would be interested in partnering with co-producers from France or the UK.

The directors further explain the significance of the title. “Reconciliation – which is very different from forgiveness – is at the heart of the documentary,” they say. “It’s not a unilateral act, but a journey to undertake together, a path in which we learn to empathize with others, regardless of the severity of their actions.”

The post MIA feature doc pitch: I Don’t Forgive by Simone Spampinato, Elisa Faccioni appeared first on Business Doc Europe.

MIA docuseries pitch: Re-Making of Love by Lucio Basadonne and Anna Pollio

Nick Cunningham — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 13:33:52 +0000

In the docuseries: Re-Making of Love, eight young people between the ages of 18 and 24, the self-named Troublemakers seek to create a new form of sex education for presentation to their peers. The process is followed by the husband and wife team of Lucio Basadonne and is one that proves to be as revelatory for them as for the film’s subjects.

“This is a documentary project which was born from my desire to start a conversation about the right of knowledge,” explains Basadonne. “The desire to see taboos for what they really are – layers of cultural and social ignorance. A different type of learning. To go beyond. With no mystery of faith. No confessionals. Where there is beauty, eroticism and love.”

The film shows how the Troublemakers set out to reinvent and openly promote a sex education free of common misconceptions, deciding to call on a number of experts as they began their adventure with a series of experiential workshops, confronting at first hand some of the core issues of our times, such as consent, gender identity, the use of one’s body, prejudice, disability.

In each episode, the group undergoes fundamental change and new light is shed on how to experience sex. The workshops become places of sharing, conflict and revelation. Four of the five series episodes were shot pre-pandemic, and a fifth, which will take this new brand of sex education beyond Italian borders, “from Norway to Romania,” as Basadonne puts it.

Will the project be controversial? “I think it will be really sad if to talk about sex education is considered controversial,” he responds. “But it could be in Italy, because here we’re not used to sex education… So we thought, who is the best that can talk about sex to teenagers – other teenagers. So this is, I think, the most beautiful thing to do. Just create a safe place.”

Basadonne acknowledges that this was a project best directed by a husband/wife team. “I think if you have to talk about sex, you need to have [balance],” he says. “I think I’m more focused on the practical stuff and she’s more on the emotional stuff. So it’s a work that we made together and [in which] we made our point of view, me as a man, and she as a female. And together as a couple, because of course talking about sexuality from every side involved us as a couple, but that’s not in the documentary, as the documentary is focused on the young adults.”

He offers further clarification: “She [Anna] was the one that decided that at one point we need someone that follows them from an emotional perspective…So she was more like a mama for the group and making sure that everything is safe and we are working in a safe place. I was more the wild one to say, okay, let’s make something more strange or let’s film something more extreme. Okay. So I think the movie is a balanced space between our two points of view.”

That said, the contribution of the Troublemakers themselves is just as important. “We gathered everything they made…so the documentary is a melting pot of stuff, some things that we created, some things that they created and some things that came from their phones.”

Re-Making of Love retains an experimental vibe, Basadonne notes. “There’s nothing scripted in the documentary part and we just followed what happened. It’s totally experimental [but] we tried to make a normal narrative through the film editing.”

The approximate budget is €569,059 of which €171,000 is in place. At MIA the filmmakers are looking for co-producers, pre-sales and distributors. Basadonne stresses that they are especially looking for an international online platform to “take it to the world.”

The post MIA docuseries pitch: Re-Making of Love by Lucio Basadonne and Anna Pollio appeared first on Business Doc Europe.

MIA doc pitch: 5 NANOMOLES – The Olympic Dream of a Trans Woman by Elisa Mereghetti

Nick Cunningham — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 17:56:39 +0000

Elisa Mereghetti’s new documentary project follows Valentina Petrillo, a 48-year-old visually-impaired Paralympic athlete whose dream is to compete at the Tokyo 2021 Paralympics as Italy’s first trans athlete in a women’s category. The film is co-produced by the Italian lobby and support organization Gruppo Trans. The director explains more to Business Doc Europe.

Even when competing successfully in the track and field male category, 48-year-old Valentina Petrillo always perceived herself as a woman. In 2019 she started the process of transition and hormone therapy, but never lost her desire to compete. For two years she tried to convince the Italian sports federations that there are international rules regulating transgender people’s participation in sports. Finally she becomes the first Italian transgender athlete competing internationally in the women’s category, but will she able to compete at the Tokyo 2021 Paralympics?

Mereghetti’s film will follow Valentina as she tries to achieve this. It will also feature some of the extreme reactions that Petrillo’s story elicits.

“That is an issue that we’re working on in the film, the media representation of transgender people, and that is, as you know, a sensitive issue,” says the director, who explains how some people refer to the previous names of trans people as ‘dead’ names. “TV programs really dug into her private life, her family. Also the transition is an emotional process…I’m documenting this so I’m learning a lot about this world, but what I can say is that transition is a very emotional process, first of all, and then a physical process. But the media usually digs into the intimate, physical details… She wasn’t really prepared for that. It was a little bit crazy.”

The documentary will be an Italian/Japanese co-production together with Daruma. The budget is €244,450 with €105,500 yet to be sought. Mereghetti confirms that the project is generating a lot of interest at MIA and that she is receiving many requests for meetings. “I think the film will have a better chance to interest the broadcasters mainly for pre buys,” she says. “So it’s going to be interesting to see.”

Mereghetti also underlines how she will be mounting a strong impact campaign for the film.

“We participated in a very interesting workshop, which was led by Doc Society, on the impact distribution essentials. So we are preparing an impact campaign for when the film is going to be ready. We have already a wide network of LGBT organizations in Europe and elsewhere. So we are going to really plan on that because it’s probably going to be the first impact campaign of this kind in Italy. I think we have a very good thing there to work on and to give visibility and to try to make the film meaningful for changes that might happen within the sports regulations and in the attitude of people towards transgender people,” she says.

The 5 nanomoles of the title refers to the acceptable (and hotly disputed) level of testosterone within each litre of blood of trans athletes. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has requires female athletes to have less than five nanomoles of testosterone per litre of blood. Petrillo shows levels consistently well below the two-nanomoles-per-litre mark.

“We are strongly motivated by Valentina’s story for various reasons, among which the fact that it is a, exceptional story and that it has great impact potential,” Mereghetti further stresses in her film notes. “We believe that it can open many doors, in its power of affecting both Italian society and the international sports scene. It’s definitely a story that needs to be told, and we feel privileged to have this opportunity.”

The post MIA doc pitch: 5 NANOMOLES – The Olympic Dream of a Trans Woman by Elisa Mereghetti appeared first on Business Doc Europe.

MIA feature doc pitch: Wanted – Roni Kalderon by Erez Laufer, Hilla Medalia

Nick Cunningham — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 16:39:04 +0000

As one of the golden footballers of his generation Roni Kalderon had the world at his feet, playing for the mighty Ajax and impressing for the Israeli national team. But then he turned to the dark side, morphing into an international drug lord. He served time, and then he disappeared. Erez Laufer and Hilla Medalia tell BDE more about Kalderon’s life of two halves, and how they will document it.

It’s not every 17-year old who gets to share a football pitch with the likes of Johan Cruyff before eyeing up a future in the mould of Pablo Escobar. But that’s what Israeli footballer Roni Kalderon did.

Co-director Laufer says that Kalderon could manipulate a football like no other and defenders came to expect the unexpected. “It seems to be that the way he moved the ball, that’s the way he moved his life,” he says.

Kalderon ended up in Brazil where he was imprisoned for 32 years before planning and executing a successful escape plan. Since then, nobody has seen or heard a thing from him. There are rumours that he was assassinated by rival drug dealers in Brazil and that he lives the life of an Orthodox Jew in New York. He might well be dead, or he may still be alive…

As the directors note, Roni Kalderon’s story “has all the elements a scriptwriter could want: football, love, passion, and crime. Roni is the type of living legend that, even after his disappearance, myths continue to live on long about afterwards.”

“Like every good story it is all about strong characters,” says Laufer. “When you follow his character from childhood, with the background that he came from in this poor neighbourhood of Tel Aviv, where his parents deserted him when he was 12 years old and moved to America…that probably influenced a lot of his choices along the line, such as his relationships with women. He had a wife and two daughters that he deserted, and then he had another woman in America. And then we, of course, we have the Brazilian wife that you can see in [the project].”

“The film also asks this big universal question,” adds co-director Hilla Medalia. “Are choices that we make in life really our own, and if everything is already (pre)decided, if you believe in that from the get-go, can we create another destiny for ourselves? So there are all kinds of bigger universal questions, but I think that the heart of the film is the story itself. It is just such a great story.”

Medalia (who reveals that she too has sporting antecedents, as a competitive triple jumper) adds that the project is also highly entertaining. “It’s fun. It’s what people want, especially now… I feel that sometimes within the doc community, we forget that those films are super important and they’re also important to break outside of the traditional documentary audience. So we are hoping that we’re able to reach a wider audience with this film, and have fun.”

“I think we both have a lot of experience that we can make a film that can be very popular for a wide audience, but still be a festival film,” adds Laufer of the €489,133 budgeted film, of which just over half is secured (including €150,000 from Israeli broadcaster yesDocu).

The pair refuse to be drawn on Kalderon’s current status (ie whether he is alive or dead) or his whereabouts, if indeed they know any of these details. But they do concede that the third act of the film will constitute a search for their elusive subject. Most of the film is in the can, they say, with a final New York trip planned (Covid permitting).

Their plans for MIA go beyond the Kalderon project. “Every market is an opportunity to meet new people, new friends, new connections and new partnerships that lead to something bigger, both for this film and for other films and other projects that we do,” says Medalia. “With respect to this film we are looking for partners, we’re looking for distribution. We want partners in more countries to be able to make the film that we want to make, but also to be able to deliver the film to the audience.”

The post MIA feature doc pitch: Wanted – Roni Kalderon by Erez Laufer, Hilla Medalia appeared first on Business Doc Europe.