Deckert Distribution has taken on international sales responsibilities for Lina’s 5 Seasons of Revolution, which world-premiered in Sundance World Cinema Documentary Competition. The North American rights for the film are represented by Anonymous Content’s newly established sales arm, AC Independent.
Produced by Diana El Jeiroudi, director of the much lauded Republic of Silence (2022), 5 Seasons of Revolution is the debut feature doc by Lina. The logline tells how an aspiring video journalist in her twenties finds herself in a process of self-reckoning. Born in Damascus, Syria, Lina starts to report on the events around her until she is compelled to become, first, a war reporter and, later, the unexpected narrator of her own destiny.
“Lina’s story immediately impressed us. It is an important story of how the warmth of friendship and the conviction of their beliefs can shield a generation of young artists and activists against great brutality and horrors. This is a story that will resonate internationally. With strong producers behind Lina and her film, this is a journey we want to be part of,” Liselot Verbrugge, CEO Deckert Distribution, told Business Doc Europe.
Deckert Distribution is handling sales on two other titles at EFM, Sarvnik Kaur’s Against the Tide (Special Jury Award for Verité Filmmaking at Sundance 2023) and Eastern Front by Vitaly Mansky and Yevhen Titarenko, world-premiering in Berlinale Encounters.
“Against the Tide was a project that we found at Eurodoc a few years ago, and we were really impressed by the incredible determination of the team to get the film to Sundance,” comments Verbrugge on the tale of two friends, both fishermen, whose individual approaches to the job differ radically – one relies on moons and tides, the other deploys hyper modern 21st Century techniques.
“It is yet another great film coming out of India,” Verbrugge adds. “But besides that, it also has some very important themes. As well as environment and class differences and modernism versus tradition, there is also very much the need to keep talking in a world that is polarizing more and more and more. Because it is about two very close friends who are on opposite sides of the spectrum, and throughout the film their discussions and their openness to each other form the [film’s] narrative.”
Eastern Front by Ukrainian Vitaly Mansky and Yevhen Titarenko will world-premiere in Berlinale Encounters. The logline of the film reads how, “defending their homeland from Russian aggression, the protagonists [within the documentary], along with the whole country, went to the Eastern Front. In 2022 all of Ukraine, from the Donbas to the Carpathians, became the Eastern Front for Europe.”
Deckert has handled sales on a number of Mansky titles, including Gorbachev. Heaven (2020) and Putin’s Witnesses (2018). “It’s a very long ongoing collaboration that we have that goes back many, many years,” says Verbrugge.
“We are very happy to bring these [new] titles to the market at the EFM, where we will also introduce our new Sales & Acquisitions Executive Tommaso Priante,” she adds of the company newcomer who has previously worked at the festival/markets of IFFR, Venice and TorinoFilmLab, among others, and who started his career in international distribution working on acquisitions at Coproduction Office, based in Berlin. After a difficult 2022 for the doc sales business, Verbrugge is upbeat about the coming year.
“The main vibe at the moment is that we feel that there’s a more upward wind coming,” she says. “2022 was a very tough year for, I think, all sales companies. For us it was very funny that as soon as 2023 hit, we started to get quite a lot of good news, so we are really getting a much more positive outlook towards the spring.”
