London-based sales outfit Dogwoof has taken on world sales rights to two new titles, both by female directors and both world premieres at IDFA: Sophie Dros’ King Of The Cruise (in IDFA’s competition for Dutch documentary) and Laura Herrero Garvin’s La Mami (in Feature-length Competition, pictured above).
“We always like to have one or two news films in IDFA. The two we have are new filmmakers, both are women,” Dogwoof head of sales Ana Vicente commented.
These films have been added to an already bulging Dogwoof slate which includes sports films (Daniel Gordon’s The Australian Dream), arts docs (Cunningham), fashion films (Martin Margiela: In His Own Words) and political documentaries (Laura Greenfield’s doc The Kingmaker, about Imelda Marcos).
In response to a changing marketplace, Dogwoof is increasingly targeting the North American market. Theatrical buyers in the territory are becoming more open to acquiring documentary, having seen the box office numbers posted by such Dogwoof titles as Free Solo and Three Identical Strangers, or by women’s yachting movie Maiden, which tells the incredible, against-all-odds story of sailor Tracy Edwards, released by Sony Pictures Classics earlier this year, grossing around $3.5 million.
Meanwhile, the company is set to take advantage of opportunities presented by the onrush of new content-hungry streaming companies (among them Apple, Disney and Hulu) looking for docs.
Dogwoof has been licensing both catalogue titles and new films to Netflix for several years. (One of its first sales to the streamer was 2013’s Blackfish). However, several other platforms are now buying as well.
“What were are noticing is that many of these new players want to come on board earlier, before the film is finished,” Vicente said.
Underlining the opportunities in the territory, one recent Dogwoof title, Mark Cousins’ Women Make Film, went to four separate buyers in North America alone: Cohen Media for theatrical and home entertainment, TCM for pay-TV, Criterion for SVOD and Kanopy for the educational market.
At the AFM in Santa Monica earlier this month, the company screened footage of Steve McCurry, its new feature documentary about the celebrated US photographer which is still in production.
“We wanted to start the process of presenting it to North American buyers not with the aim of closing a deal then but with the aim of introducing the project to theatrical distributors,” Vicente explained of the strategy. The company also began sales on The Lost Leonardo, the new feature documentary from Andreas Koefoed, which explores the very murky history of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi.
“That’s one where Dogwoof has come on board to close the finance. We just find it really fascinating,” Vicente said of the project which the company picked up at CPH: Dox earlier this year.
Dogwoof also targets titles at the IDFA Forum. It was there that it acquired Alla Kovgan’s ballet doc Cunningham (about legendary US choreographer Merce Cunningham) at an early stage. The company sold the film to Magnolia for the US earlier this year.
