Anaïs Clanet, head of sales and acquisitions at French outfit Reservoir Docs, is in ebullient mood on the eve of the European Film Market (in its first physical edition since 2020). “All our buyers are coming back. Whether it is from America or Asia, everybody is back. It feels like there is an energy and a willingness to meet up and discuss what they can buy for next year,” she tells Business Doc Europe.
Clanet comes into the Berlin EFM after strong recent business on its James Bond documentary The Other Fellow. Written and directed by Matthew Bauer, this is a light hearted film not about 007 but, as its logline puts it, profiling “men, real men, named James Bond.” It recently sold to Bulldog in the UK and will be released in North America by Gravitas Ventures this week.
“It’s a bestseller for us,” Clanet says of how the Bond movie has shaken and stirred acquisition execs all over the world. “This film has all the ingredients the buyers need at the moment. It is English language, it is fun. It is also original and it says something different about one of the most popular characters in the world.” The Other Fellow is (Clanet suggests) the perfect title for a post-pandemic audience.
“We are going to Berlin with a lightness in our step, much more than we have had for the last two years,” Clanet adds of how Reservoir Docs is bouncing back after the pandemic. She doesn’t disguise the toll Covid has taken on the doc sector. “It has been a tough two years,” she says. European companies may have befitted from subsidies and thereby managed to stay afloat. “But let’s be honest, none of our documentaries came out theatrically. The buyers were not interested any more. They had to take a look at what they were doing and wait…”
Now, though, the waiting game is over. Distributors are again ready to take theatrical rights. The sellers have been listening carefully, adjusting their slates to provide these distributors with what they want and need.
Streamers may not be licensing docs from indie sellers but distributors are back in the game. Asia is still weak (“they used to be the biggest players at buying art and culture from us but all of a sudden they disappeared”) but Europe has rebounded.
Reservoir Docs’ Berlin line-up includes a Panorama title, Thierno Souleymane Diallo’s The Cemetery Of Cinema. This tells the story behind Mamadou Touré’s 1953 feature Mouraman, historic as the first title ever directed by a Black French speaking director. It should have had its niche in cinema history. Instead, it has disappeared. No-one can find a print. The film asks where it has gone and why a movie of such cultural importance has been allowed to vanish from sight.
“It is a tale that people need to hear,” Clanet says of the film which is structured like a road movie and also have a flavour of Don Quixote.
Clanet acknowledges that there has been slight shift in the docs she is selling. Now, she suggests, is not the time for “difficult” films. “We are trying to have documentaries that are meaningful but a bit more factual than we used to have,” she elaborates. The “classical arts and culture” docs that the company used to specialise in are a tough proposition in the current marketplace.
Buyers, it seems, want more fizz and fun than in the past.
Natacha Giler ’s new film Venus De Milo – Disarming Beauty, about one of the best loved sculptures in the Louvre and also on the EFM slate, has references to Beyoncé and Brigitte Bardot. It explores the impact the sculpture has had on feminism. As Clanet points out, it is “entertaining,” and therefore high on the fizz/fun factor.
Originally made for ARTE and made through YUZU Productions, it will be sold theatrically in the international marketplace by Reservoir Docs.
Reservoir Docs is also selling Sophia and Georgia Scott’s Marwan – Tomorrow’s Freedom, about Palestinian politician and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Marwan Barghouti, who could be leading his country but is instead languishing in an Israeli jail. “It touched me greatly,” Clanet says of the project which is attracting strong TV interest.
Another new title is Jamie Kastner’s Nobody Wants To Talk About Jakob Applebaum, profiling the whistleblowing journalist and hacker once described by Rolling Stone as “the most dangerous man in cyberspace.”
Clanet also has another film from Kastner, Charlotte’s Castle, about activists fighting to protect their homes from ruthless property developers.
Meanwhile, Pascal Garnier’s A Hip Hop Minute, which features LL Cool J and Rum DMC and tells the story of 80s hip-hop, is nearing completion and is set for summer release.
Also likely to premiere later in the year is Tamara Erde’s After The Evil, which profiles the Austrian-British journalist Gitta Sereny, celebrated for her probing studies of characters considered to be “evil.” Her subjects included Hitler’s architect Albert Speer; Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka death camp; and Mary Bell, a woman convicted of killing two children when still a child herself.
“She [Sereny] is basically saying that if we don’t look at evil, then we will never be able to cure it,” Clanet notes of the award-winning journalist who died a decade ago in 2012.
Reservoir Docs has done strong business over the last year on José Luis López-Linares’ Goya, Carriere And The Ghost Of Bunuel. Epicentre in France oversaw more than 50,000 admissions on the title, evidence that ambitious art docs can still work in the theatrical marketplace. A few territories remain to sell, among them Asia, and Clanet will be pursuing these in Berlin. In the long run, Clanet believes buyers will again acquire more serious, engaged, heavyweight docs for cinema release.
“But they’re not picking up anything that is not coming out of Berlin, Sundance or Cannes. Those are the only ones they are interested in,” Clanet says. “The relevance of having a good, strong [festival] premiere is more important now than ever.”
