Irish outfit Silver Mountain Distribution is embracing documentary in earnest. The company, which is the sales and marketing arm of Carey Fitzgerald’s Silver Mountain Productions, is at the European Film Market in Berlin with three new feature docs on its slate.
The slate includes Nick Kelly’s The Song Cycle, winner of Best Independent Film at the Galway Film Fleadh, and which has just screened at the Santa Barbara Festival. The film follows director Kelly as he cycles from his home in Dublin to perform with his musical partner Seán Millar at the Glastonbury Festival.
Also being presented in Berlin is Garo Berberian’s music doc Married to the Music, profiling the first lady of British House Music, DJ Sam Divine. Meanwhile, Silver Mountain is introducing buyers at the EFM to new Indian bodybuilding doc, Tight – The World of Indian Bodybuilding.
“We only work on creative documentaries. One of our aims is also to work on stories of the under-represented,” Fitzgerald explains why Silver Mountain is muscling into the doc sales arena.
All rights are available on all of the films. “Berlin is a very good market for documentary because of the buyers who come there,” Fitzgerald says.
This isn’t the first time that Silver Mountain has represented docs. The company also handled sales on La Sagrada Familia, the documentary road movie about a family’s epic journey across South America.
Further back in time, at her previous company High Point, Fitzgerald had spectacular success with Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff, exploring the 90-year career of legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff. “That literally sold everywhere in the world,” the Silver Mountain boss remembers. Another High Point doc that did brisk business was Katrine Boorman’s Me and My Dad, about her illustrious filmmaker father, John Boorman.
The difference now is that docs are a core part of the slate and are not just being handled in a piecemeal fashion.
Post-pandemic, many documentary sales specialists have recently been bemoaning the difficulty of getting non-fiction features into cinemas. Fitzgerald, though, is confident this can still be achieved.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time,” the seasoned sales exec reflects. “I find everything is a bit cyclical. Theatrical is difficult for any film whether it is a documentary or not. But I think you have to be more creative and try to work in different ways…Theatrical documentaries were really invented, I think, by Michael Moore [director of Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11]. He invented them because there was nowhere to go, no good TV [slots] in the States at this time.”
Fitzgerald cautions, though, that just because a doc lasts 90 minutes, that doesn’t mean it is theatrical. Only a select few are really worthy of being shown on the big screen. “It’s really the exceptional documentary, the occasional documentary that gets a theatrical release. It’s about being as creative as you possibly can be and pulling on the strengths of what you actually have. Also, festivals and prizes really help. Often, the festival release is the theatrical release for these documentaries. Especially in the States, they will do a festival tour.”
Some innovative marketing ruses are being thought up to draw attention to the new titles. Nick Kelly will be cycling to London in time for St Patrick’s Day and will perform a set in Trafalgar Square (accompanied by clips of the movie). There is already strong UK and Irish interest in the film.
Fitzgerald and her team are contemplating staging a joint screening/musical event for Tight that will foreground the atmospheric musical score of the movie. This was composed by Sarathy Korwar, the US-born, Indian-raised, London-based drummer, percussionist, composer and bandleader.
Married to the Music ought likewise to lend itself to event releasing and clever marketing. “It’s not just a female DJ going round all these festivals. It is really about the underbelly of the music industry. But, yes, you could easily show it at a festival.”
Alongside its sales activities, Silver Mountain remains “very active production-wise.” Its new drama, The Guinness Girl, based on the true story of Maria McAteer, the first black world champion Irish dancer, received development funding from Screen Ireland.
Fitzgerald suggests that the company will look in future to produce docs as well as to sell them. She points out that Silver Mountain’s Creative Director, Dominique Murphy-de Neef is a documentary maker as well as a sales and production exec – and is passionate about docs.
The Silver Mountain boss also believes that docs have long tails. Films like La Sagrada Familia continue to sell and remain on the slate for years after their original production.
Fitzgerald doesn’t just sell and produce. She now has another sideline. Silver Mountain runs bespoke workshops, mentoring and training programmes.
“How that came about was that I got a bit frustrated that with a lot of these film courses up and down the country, you get taught the craft of filmmaking but not the business of how it works. Whether you want to go into business or not, you still need to know how it works and how to get your money back.”
Her goal is to ensure that students are “job ready” by the time they finish their training.
Fitzgerald is also a mentor for Minding Creative Minds in Ireland. One of the filmmakers she is mentoring is Johnny Sucura, a Croatian Sound Engineer/Documentary Producer based in Dublin.
The tireless Silver Mountain boss is also Chair of Irish Film and TV UK – and is involved in various festivals among them the Irish Film Festival, London which opened last November with a documentary, Aoife Kelleher’s Mrs Robinson (about the first female President of Ireland. For Fitzgerald, that was yet more evidence that docs are more prominent than ever before and that audiences have learned to cherish them.
