Multi award-winning Flemish production house Storyhouse doesn’t just make docs – producer Maarten Schmidt also produces true story fiction and youth content – but some of the documentaries the company has produced or co-produced over the years have been genuine crackers.
Such as the 2014 co-production Ne me quitte pas, which was selected for International Feature-length Competition at the IDFA 2013 before awarded (among other gongs) Best Editing at Tribeca Film Festival 2014, Best film at Docaviv, and selected as a Special Presentation at Hotdocs 2014, winning the Filmmaker to Filmmaker Award.
The following year he produced the mesmerising Our City, a love letter to Brussels written and directed by Maria Tarantino, which premiered at IDFA 2014 and was awarded the Jury Prize at FIFF 2015 (Belgium). More recently he was awarded the Flemish Industry award for Best Documentary for the investigative doc Breathless, and has produced a raft of docs since then.
“I love the way we make documentaries. It’s very flexible in the production process, that’s something that always attracted me to documentaries,” Schmidt explains. “And also that aspect of getting to know people in real life…you get to know amazing stories and you want to bring those to the audience as [creatively] as possible.”
“I work a lot with editors who also work on fiction projects, and the really great documentary projects they like a lot, because they have more flexibility to impact the storytelling and to work with the directors on shaping the film,” he continues. “But at the same time the way we work on documentaries is very much to put a lot of preparation and research into them before we start shooting.”
Schmidt says that Belgium is a strong partner for minority documentary co-productions, having picked up two projects at IDFA Forum 2020 which he is currently co-producing, Sweeties by Natalie Bruijns and Anneke De Lind van Wijngaarden (Netherlands), and Things We Said Today by Andrei Ujica (Romania/France).
He concedes however that the flow of co-pro monies doesn’t always work in reverse as the local streamers and broadcasters have a tendency to put their funds into true crime documentary production and “eccentric stories” that rely too heavily on an overly fictionalized mode of storytelling, all to the detriment of strong, author-led feature docs. Not that plot twists are to be outlawed, but he argues that the ones in a film like Ne me quitte pas (Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koevorden) are organic, whereas these days the in-your-face requirements of the streamers and broadcasters are stretching the credibility of the stories they are looking to screen.
“There are techniques for us to guide storytelling in the film, but it should remain balanced. You shouldn’t push it too far. It shouldn’t undermine the credibility of the film as in these times of misinformation and fake news, documentary storytellers put a lot of time and effort into bringing well-researched, balanced and truthful stories to the audiences,” the Storyhouse producer underlines.
The projects that Schmidt will present during Producers on the Move are diverse in subject and form.
In Under the Surface, Anne, born premature, has Asperger’s and so escapes her sensitivity to noise by immersing herself under water. She is slowly constructing her life together with her boyfriend, but reality hits hard when she finds out that her condition is caused by the drug DES, a medicine prescribed to her grand-mother in the 60s. “It’s about a woman who wants to live as a mermaid underwater, but she has to learn to live independently above the surface,” says Schmidt. It is, he adds, a character-driven film that is reminiscent of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, describing it as “a tale of an impossible love made possible by the imagination and persistence of the female protagonist.”
The Last Frontier by Quentin Noirfalisse and Friedrich Moser examines the new race towards the discovery of new minerals “at the bottom of the ocean and in outer space,” explains Schmidt. “That’s a big topic, investigative documentary that we are pushing right now, but very much with a clear [ecological] message.”
Exit Tales is an animated short series for youth audiences that fuses imagination and reality. It is based on the stories of six children fleeing their homes in Venezuela, Afghanistan, Syria, Guatemala, Ukraine and South Sudan in order to survive. Through voice-recorded interviews, we learn the story of six child refugees, but instead of re-telling events, we focus on their imaginative way of depicting the migrant journey. “These experiences can be quite heavy sometimes. If we tackle it through their imagination, then it becomes something much more colourful and maybe more easy to digest, but it also broadens the interest for the audience a lot.”
Schmidt assesses the days to come as one of EFP’s chosen producers. “Normally I push the directors into the spotlight. But I will use the opportunity to promote my projects and my company,” he says. “Establishing new connections and relationships, also to launch myself into fiction animation production, I think it’s the right place to be. And [there is] Flanders Image, which promotes me. So it’s amazing. Then I’m gonna see a few films and have fun.”
