One film which is being heavily tipped for awards this year is Todd Field’s Tar in which Cate Blanchett gives a towering performance as a female orchestra conductor whose brilliant career threatens to unravel. On its current slate, US outfit Cargo Releasing has a documentary whose subject bears more than a passing resemblance to the conductor Blanchett plays in Tar.
The Conductor, directed by Bernadette Wegenstein, features the New York-born “maestra” Marin Alsop. As a kid, Alsop was inspired by seeing conductor/musician Leonard Bernstein perform and became determined to make a career in the classical music world. It’s a world dominated by men. Outsiders don’t generally break in. Alsop, though, has now become one of the world’s leading conductors.
“We were instantly intrigued by the story,” Cargo President David Piperni says of the film (which premiered in Tribeca last year). “We thought Marin was just terrific. She came off great on screen, spoke very eloquently about her craft and the challenges she has had to endure in what has traditionally been a very male dominated space. We loved Bernadette’s take on that and how she was using the music that Marin was performing as a character in the film. All the pieces really came together very nicely and showed an artist at the top of her craft.”
Speaking on the eve of IDFA, Piperni said he was yet to see Tar. “I have had discussions with Bernadette and Marin about it,” he says. “It is clear that the Tar film does borrow heavily from Marin’s biography. I think Cate Blanchett’s conductor is a gay, female conductor playing lots of Mahler – [and] Mahler plays a significant role in Bernadette’s film. She [Blanchett’s character] is part of an organisation that tries to elevate young musicians which Marin did as well.”
The similarities between the doc and the fiction film are bound to pique viewers’ curiosity. Fans of the Blanchett movie who want to see what a female conductor’s life is really like will search out Wegenstein’s film as well.
Cargo is expecting a typically hectic IDFA this week. ‘When we attend, we do multiple things. We are catching up with buyers, we are meeting with filmmakers, we are going to the Forum pitches, we are meeting with festival programmers. It really is one stop shopping for many things we are involved in,” the Cargo President reflects on what he describes as “the biggest documentary festival in the world.”
In recent years, Cargo has made “a hard pivot” to boarding projects at an earlier stage. At any one time, the company will have 8-10 projects it is working on, at different stages of production.
Cargo operates not only as a sales agent, representing completed films but also exec-produces projects and distributes selected titles in the US and Canadian market (and occasionally in the UK too).
Next month, Cargo’s title Hidden Letters, directed by Violet Du Feng and Qing Zhao, will be released at London’s Bertha Dochouse. This looks at the secret language of Nushu, developed by Chinese women so they could write their own poems or songs in a period when they were forbidden from expressing themselves. The film premiered at Tribeca and was also shown at the BFI London Film Festival. “It explores ideas which are still as relevant today as in the past – this idea that the patriarchy is still alive and thriving in modern China,” Piperni says of the film.
The US release of Hidden Letters will also be in December and the doc is being positioned as an awards contender. The Norwegian-Chinese co-production was made through Fish + Bear Pictures and Ten Thousand Images. It has broadcaster backing from Independent Television Service (ITVS), and Arte/ZDF, and also has support from Bird Street Productions, Chicken and Egg Pictures, EST Media, and Nika Media.
Newer projects on the Cargo slate include The Grizzlie Truth, directed by Kathleen S Jayme. “It explores the deep roots of sports fandom,” Piperni says of the film, a recent premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival. It’s about a Canadian woman’s attempts to “win back” her beloved NBA hometown team, The Vancouver Grizzlies, the so-called “bad luck bears,” after they relocated to Memphis in murky circumstances over 20 years ago. “If you’re any kind of sports fan, the film will resonate.”
Also on the sports front, Cargo is handling Black And White Stripes: The Juventus Story, about the legendary Italian football team from Turin, and Danish director Mads Hedegaard’s crowd pleasing debut feature documentary Cannon Arm And The Arcade Quest, about arcade game genius Kim Cannon Arm.
Cargo docs run the gamut from art to crime to sport, from environmental to history, from current affairs to wellness.
Ask Piperni about the varied slate of projects and he responds that this is a source of richness. “We see the non-fiction space as being a very dynamic space. There are many different ways of telling a story. We are always looking for that unique voice, something that surprises us in the storytelling,” Piperni. “It then comes down to [the] team really responding to it [the doc] and falling in love with it. And joined to that is our confidence is really being able to monetise the film in the marketplace!”
