Clare Doyon’s Pénélope, mon amour
The Lightdox IDFA 2021 slate may seems small, but that’s exactly the way company boss Anna Berthollet wants it. What’s more three of those films are in official IDFA selection, including the world-premiere of Serbian Srđan Keča’s Museum of the Revolution in Luminous section. Berthollet explains her rationale to Business Doc Europe.
The 2021 IDFA slate also includes Abdallah Al-Khatib’s highly lauded Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege in Best of Fests “which has basically hit an award at every festival we travelled to,” as well as first-timer Stefan Pavlović’s Looking for Horses, which Berthollet describes as “so fragile and so intimate, a film that we really loved very much,” and which continues its successful festival run at IDFA. Recent sales include France (Dulac Distribution) and Restart for the Balkans.
Berthollet underlines how she was always keen to work with the producers of Srđan Keča’s Serbian/Croatian/CzechMuseum of the Revolution, and was increasingly intrigued as she saw the film evolving before her eyes. “When we saw the last cut we were completely amazed,” she says.
The film tells how, in 1961, a plan was hatched to build a monument to Socialist Yugoslavia in the form of a grand museum. But the building was never finished and the hulk now contains the poor and the dispossessed whose futures were shaped by the subsequent embrace of capitalism. “We thought it’s completely the kind of film we would like to identify ourselves with. It’s a local story, but with an amazing universal appeal and told in a very cinematic way… When we watched the film, we reached an emotional level such that we couldn’t imagine ourselves not being a part of the journey of the film.”
Also at IDFA is the top-selling Witches of the Orient, about the 1960s all-conquering Japanese women’s volleyball team with seemingly supernatural powers on the courts, which has already sold to US, Canada, UK & Ireland, Italy, France and Japan, with an upcoming sale to Taiwan, Berthollet told BDE.
The final film on Berthollet’s IDFA slate is Clare Doyon’s FIDMarseille double prize-winning Pénélope, mon amour, for which the director followed her daughter with autism for 18 years. Berthollet has “very high” hopes for the film’s prospects and is confident of selection at a prominent international film festival in early 2022.
Berthollet adds how her company works as much as a “service supplier for producers” as a regular sales company. “That’s why our slate is small but qualitative,” she says. “It’s just to have the time and the availability to be present for our filmmakers. It’s a way for us to give back power to producers and directors, to have a control over the distribution of their film. And this is so, so much appreciated [in return].”
As reported earlier this month in BDE, Tull Stories has acquired UK and Irish rights, including theatrical, for the Sweden-Belgium-Norway-Chile-UK co-production Arica, directed by Swedish directors Lars Edman and William Johansson Kalén. Other sales include Dalton Distribution: Benelux and Folkets Bio in Scandinavia.
The multi award-winning documentary follows the struggle of people in the Chilean town of Arica as they fight for justice against Boliden, a multinational Swedish company, who exported 20,000 tonnes of highly toxic mining waste there in the 1980s.
