Wouter Jansen’s Vienna-based Square Eyes is at IDFA this year with half a dozen films in official selection, including both features and shorts.
The company’s Amsterdam haul is spearheaded by Georgian international competition entry, The Kartli Kingdom, from directors Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebrel which receives its world premiere in International Competition this weekend.
Jansen first came across the project at the DOK Leipzig co-production market back in 2022.
“Of course, I was already familiar with the production company, Sakdoc, which had also done Taming the Garden,” he notes of Salomé Jashi’s award winning doc about a wealthy Georgian oligarch collecting ancient trees for his private estate.
The Square Eyes founder was immediately intrigued by ‘Kartli,’ as it was then called, a closely observed study of refugee families living in a vast Soviet-era sanatorium in Tbilisi. He kept tabs on the project as the years passed, meeting the filmmakers again when he was a tutor at the EAVE Change workshop.
“Then, shortly before they got the news from IDFA, they approached me with the cut,” Jansen remembers. It was then a very “quick decision” to come on board. The film, he says, was everything that he hoped it would be.
With the feature docs it sells, Square Eyes tends to take sales rights at a relatively late stage. These are films that, as Jansen puts it, “find their form in the editing process…with most of our projects, we get on board when there is a cut.”
All territories are currently available on The Kartli Kingdom. Like almost all Square Eyes project, it is an auteur-driven work, not a piece of journalistic reportage that can be cut into a 52-minute TV version.
Other Square Eyes features at IDFA this year also include the Ukrainian Militantropos, from directors Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova and Simon Mozgovyi, which premiered in Cannes. Screening in Best of Fests, this is a deeply layered film about how every part of Ukrainian life has been affected since the full-scale invasion.
Militantropos is the first part of a trilogy being made through production outfit Tabor – and Square Eyes is aboard for all of the films.
“We worked together with Alina Gorlova in 2021 on This Rain Will Never Stop and so when they were developing this project, I said quite early on that I trust the company and the directors. I just stepped in…” Jansen explains the huge level of trust he has in the filmmakers.
The second film in the trilogy is currently being edited and should be ready by the summer. “I definitely think that if the films have their own angles on the conflict, there is space for them,” Jansen says of the Tabor trilogy, even if buyers have recently been wary about acquiring more Ukrainian war docs.
Also on the feature front in IDFA, Square Eyes is handling Maureen Fazendeiro’s Portuguese doc The Seasons which receives its Dutch premiere in Paradocs. This one came to Square Eyes through FIDMarseille which Jansen describes as “one of my favourite markets because it is really for auteur films.”
Jansen has strong links within the world of short films, and is a former head of film programming at the Oscar-qualifying Go Short Film Festival. While Square Eyes focuses “mainly on the festival potential…there is also a talent development element.”
Among Square Eyes shorts in IDFA is Randa Maroufi’s L’Mina, about miners in north-eastern Morocco who are still working although the pits where they are digging were officially closed many years ago. Jansen has known the director since seeing her graduation film at film school almost a decade ago, and has stayed in touch with her ever since. L’Minascreens in Amsterdam having already won the Leitz Cine Discovery Prize at Cannes Semaine de la Critique in May.
Another short on the Square Eyes IDFA slate, also screening in Best of Fests, is Chilean director José Jiménez’s Dead Tongue, exploring the dark and sinister past of Íngrid Olderöck, the most powerful figure in Chile’s secret service during the Pinochet era, and notorious for the way she used specially trained dogs for torture purposes. Jansen met the filmmaker at the Berlinale where Jiménez was pitching a feature doc which he is co-directing on a similar theme.
Working on shorts gives Square Eyes the chance to strike up relationships which might pay dividends when their directors transition to features. The company generally looks to represent six or seven features a year – and deliberately keeps its slate small in order to “give each film the proper attention.”
Square Eyes is among several sales agents now based in Vienna. Other companies include Autlook, and Martina Droandi’s new outfit, Odd Slice. “I think I have such a specific line-up that I already feel that there isn’t much competition for the type of films that I am gravitating toward,” Jansen dismisses the idea that they’re fighting over the same work.
One company that does have a similar footprint is Maria Vera’s Lisbon-based Kino Rebelde. Nonetheless, Jansen says there’s a collegial atmosphere between the different outfits. They often exchange information and try to help each other where they can.
The company handles fiction as well as documentary. He acknowledges that the theatrical market for documentary is currently difficult. Nonetheless, major festival programmers will often veer towards the company’s titles.
Square Eyes also has certain key distributors with whom it has struck up close relationships, among them Grasshopper in the US and No Comboio in Portugal, both of whom acquired Czech director Klára Tasovská’s I’m Not Everything I Want To Be which was at IDFA last year and which is the Czech Republic’s Oscar entry this year for Best International feature film.
IDFA may be screening several of his films this year but the Square Eyes boss acknowledges that Amsterdam isn’t necessarily where he comes first to make new pick-ups. Nonetheless, he also points out that the festival is an excellent platform for the company’s docs. “There is always a clear difference between the market side and the festival side. What is happening in the Forum is quite different from what is happening in the programming.”
