In each of the past three years, Anna Berthollet of Lightdox has acquired a great new doc at Visions du Réel which was then selected for Cannes ACID. Over the same period her company Lightdox has been one of Cannes Docs’ featured exhibitors. Which makes it all the more surprising that Berthollet will be visiting the world’s leading film festival for the first time in 2022.
“I was supposed to go the previous years before COVID but always something happened, like something personal or something else that prevented me from going,” Berthollet tells BDE. “So I’m really going for the first time in 2022.”
But her Cannes credentials are nevertheless very sound. In 2020, Berthollet represented the ACID title Il Mio Corpo by Michele Pennetta for world sales. In 2021, she sold the ACID pick Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege by Abdallah Al-Khatib. The film is nominated this year in the Best Documentary category, Critics’ Awards for Arab Films.
The ACID vibe continues in 2022 in the form of Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s much-lauded How to Save a Dead Friend, which world-premiered at Visions du Réel. Berthollet is also selling Céline Pernet’s Garçonnières which screens at the Cannes Marché.
In How to Save a Dead Friend, Marusya and Kimi are inseparable lovers coming of age just as Russia’s authoritarian dreams take hold. Turning Marusya’s camera on themselves, the two capture the euphoric anxiety of their youth, burning the candle at both ends – but as one light burns brighter, the other may be extinguished forever.
“I really adored those questions of how do you survive in a hopeless situation?” says Berthollet of the film. “What kind of resources can you really find deep in yourself in order to survive an overall deeply depressing and destroying environment. For me, it’s really a film about love and hope… a tool of finding a way to get out somehow from the situation…emotionally, it’s a really striking film.”
In Garçonnières, which also world-premiered at Visions du Réel, filmmaker and anthropologist Céline Pernet questions her relationship with the men of her generation. Responding to an advert, men aged 30 to 45 years old answer her questions, in a quest as personal as it is societal. The film casts an amused and caring eye, reflecting an urgent need to discuss current models of masculinity.
“I love Garçonnières because it’s one of the few really positive, optimistic, funny, tender and really audience-friendly films that I saw in this spring season,” comments Berthollet. “It’s very uplifting and also deals with a question that for me was really time to speak about, which is masculinity and how men feel after the #MeToo movement.”
Other films on the Lightdox slate include No Place for You in Our Town by Nikolay Stefanov, whose camera “peeks underneath the hooligans’ tough and rough appearance and explores their lives — and the lives of millions like them across the globe — with openness and genuine human curiosity.” The film world-premiered in CPH:DOX – Next:Wave Competition 2022.
Lucie Králová’s Kapr Code, which world-premiered at Visions du Réel, is a documentary opera featuring the contradictory life of progressive composer and prominent communist Jan Kapr (1914-88). The film is nominated for the Doc Alliance Award 2022.
Lightdox may take on a small number of films per year, no more than half a dozen, but there is considerable method to this decision. “That’s exactly the strategy and I don’t think it’s going to change because it’s, working so far,” Berthollet says. “Our most precious asset is this very clear editorial line and the choices that we are making. It’s a balance of both having a few films, but pushing them further and really working profoundly with them.”
“Buyers can clearly identify what they can expect from us and the films that we are going to offer. At the same time, producers very clearly understand what is our [level of] engagement.”
Berthollet will be looking to gauge the market in her meetings with buyers at Cannes 2022. “We are handling theatrical docs, and even though documentaries drown within [all] the fiction at Cannes, still my theatrical buyers are going to be there and it’ll be very important for me to take the temperature of how the theatrical markets are going in each territory,” she says.
“And of course we are also going to meet producers and assess projects, and try to figure out what the second part of the 2022 line-up is going to look like.”
