The Rome-based 5-day MIA market opens its doors October 9, promising a smorgasbord of doc and factual activities.
During the Pitching Forum & Co-Production Market 18 documentary and factual projects from 8 countries wil be presented. Nine of the projects are from Italy and a further four are Italy-themed. The majority of projects will be market debutants.
“I really have the feeling that in the past, when you talk about Italian documentaries, people associated to the notion of stories about crime [or] the Mafia or sad, depressing stories, and let’s say that idea was very bleak,” Spagnoli says of the recent evolution in Italian output that he has observed. “Nowadays, and this is what I always stress, Italian documentaries are more different and more various. You have documentary as a ‘macro genre,’ and then we have many sub genres such as politics, such as current affairs, entertainment, cinema, music.”
Italian selections include the Italian-French one-off TV co-production Her Name Is Battle, a portrait of the recently deceased Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia. The docu-series Achille Lauro – The Terror, directed and produced by Raffaele Brunetti, takes us back to the infamous hijacking of the doomed cruise ship in 1985. Meanwhile Enrico Maisto’s appropriately titled Mia tells the story of the integration of a family with a charismatic female figure at its centre. Jesus Garcés Lambert’s feature doc Ocean Drive tells the intriguing story of a father and his children who, due to a terminal illness, decide to realise their dream of crossing the ocean in two floating cars. And yes, there is one Mafia-themed project, I Didn’t Kill Borsellino, a docuseries directed by Simone Manetti, produced by David Perluigi and Luca Motta.
The same diversity applies to the 90-minute Italians Doc It Better showcase during which market attendees can get acquainted with 17 recent Italian documentary works. Selections include Caroline von der Tann’s The Gospel According to Ciretta, an intimate portrait of the Neapolitan underbelly, Kasia Smutniak’s recent TIFF selection Walls, and Edoardo Anselmi’s Banksy and the Stolen Girl, about the theft of the Bataclan door on which Banksy had stenciled his ’Sad Girl’ mural.
Spagnoli is determined to give each film in the programme maximum of exposure to as wide a professional audience as possible. “I’m very meticulous and don’t want anything to be taken for granted,” he underlines. “Of course it’s not all the Italian productions, but still there are hints of what’s trending, or stories that people can relate to.”
Spagnoli further identifies “a European kind of filmmaking,” in these recent works, “in the sense that they are identifying shared values, shared stories.”
Talks and panels
Co-production is on the agenda as MIA invites top execs from French, German and Italian production houses and broadcasters to identify common ground for collaboration as well as highlight recent successes. Fabrizio Zappi, Director of Rai Documentari and Antonio Grigolini, Head of Documentaries at France Télévision will go head to head on October 12, while on October 13 Christian Beetz of gebrueder beetz FILMPRODUKTION and Christiane Hinz, Head of Documentary at ADR/WDR will engage with Francesco Virga, President of Doc/it and (once again) Fabrizio Zappi, Director of Rai Documentari.
October 10 sees Sara Bernstein, president of Imagine Documentaries, in conversation with MIA director Gaia Tridente on how to lead the development and production of premium documentary feature films and series.
The 13 October panel ‘Theatrical documentaries at the Box Office: new films for new audiences’ promises to be a lively affair, as panelists discuss the state of the theatrical market for documentaries post-pandemic. Spagnoli is, for one, a strong advocate for the ongoing collective screening of documentaries within theatres and doesn’t subscribe to the notion that this should be compromised by small screen domination by the streamers. The theatrical doc is, for him, very much alive and kicking. “I am a relic of the old studio system. I don’t believe in this kind of divide. I mean, even if you tie me to a chair with a light, with maybe a drop of water as a torture, I will not believe it. I think it’s a fabricated thing,” he underlines. “I want to say something and I say it as somebody who has been working in media for 32 years. We have witnessed many funerals. We have witnessed the funerals of home video, we witnessed the funeral of pay-per-view tv, but nothing has replaced the cinema business model very convincingly.”
At MIA 2023 producers are invited to look beyond their own sector in determining future production strategies, says Spagnoli, who further expresses his deep regret that legendary Israeli animator/doc maker Ari Folman can’t make it to Rome to give his masterclass following the recent outbreak of hostilities in Israel.
For Spagnoli, Folman embodies a particularly fluid approach to filmmaking that has influenced filmmakers more and more in recent times. “What we learned in the past years is that the story determines the form. You don’t say, ‘I want to do a movie and I want to find a story.’ You find the story first and then you see how this story could be presented. Could it be a short? Could it be a documentary? Could it be a series or a one-off?” he says.
“And the MIA market can help to facilitate this storytelling,” Spagnoli signs off.
