Apple: The Trillion Dollar Betrayal produced by Enderley Pictures
Kathryn Bonnici, Head of Acquisitions & Development at French/UK Java Films, comes to La Rochelle very much with her acquisitions hat on. Sunny Side is a core event for the company and one which dovetails seamlessly with Java’s editorial remit that targets current affairs, human rights, history and environmental documentaries that tell “stories that explain the big issues of tomorrow,” Bonnici underlines.
Java’s feature department takes on up to 10 feature docs a year, while the TV department works with approximately 60-80 titles per year. The company website outlines how Java is divided into three sections working in harmony. The festival section focuses on securing premieres and long, non-theatrical runs for its films, typically of 12-36 months made up of festival and company screenings. The digital section looks to place films across all types of VOD platforms, as well as manage social media marketing and work with designers and outreach teams to create suitable artwork and visual assets. Meanwhile, the sales department works to secure TV broadcasts, educational deals and inflight sales.
In 2021, the company’s docs screened at 150 festivals around the world, winning 32 awards and five special mentions. Furthermore, the company has its own YouTube channel with over 100,000 subscribers.
Bonnici explains her acquisition mind-set for the June market. “By the time Sunny Side comes around, we’ve already seen the buyers at MIPTV.” The company publishes two catalogues of new films per year, one in the Spring, one in the Autumn, each containing 30-40 titles. “So [Sunny Side] a really good place for us to, on one hand, catch up with the TV buyers… but mainly to meet the producers [and] find new films.”
“We take on films in development, and we try and help find co-producers for films,” she adds, “but obviously we can only do that for a limited amount of films a year. So I would say 95% of the films we take on are at rough cut or finished stage for straight distribution, but 5% we might do development with or presales.”
Recently, the company sold world broadcast and streaming rights for Pleistocene Park to Vice World News for Season 3 of its spotlight documentary series, The Short List with Suroosh Alvi. The film, selected earlier this year for CPH:DOX, Hot Docs and Thessaloniki, is described as a captivating and entertaining look at Russian geophysicist Sergey Zimov’s Pleistocene Park project, an attempt to re-wild a remote corner of Siberia.
“Pleistocene Park is a good example of how we work,” explains Bonnici of a film whose career started with a strong festival run. “We took it on three years ago when it was in production and we really helped with production with presales. We [gave] a lot of editorial advice on it, watching lots of rough cuts, giving notes as to how we thought it should best be edited.” Meanwhile the film’s festival career continues.
This year Bonnici was on the selection committee for the Sunny Side Global Issues projects, the quality of which is particularly high in 2022, she argues. “Pretty much 90-95% of the projects could have been selected, they were that good. Whereas normally [at other events] you’re really struggling to find things that you think could work for you… I felt like this time it was the opposite. We were struggling [with] the projects because they all could have been selected.”
She underlines another characteristic of Sunny Side which renders more effective the process of doing doc business. It is a market as opposed to a festival, and therefore a lot more streamlined. “I feel like now the traditional places that we go to meet clients like the festivals are really focusing on being festivals…and there are very few places where you can go to a pitching forum and see films that are specifically…being made for TV.”
“And it’s also a market that gets results. People really like going there. Sunny Side is very productive,” she ends.
