This year Cinéma du Réel launches “ParisDOC Capsules“:
thematic and convivial breakfasts for film professionals
ParisDOC Capsules: impassioned and inspiring discussions, encounters made easy, for experienced professionals and beginners alike!
Participation is free, upon mandatory registration.
* ParisDOC CAPSULES are conducted in FRENCH
ParisDOC Capsule 1 : MEET THE GUESTS
Le Georges, top floor of Centre Pompidou
An opportunity to discover the key players of the documentary world in a different light!
Other participants include:
Gerwin Tamsma, Programmer at IFFR Rotterdam (Netherlands), Manuela Buono, Founder and Director of sales and acquisitions at Slingshot films (Italy), Roland Loebner, Coordinator of DOK Film Market at DOK Leipzig Documentary Film festival (Germany), Ina Rossow, Head of Festivals at Deckert Distribution (Germany), Gabor Greiner, Director of acquisitions at Films Boutique (Germany), Davide Oberto, Programmer for Torino Film Festival (Italy) and Co-Head of Doclisboa (Portugal), Charlotte Selb, Programmer for RIDM, Hot Docs, Cinéma Moderne and film critic at 24 images (Canada), Susana Santos Rodrigues, International consultant for Karlovy Vary (Czech Republic), Rio de Janeiro (Brasil), Bildrausch Film Festival (Switzerland) and distributor for VAIVEM (Argentina), and Sandro Fiorin, Co-Founder of Figa Films (USA).ParisDOC Capsule 2 : THE DISTRIBUTION OF DOCUMENTARIES ON NEW MEDIA PLATFORMS
Wednesday, March 28 at 11amLe Georges, top floor of Centre Pompidou
How are and by whom are documentaries viewed on the VOD/SVOD platforms? Is the European network organization of UniversCiné representative of the needs of a new generation? Sketches of the new landscape of viewing practices 2.0
Discussion led by Charles Hembert, Director of UniversCiné editions and member of Eurovod.
Conducted in French.
3 questions to Charles Hembert:
They are more on a national scale than for fiction. Documentaries are released on few copies in theaters in France, about 50-60, so 30-40 cities, however well supported by the press. Thus when they arrive in VoD, they become accessible to 60% of France for the first time. This allows them to reach more people, the audience of documentaries are in the end less Parisian than that for fiction, at least on our platform. And the strength of the documentaries is also to be able to interest other types of public than the film-lovers. So the movies that work are those with themes that are not only circumscribed to the cinema cues. This is valid for documentaries on artists like Janis by Amy Berg or Vivian Maier by Charlie Siskel and John Maloof or on societal topics such as Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro or Mariana Otero’s Like an Open Sky.
What can documentaries hope for from new viewing practices?
Physical video still has significant weight in the documentary market compared to digital, the transformation rate is still 10%, where normally it is around 2% for the rest of the market. On the digital, especially on TVoD, the documentaries suffer from the rise of catch-up TV. In fiction, except for Arte, nobody does catch-up with movies. This practice made the audience feel that paying for a documentary was not “normal”. On the other hand, the emergence of the SVoD has shown that within a subscription offer, where the consumer does not have the feeling of paying again, the documentary, but also short films or more experimental works, are more watched. The success of a platform like Tënk or even documentaries on Netflix or in our UnCut offer shows it well: there is an audience for this type of work.
Is collaboration the future of European VoD / SVoD?
Historically, UniversCiné and Eurovod, an association that we run, have always been strongly supported by the European Union and the MEDIA program. Moreover, today, in this idea of the European single market, there is a strong desire to Europeanise some VoD / SVoD platforms. We can see it with Netflix, when buying a film, it’s still easier to pay it off on 190 territories than on only one. With Eurovod, we are trying to gather and grow together to become a real European VoD union. The challenge is to improve the distribution of arthouse and documentary films, which are often limited to a few territories. The idea is to, thanks to the low cost of online techniques and advertising, make this type of cinema more accessible within Europe, including by joining forces more with festivals.
ParisDOC Capsule 3 : ROUGE INTERNATIONAL
Friday, March 30 at 11am
Le Georges, top floor of Centre Pompidou
Meeting with producers Nadia Turincev and Julie Gayet.
From Fix Me to Raw, between documentaries and fiction, Beirut and Paris… A focus on the singular career of Rouge International! Challenges, intuitions, strategies… What were the key choices made by these two partners?
Discussion moderated by Pamela Pianezza.
Conducted in French.
Of course ! The universal begins when you push the walls of your kitchen – that’s our motto from the beginning. “International”, yes, and not only national, “international” in the sense of relationships, reciprocity. And also interlocutors, interstices, interpreters, interrogators, interactors…
The company has been around since 2007, but the success of Grave really put it in the spotlight. What did the film of Julia Ducournau actually change for you?
It depends on what scene! We do not see a radical change, no break, rather a continuity. A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness, with more than 125 festival selections and numerous awards, had put Rouge International on the forefront of avant-garde arthouse cinema, and we have continued to earn our stripes, step by step, as with Le Trésor, Mimosas … and Grave.
You work as much on fiction as you do on documentaries, without distinction. But what are the main differences between these two materials in terms of production and distribution?
In terms of production, documentaries accept a creative disorder, a less rigid temporality, and the distribution is more fragile, too. Anyway, whether fiction or documentary, every film we produce prevents any possibility of applying a recipe, forces us to reinvent, to recreate a world – and that’s what we cherish.