There is a palpable mix of anticipation and anxiety among European sales agents as they prepare for the European Film Market (EFM) in Berlin, the first fully physical edition since 2020.
After a quiet American Film Market in November, the expectation is for Berlin to be buzzing. Execs are reporting their meeting schedules are already heavily booked, at least for the first few days of the market.
“I am genuinely excited,” says London-based Embankment Films co-founder Hugo Grumbar of his return to a physical EFM. “It’s been very active, very early in terms of meetings getting booked up. We feel it’s going to be the first majorly attended market since we had a pause for Covid.”
Alison Thompson, co-president of UK and LA-based Cornerstone Films, is equally upbeat. “Independent distributors have become more robust and have worked on their business plans, which is enabling them to move forward with more optimism than the last two or three years,” she says.
Munich-based Beta Cinema has secured itself a bigger space within the Gropius Bau, taking over the old Protagonist Pictures stand. “We are expanding in size and maybe even expanding in content and quality as well, doing more English-language films than we ever did and doing more pre-sales business,” says Thorsten Ritter, EVP acquisitions, sales and marketing at Beta Cinema.
The Match Factory has also moved to a new booth in the Gropius Bau. “It is great to be finally back at the EFM in its full form. We are feeling positive about the market and excited about our line-up,” enthuses head of sales Thania Dimitrakopoulou.
The Playmaker Munich is innovating its set-up for the times, installing an “online meeting cabin” as part of its Gropius Bau booth.
More than ever before, sales companies say they are not sure exactly what buyers are looking for and how much they will pay for what they find.
“Theatrical, traditional all-rights buyers — they are very, very cautious. Even when they buy, the offer is significantly less than before,” notes Yuan Rothbauer, founder and co-managing director of Germany’s Picture Tree International. Sales agents are responding by focusing on more commercial material and foregrounding English-language titles. Sellers (and their filmmakers) may want their films to be seen in cinemas but if they don’t get satisfactory asking prices, they are likely to cut deals with the streamers.
“Buyers are buying less,” says Cornerstone co-president Mark Gooder. “They want to know they’re buying things that tick a lot of boxes — the basic storyline, level of casting, the genre space… The one or two films that really hit the spot coming out of Sundance were in that thriller space.”
“The arthouse market has changed,” says Moritz Hemminger, deputy head of sales and acquisitions at The Playmaker Munich. “And the change is here to stay. It has become more difficult for drama and arthouse titles.”
Some sellers now will not take on arthouse dramas unless they have the launch platform provided by selection in a major festival.
“Buyers, more and more, are looking for completed titles that are either in the process of festivals, or starting their festival journey,” notes Anna Krupnova, director and co-founder of UK sales outfit Reason8 Films, which is handling The Temple Woods Gang in Forum. “Genre, as always, seem to be the films [buyers] are looking for.”
“Three or four years ago, we would have had more drama on our slate,” concedes Cornerstone’s Thompson. “Drama and issue-based drama is quite tough right now.”
“More of the buyers in the US are telling me they need cast-driven projects to sell to streaming platforms, and it’s the same internationally — buyers are saying they need bigger casts and bigger genres, like action and thriller,” agrees Andrew Nerger, director of international at UK-based Signature Entertainment, whose slate includes crime thriller Desperation Road, starring Mel Gibson.
Evgeniy Drachov, head of production and sales at leading Ukrainian outfit FILM.UA Distribution, says the team is concentrating on “high-value” projects. For EFM, these include big-budget animated feature Mavka, The Forest Song, which it managed to complete in Ukraine in spite of the Russian invasion.
Broad church
As no-one is sure what exactly will work in the market, it makes sense to fill slates with “a little bit of everything”, as one seller puts it.
“We’ve tried to diversify our portfolio. Some movies are more for festivals, some are more for streamers, some are more theatrical,” explains Jan Naszewski, CEO of Warsaw-based boutique agency New Europe Film Sales.
Picture Tree is handling films in action and horror as well as drama. “The market has changed a lot and it is not predictable,” says co-MD Andreas Rothbauer. “We wanted to make sure we covered everything.”
Salma Abdalla, managing director at Vienna-based docs specialist Autlook Filmsales, says theatrical documentary buyers are being more picky. “Whenever there is a strong theatrical potential, they are absolutely behind it,” she points out. “But it needs to speak a cinematic language and work on a big screen.”
Spain is one of the few remaining solid markets. Some Asian buyers, notably from China and Taiwan, are still lying low, but the general feeling is there will be a better turnout than AFM, particularly from Japan and South Korea. But French buyers are among those paying markedly less than before.
French distributors already have one market under their belt this year following the Rendez-Vous in January. French sales agents, for their part, are heading to EFM to build on what was ultimately a buzzy Rendez-Vous and meet the US, UK and Asian buyers that were not at the Paris event.
“EFM is the perfect moment to connect with everyone at the beginning of the year. Since the pandemic, January and February are like one giant market,” suggests Mathieu Delaunay, head of sales at Memento International. “We have big expectations for the EFM, both to show our films in official selection — that always works well — and also bring images, project news and films for Cannes to buyers.”
Memento is handling Chinese filmmaker Liu Jian’s animated Competition feature Art College, 1994 and, Delaunay says: “I hope Asian buyers will come and connect with European sellers.”
Cannes is also on the lips of Eva Diederix, head of sales at the company formerly known as Wild Bunch International, which has dropped its longtime name but has yet to confirm a new one. It is heading to EFM with what Diederix describes as a “juicy line-up”.
“We will show buyers a slew of promo reels for titles we’ll launch in Cannes,” says Diederix. “Everyone will be in Berlin, particularly the Asian market, who haven’t left their territories in three years. And, post-Sundance, the US buyers will all be there too, plus the Europeans. It’s a mix of everything and we’ve always seen strong results in Berlin.”
Ramy Nahas, director of international sales and distribution at SND, points to the global scope of EFM. The company is hosting six market screenings, including the market premiere of French comedy Ooh La La and a new English-language dubbed version of Princes Of The Desert, a strategic move “to give the film more exposure among buyers for English-speaking audiences and turn it into an event title in certain territories”, says Nahas.
Embankment’s Grumbar, who has Golda playing in Berlinale Special, is pragmatic. “If you’ve got strong material that knows its audience, then there’s always going to be a distributor that wants to take that material on, no matter what the platform,” he says. “It might be theatrical, it might not. You’ve got to be platform-agnostic.”
But New Europe’s Naszewski has a telling observation about one difference between streamers and traditional theatrical distributors. “The streamers have a very large rotation of people who buy,” he says. “Quite often six months later, the person you were dealing with at Netflix in the regional office would move to another office or would leave. In terms of planning your acquisitions slates long-term, it’s not easy. Theatrical buyers are much more stable in their tastes and their brands.”
Grumbar for one, though, shrugs off talk of decline and contraction. “It’s so resilient, the independent film business,” he insists. “Wherever there are pressures, we reinvent ourselves. We change, pivot, twist, and we keep going.”
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