A few days before the start of Connext, the showcase for features and TV made in Flanders and in Brussels, the organisers were busy designing an app for their international visitors.
Through the app, guests in the Belgian city of Antwerp are provided with information about everything from churches, mosques and synagogues (if they want to worship) to restaurants and cafes. Flanders Image, which organises Connext, has even set aside tickets to the city’s Royal Museum of Fine Arts, which re-opened in late September after a €100mn facelift which took over a decade.
A concerted effort is being made to make distributors, sales agents and festival programmers feel welcome after the two previous editions of the event were held online only because of the pandemic.
The digital iteration was so successful that in addition to the Antwerp experience, Connext 2022 is a hybrid event, running from October 10-11 as a physical event, and until October 24 online. And during a packed autumn for film industry professionals, Connext has attracted many top companies from Europe and beyond. Attendees this year include Mediawan, Wild Bunch, Global Screen, Lionsgate, Playtime, Netflix, Disney+, Mubi and Walter Presents, as well as festival programmers from Venice, Berlin, Directors’ Fortnight, Locarno, SXSW and Toronto.
They are not in town just to see the Rubens and van Eyck paintings.
“Connext is where we read the script [for Girl] from Lukas Dhont,” says Cécile Salin, head of acquisitions at leading French distribution and production company Diaphana, of why she attends Connext.
Diaphana ended up releasing both Girl (later Oscar nominated) and Dhont’s most recent feature, Close, which won the Grand Prix in Cannes in May, and which Diaphana also coproduced.
“You can discover films which will be in the next A-list festival, “ she explains. “You can jump on board earlier if you see them [at Connext].”
“Belgium has a very strong film industry within Europe,” adds Moritz Hemminger, deputy head of sales & acquisitions at German sales outfit, The Playmaker Munich. He points not just to arthouse directors such as Dhont, Felix van Groeningen and Fien Troch but to the strength of Belgian family movies. “We will focus our attention on the pitches and work in progress [screenings] of the feature films.”
Playmaker has partnered previously with Antwerp-based animation outfit Cyborn, one of the producers alongside Icelandic outfit GunHil on animated adventure Ploey, which Playmaker sold widely in the independent film market.
Animation is part of Connext; one of the works in progress screenings is Juul, written by An De Gruyter and directed by Tom Van Gestel. It is produced by Fabrique Fantastique.
Documentary is also strongly represented with titles including Jimmy Hendrickx and Jeremy Kewuan’s Slave Island, a work-in-progress that deals with slave trading between families, and Pascal Garnier’s A HipHop Moment, which follows a Dutch film crew as it heads to New York to investigate rap, scratch and beat boxing.
“[Connext] is extremely concentrated, a great overview of upcoming Belgian production,” says Frederic Boyer, artistic director at Tribeca Film Festival in New York and at Les Arcs Film Festival in France.
Buzzy projects
Some 83 projects have been selected this year. That is a hefty number but, by combining the physical event with an online platform, all will have their own moment in the spotlight. Onsite, there are 38 live presentations and 13 screenings of films and series both fiction and non-fiction.
“We’re not a co-production market, but an annual showcase where our film- and TV-makers pitch their projects, present work in progress material and show recently completed films to a group of potentially interested festival curators, sellers, buyers, broadcasters, streamers,” says Flanders Image executive Christian De Schutter, who conceived the event in 2016.
Works in progress generating advance buzz include Koen Moertier’s fouth feature Skunk, Tim Mielants’ Second World War drama Will, Johan Grimponprez’s latest documentar Soundtrack To A Coup D’Etat and Robin Pront’s Zillion, which won the Perfect Pitch Award in 2019 and is screening as a completed film.
Distributors are also closely tracking actress Veerle Baetens’ directorial debut When It Melts, picked up for world sales by The Party Film Sales at last year’s online event. This is in post-production and is likely to surface early next year. Baetens, who starred in Oscar-nominated The Broken Circle Breakdown, is giving a keynote interview in Antwerp this week.
Projects intriguing TV buyers include Olympia Allaert’s Season Of Sex, about a woman frustrated with her sex life who starts an online quest to improve her sex life, and Kevin Janssens’ Breendonk, a tale of love, betrayal and death set against the backdrop of a Nazi prison camp.
While some industry delegates in Antwerp will be straight on to MIA at the Rome Film Festival, there are plenty who say they are looking forward to having the platform to catch up on. “If I like the pitch and I want to follow up with the team, it’s a great opportunity to share the materials with colleagues from the acquisition team [not in Antwerp],” says the Playmaker’s Hemminger.
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