Huub Roelvink

Source: Seth Carnill

Huub Roelvink

The European Film Market has named Huub Roelvink, founder of of Benelux outfit Cherry Pickers Film Distribution, as the winner of its inagural EFM Distributor Award.

The award, launched to recognise the work of film distributors, comes with a cash prize of €7,500 and is sponsored by Fintage House. It will be presented during the EFM’s Kick-Off event on February 12.

Cherry Pickers releases around 12 to 15 titles a year. Recent titles include My Favourite Cake, No Other Land, Hard Truths and September Says. Before founding the company in 2016, Roelvink was managing director of Imagine Filmdistributie Netherlands and founder of Cinema Delicatessen, a distributor specialised in documentaries.

Speaking to Screen, Roelvink said he was “taken completely by surprise” with winning the award, and stressed that the work of Cherry Pickers was a team effort. “We balance passion with business. That’s the key to being a distributor. You have to stay passionate, otherwise you can’t do it. But you also have to be very pragmatic, because otherwise you will go bankrupt.”

One reason he thought Cherry Pickers might have won the award is because “we have managed to establish ourselves over the past eight years in the Netherlands, one of the most competitive markets for arthouse films”, with rival distributors including Cineart and September Film.

He says Cherry Pickers looks for “the highest quality arthouse movies, but always with a commercial potential.” It will buy both finished films, and will also pre-buy and pay minimum guarantees for rights.

Roelvink says the company secured important financial backing from private investors to help launch the company in 2016, which helped to lay the foundations for growth. “There’s a wide range of distributors in the Netherlands, but also a lot of very small ones. From the start, we didn’t want to be in that space, just struggling from one release to the other.”

The backers have now been paid back, and Cherry Pickers has a full-time team of three. Roelvink works alongside David van Marlen who is responsible for sales, logistics and acquisitions, and Chantal van Remmen, marketing coordinator and responsible for subsidies. For releasing its films, Cherry Pickers works with Petra van Horssen’s marketing and publicity agency FilmInc.

Roelvink picks out Cherry Pickers 2016 release of Lady Macbeth as one of the company’s first breakout release successes. “In terms of curation, what we look for sometimes are the titles that are slightly more edgy than some of our competitors would choose.”

No Other Land

Source: Berlinale

‘No Other Land’

He also cites its acquisition of controversial Palestinian / Israeli documentary No Other Land. “A lot of people were a bit wary of buying it. We didn’t think about it too much.”

He says the Netherlands has a “very, very healthy arthouse market at the moment”, citing the importance of the Cineville moviegoing pass for helping to drive admissions. The downside of the Netherlands “is that it’s very competitive, so more and more titles get distributed.”

In the meantime, he is looking forward to the EFM next week – describing Berlin as “a properly global market for us. Apart from Cannes that is quite rare, since AFM and TIFF are both much more US focused and Venice still doesn’t really have a market…so it is a really important one for us.”

Roelvink was selected as winner of the EFM Distributor Award by a jury comprising Leila Hamid, CEO of Germany’s X-Verleih, Nathalie Jeung, head of sales at Paris-based Kinology, and Kim Foss, CEO of Denmark’s Camera Film.

Tanja Meissner, director of Berlinale Pro, said: “I wanted to introduce an award within the EFM to recognise the crucial societal and cultural value of the work of European Arthouse Distributors which is often undervalued. While awards mostly go to filmmakers and producers, films only truly exist once they’re distributed and reach their intended audiences. We often discuss the importance of fostering cultural exchange by upholding diversity and showing different perspectives, and cinema has a really powerful role to play in that. Arthouse Distributors contribute not only culturally, but also economically and politically by reinforcing the foundation of European democracy.”

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