Corcoran, Olesen to present projects at Cross Video Days

Actress, writer and producer Emily Corcoran [pictured] and director Annette K Olesen’s will be among the film professionals crossing over to the web to present transmedia projects at the upcoming edition of Cross Video Days (CVD) in Paris later this month.

The cross-media market and conference event, unfolding June 19-20 in a former warehouse on the outskirts of Paris, marks its fifth edition this year.

Founder Bruno Smajda is expecting it to be the biggest edition to date.

“It’s taken off in terms of the quality of the projects and the attendance of commissioners, one feeds into another,” he says.

“Today producers and broadcasters have to conceive projects in a transmedia way, taking into account convergence and what’s happening digitally — not least due to the realities of the market and the way in which people consume content,” says Smadja.

“The wave of change is so great everyone has to learn how to surf it rather than attempt to hold back the waters.”

A total of 59 transmedia projects have been selected for CVD’s market, out of 350 submissions from 40 countries, 20 of which will be pitched to commissioners from a variety of organisations including Channel 4, Arte, Rai, Tribeca Film Institute, IDFA, YouTube/Google, IDFA DocLab and Power to the Pixel (PttP).

Corcoran, the New Zealand-born founder of London-based Cork Film Ltd, will unveil web-series The Fight Room about a group of female fighters who are kidnapped and forced to fight one another for an unknown group of voyeurs on the internet.

She co-wrote the series alongside actress Gillian Macgregor. They also co-star with martial arts actress Zara Phythian and Siu See Hung. Niall Johnson, best known for the 2005 comedy Keeping Mum and writing the screenplay to the Michael Keaton-starrer White Noise, directs.

Cork is producing the series with Stanley Road Productions. 

Cork’s previous productions include Tobias Tobbell’s thriller Confine starring Daisy Lowe as a former model who is taken hostage by an armed robber, which is co-produced with Two Bells.  

Danish filmmaker Annette K Olesen, whose film credits include Little Soldier, will present her transmedia adaptation of Norwegian writer Erlend Loe’s Muleum, about a wealthy teenage orphan who spends her inheritance on air tickets in a bid to die like her family in a plane crash.

It is produced by Julie Friis Walenciak and Amalie Lyngbo Hjort of Zentropa Productions.

Other projects with feature films attached include Australian Jonny Peters’ futuristic The Dream Channel about a deadly TV game revolving around people’s dreams. Peters is developing an interactive web series as well as feature film.

Korean filmmaker Jero Yun will present his ongoing transmedia project revolving around the North and South Korea divide, featuring the documentary Mrs B. a Woman from North Korea, the web documentary The Smuggler and his fiction film Secret of My Father.  

Yun started developing the project while participating in the Cannes Film Festival’s Residence du Festival programme in Paris.

Interactive documentary projects in the selection include Adrift, a multi-platform project revolving around Italian adventurer Alex Bellini’s attempt to survive on an iceberg for 12 months as part of a campaign to draw attention to climate change. It is co-produced by Italian Decima Rosa and UK-based Freeside Films.

London-based Pinch Media will unveil Davide Gambino’s web documentary Still Life about a trio of taxidermists hailing from Rome, London and Brussels who take part in an act of eco-terrorism to highlight the plight of the Animal Kingdom. It is co-produced by Rome-based Orisa Produzioni.

Three of the projects presented at the market will be the fruit of the Tribeca Hacks Paris just prior to CVD, a collaboration with the Tribeca Film Institute, transmedia networking group Storycode France and digital, co-working hub NUMA in which seven multidisciplinary teams will develop a pitch from a set topic.

Alongside the project market, CVD’s two-day conference programme will discuss multi-platform story-telling, the relationship between broadcasters and the web; the latest developments in Subscription Video on Demand (SVoD) and whether YouTube really does offer a financial eldorado to creatives. 

Speakers will include Alexandre Brachet, the pioneering producer of web documentaries Prison Valley and Alma, A Tale of Violence who is also CVD’s honorary “grandmaster” this year, former Arte Cinema chief-turned-transmedia producer Michel Reilhac, Channel 4’s multiplatform commissioning editor Adam Gee, Mathieu Luquet, VP of business development at the French arm of Europe’s largest Multi Channel Network Base 79, and PttP’s founder and CEO Liz Rosenthal.

For the full programme, visit CVD’s website.