European group Mediawan is making waves in the documentary sphere through its sales division Mediawan Rights, which has its own boutique operation handling upscale auteur-driven docs.
Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack To A Coup D’Etat is screening at IDFA this week as part of the festival’s Grimonprez retrospective, while An American Pastoral by French director Auberi Adler is screening in the international competition.
“We wanted to develop something different from what we were doing,” says head of documentary sales Arianna Castoldi, of why Mediawan ventured into the feature doc sector. “We decided to create a feature documentary line-up which is very, very tiny, and which takes four titles a year max.”
Mediawan’s high-end documentaries complement its more populist non-fiction titles such as sports doc Isle Of Man, about the TT Motorcycle Race, which is co-produced by partners including Channing Tatum’s Free Association and Brad Pitt and Dede Gardner’s Plan B.
With outfits including Brad Pitt’s Plan B and UK documentary firm Misfits, run by Ian Bonhôte and Dee Ryder, now falling under the Mediawan umbrella, the nascent sales arm has access to a slew of prestigious feature documentarie, although not all of its documentaries come from its producer stable.
One of the first feature docs Castoldi and her team handled was Oliver Stone’s Nuclear Now in 2022, on which it worked with the now-closed Participant Films to handle sales outside North America.
Castoldi says it was a great opportunity to work with one of the best-known US directors of his generation, and “to enter in the US space.”
Grimonprez’s Soundtrack To A Coup D’Etat is very different in tone. Blending jazz and Cold War politics, it premiered in Sundance and has since sold to companies including Modern Foilms in the UK, FilmIn in Spain, Madman in Australia, Filmladen in Austria, and Cinobo in Greece. Kino Lorber is mounting an Oscar campaign for the film in the US, where Mediawan has collaborated with Submarine Pictures on the film.
Castoldi says she spent nine months persuading the Soundtrack producer to sign with Mediawan after she saw an early version of the doc at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. “Eventually, he saw the passion and the fact that we wanted to fight for a big audience for this documentary.”
Small team
Mediawan’s documentary sales team is small at just three people, but it draws on the marketing might of its parent company. “We can give a better exposure maybe to docs that are a little bit thought provoking or different,” says Castoldi.
Edler’s An American Pastoral fits into this category. It is an observational film set in a small Pennsylvania town with picket fences and where there are stark and bitter divisions between Republican and Democrat voters. Matters come to a head during the school board elections. The film is produced by France’s Serge Lalou through Les Films d’Ici Méditerranée and has broadcaster support through ARTE.
With most of its titles, Mediawan will offer both a theatrical and a TV version. “It’s our general strategy to go both ways. We have the experience in TV. We are all well known by all our clients. That is our DNA mainly,” Castoldi reflects. “We bring titles to the distributors and in those territories where theatrical is not possible, we try to sell directly to broadcasters.”
Mediawan’s slate also includes music documentaries such as Frank Sinatra film My Way, directed by Thierry Teston in collaboration with Lisa Azuelos, and David Hertzog Dessites’ Once Upon a Time Michel Legrand, as well as animated films including Léonard Cohen’s Flavours Of Iraq which premiered in Annecy and had its US premiere recently at DOC NYC.
“What really struck us [aboutFlavours] was the visuals. The animation was beautiful,” Castoldi enthuses. “It’s a true story, 95% animation 5% archive. It’s a coming-of-age story with the second Gulf War in the background.”
Also new to the slate is Ado Hasanović My Father’s Diaries, a story about the Srebrenica massacre told through footage shot and diaries kept by the filmmaker’s father. It is produced by Italian outfit Palomar, one of the many companies now in the Mediawan stable.
“We co-produced it,” Castoldi explains.
Title-by-title
Arrangements with companies already owned by Mediawan appear to be flexible. For example, there’s no output arrangement with Plan B. “It’s on a title-by-title basis.” At the same time, Castoldi and her team “consult” and give advice to partner outfits, for example advising US companies on how the European market works. The team also has the capacity to invest in selected projects, and will acquire third-party documentaries.
“The market is not the easiest one,” says Castoldi. “That is why we try do different types of topics, different types of documentary, and to have something for each client. The key word is difference - trying to have different films for different markets is our strategy.”
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