Mediawan Rights has acquired international rights to bio-doc Godard Cinema, exploring the life and work of iconic French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, via its documentary arm which will launch sales on the title at the EFM running February 10-17.
It marks the first title in a slate of feature documentaries suitable for theatrical release being pulled together by Arianna Castoldi, head of documentary sales for all formats within Mediawan Rights, the sales arm of burgeoning Paris-based international film and TV group Mediawan.
“Unlike the TV catalogue, which is vast, the aim with this new slate is to take a boutique approach to focus on three, four premium documentaries a year,” explained Castoldi, who joined Mediawan in 2017 when her former employee Groupe AB was acquired by the group.
Her team has recently been bolstered by the arrival of former Reel Suspects head of sales Arnaud Chevallier who joins festival manager Kilian Kiefel.
A change of focus
“Our focus has traditionally been on series, but with the team that we now have in place we are equipped to push into theatrical docs too,” said Castoldi. “We’ll decide together which feature projects to take on. The idea is to really fall in love with a project and then support it to the full.”
Godard Cinema is the latest cinema-themed bio-doc from French filmmaker and editor Cyril Leuthy whose previous work Melville, Le Dernier Samouraï, about French director Jean-Pierre Melville, played in Italy’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in 2020.
Mixing archive footage, film extracts and interviews with past collaborators, it attempts to capture the essence of the cult filmmaker via five distinct stages in his trajectory, from his start as a director to his role as a leader of the French new wave, through to his period as a political agitator and then stardom and later retreat to Switzerland.
Castoldi said it has the full support of Godard. Interviewees include Nathalie Baye, Julie Delpy, Cannes Film Festival president Pierre Lescure and former Cahiers du Cinema journalist Alain Bergala. It is currently in post-production for a May delivery.
The documentary is produced by 10.7 Productions in collaboration with broadcaster Arte which will air it in France. Mediawan Rights will work on building a festival career and selling all rights internationally outside France.
This approach grew out of Castoldi’s past experiences handling international sales on Gregory Monro’s 2020 documentary Kubrick By Kubrick, which premiered on Arte in France but then toured a number of international festivals including Tribeca and Karlovy Vary.
“With the producers [Martin Laurent and Jeremy Zelnik] we decided to make two versions – one running 50 minutes, the other 75 minutes. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the theatrical rights, but we worked on giving it a festival career alongside selling the TV rights,” explained Castoldi.
”Through this experience, we saw there was an appetite for this sort of bio-doc around a cinema figure and that it was possible for a film conceived for a French TV audience to be enjoyed theatrically internationally.”
“We thought this approach could work with this film is because it’s more than just a collection of archives,” she continued. “Each section has a different style, there is a real cinematic intention behind the work.
Other new titles being lined up for the new slate include another cinema-related bio-doc, an animated documentary and an investigative piece in the vein of award-winning work Collective.
Mediawan group synergies
Looking to the future, Castoldi hopes to build the new feature slate via synergies with other companies within the Mediawan group, such as Palomar Doc.
The documentary division of Italian Mediawan subsidiary Palomar was created in early 2020 with former I Wonder Pictures head of acquisitions and Bologna’s Biograf Festival director Andrea Romeo at the helm as creative director.
“We would like to collaborate in such a way that he produces, and we distribute,” said Castoldi. ”Thanks to his time at the Biograf Festival, he has great connections with all the documentary filmmakers. We want to put all these ingredients together, to support his projects from the beginning, in a move that could see us handle more auteur-style works by some of the best documentary makers in the world.”
No comments yet