“For first-time directors, it is super hard to access not just the festivals but the market itself,” says Olivier Barbier, head of acquisitions at French distributor MK2 and a member of the jury at this year’s event, “so places like [the EWIP] are becoming more and more important…what I like from what I’ve seen is the diversity of places from where stories are coming from: from Brazil, from Mexico, from Europe, from Taiwan from Israel.
Instead of looking for projects that fit into easy categories, Barbier says he is trying to discover movies that break the mold. “I think what we have to preserve in the art house ecosystem is our uniqueness, our originality,” he says. “Art house has always been a place where you are going to see things you have never seen before.”, a moving drama about a family of Catalan peach farmers, which won the Golden Bear in Berlin this year, as a prime example.
“Even before the film won the Golden Bear we had offers from everywhere in the world and the movie has now sold everywhere,” he notes. “This is a film with a very local topic, but people connect with it. It’s sold everywhere and audiences are connecting with it.
28 European co-productions at EWIP are competing for a series of awards, which come with around $60,000 in in-kind post-production services. The event, which wraps up Wednesday, is backed by regional film fund the Medienstiftung NRW and organized in cooperation with AG Verleih, the association of German independent film distributors.
Was it worth it? Or a big waste of time?