The Lau Haizetara Documentary Co-Production Forum has successfully celebrated its 13th edition with a notable presence of Basque projects.
The event, which took place yesterday, 28th September 2017, within the framework of the 65th San Sebastian Film Festival, was well received by the audience. Six countries were represented in twelve feature film projects which, giving greater prominence than ever to women, included subjects such as integration, exploitation, personal and social conflicts, spy stories, the power of social networks, immigration, torture and human rights. Two of them, I´m not your slave produced by Contramedia Films-AlemDoc and Prisoners without prison by Mov(i)e ON, came from FIPA (Festival Internacional de Programas Audiovisuales de Biarritz), a product of the ongoing agreement between IBAIA and the San Sebastián Film Festival which began in 2007.
The main objective of this Forum and its parallel activities is to offer an ideal space in which to present documentary projects to potential funders and experts from the audiovisual and cinema sectors.
In the preceding days, the producers of the selected projects attended workshops with professional experts. They worked exhaustively on presentation, both of the storyline and the teaser, and they were able to maximise the potential of their projects before presenting them. In addition, they were given guidelines to improve individualised meetings with the Commissioning Editors, a panel which was more international in flavour than ever: (TVE) Andrés Luque – Executive Producer / (EITB) Aintzane Pérez del Palomar – Co-prod. Commissioning Editor / (ARTE) Mark Edwards – Commissioning Editor / (RADIO CANADA) Jean Pelletier – Senior Director – TV News Information / (KCET LINK TV) Lorraine Hess – Programming Consultant/ (TREELINE DISTRIBUTION) Elena Mera – International Business / (TV3) Jordi Ambrós – Co-prod. Commissioning Editor / (AL JAZEERA) Mohammed Belhaj – EP of In House Production|Production Department / (STV) Axel Arnö – Commissioning Editor / (CAT&Docs) Catherine LeClef – President / (TG4) Proinsias Ní Ghrainne – Commissioning Editor. In individually-tailored meetings of approximately 20 minutes, the Commissioning Editors and producers were able to talk at length with the aim of specifying possible collaboration agreements.
Meanwhile, the professionals present in halls 8 and 9 in the Kursaal were able to attend the conference “The future of telling real life stories — Documentary in the digital age”. Organised by IBAIA and Europa Creativa Desk Media Euskadi, Ove Rishøj Jensen (Film Consultant of the European Documentary Network) spent 90 minutes closely examining the latest events in the field of interactive, online and VR documentaries, and showed examples of documentaries made with media highlighting the essential considerations for these new forms of narration.
To close the conference, all the sector professionals in attendance enjoyed the closing ceremony and the awarding of the IBAIA and TREELINE Distribution prizes in the KELER space. Fernando Sa Casado, member of the Board of Directors of IBAIA presented the first IBAIA prize consisting of €3000 to the project Tolyatti Adrift by Laura Sisteró (BoogalooFilms). El sonido del “Crack”, produced by Irusoin, SL / Mirokutana films, received from Elena Mera, responsible for the project, the Treeline Distribution and Festival Consultancy Prize, consisting of two advisory sessions for the project.
For IBAIA, organiser of the Lau Haizetara Documentary Co-Production Forum, it is vitally important to establish spaces to consolidate the specialisation and development of new high-quality documentary projects and to collaborate in getting them under way.
