23/11/2018 - The Industry Days at Braunschweig International Film Festival provide a networking platform for filmmakers

(l-r) WIFT Women in Film and Television Germany's Julia Dordel and Cornelia Köhler, Braunschweig director Michael P Aust, and producer Pandora da Cunha Telles (© Julia Rutkovska/Filmfestival Braunschweig)

Film financing, funding opportunities and aesthetics in film were the key topics during the Industry Days event at the 32^nd edition of Braunschweig International Film Festival. Among the producers who gave an insight into their work was Pandora da Cunha Telles, co-producer of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote [+see also:
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film profile] by Terry Gilliam. The Portuguese producer talked about the genesis of the film, which evolved into a crime story. When the team was filming in the Portuguese Tomar monastery complex, it was mentioned in the evening news on TV, after Terry Gilliam was blamed for damaging the 12^th century building. “This was fake news,” said the producer, “but it gave me sleepless nights.” The production also faced difficulties regarding different copyright laws in Europe.

“Our Industry Days are fulfilling two functions. On the one hand, the Industry Days provide filmmakers and students from our region with know-how and offer them a networking opportunity,” says the festival director, Michael Aust. “On the other hand, we are inviting speakers to the Industry Days to give them an idea of what our festival is like, so that they can come back to us with their films.”

A crash course in crowdfunding campaigns was given by Jonas Pariente from the Paris-based company Chaï Chaï Films. Collecting money by crowdfunding can work well with documentary features that appeal to a larger audience. For the Turkish-German-French co-production Mr Gay Syria [+see also:
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film profile] by Ayse Toprak a total of €200,000 was collected on various platforms. Meanwhile, Pariente was hired by Kickstarter to develop their brand in France. Most recently, he has been working on the documentary Mother – If I Want, When I Want by Vanessa Rizk, a French filmmaker who is based in Berlin.

Johannes Rexin, producer of the Cologne-based Rexinfilm, gave an insight into a micro-budget production, focusing on the development and production of high-quality feature films and TV series. When Alain-Pascal Housiaux and Patrick Dechesne pitched him their documentary project about a young fisherman in Ethiopia, he turned it down. But eventually, when the filmmakers decided to turn it into a feature film, he decided to produce Shattering Shadow. Financed with a low budget of just €455,000, he got the French cinematographer Hélène Louvart on board, whose credits include Happy as Lazzaro [+see also:
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film profile]. “You can only work on these kinds of projects, where you make very little money, if you have other projects that are balancing it out,” highlighted Rexin, who is preparing the European co-production of Ostende 1936, Sommer der Freundschaft by Uli Edel.

“The Industry Days offered high-quality lectures and gave a comprehensive outline of the various fields of film financing,” sums up Christiane Siemen, managing director of Creative Europe Desk Germany. “Industry Events are becoming more important at film festivals because they provide a networking platform for filmmakers who are presenting their films.”