Co-production rules!
Chronicle by Janne Niskala, Vaski Filmi
Since my trip to Asia things have moved nicely forward. And as usually, when things start to move, they move quite fast.
I went togheter with my South Korean partner from CreativEast, Mr. Min-Chul Kim, into Sunny Side of the Doc in La Rochelle, France. Even though the atmosphere was a bit slow compared for example to Asian side of the Doc, lot of good things happened to us.
We expanded our network, met new possible co-producers and I met lot of the nice people from Eurodoc.
So far our co-production Planet of Snail, has changed into South Korean? Japanese ? Finnish ? U.S. Co-production, which I'm proud enough to say, is definitely first one in kind. Of course YLE is involved too, so now we are searching for the rest of the pre-sells and waiting for the Finnish Film Foundation decision. The film has a great potential. The first version of
it was screened at EIDF festival in Seoul and it won two awards out of five. It's a great result when competing with high quality films like Last Train Home!
But despite with the good results so far the best part from our co-operation is that now me and Min-Chul are developing a new joint production togehter. This means that there is a continuity going on here.
I'm very pleased about it and big thaks of course goes to Film Arc project that originally has pushed us into the big open world to mingle and search for partnerships.
Rest of the year will be quite busy for me. I'll try to attend Taiwan International Documentary Festival, Sheffield and IDFA in Amsterdam. We'll try to develope our new project as quickly as possible into a phase where we can speak more about it but at least we have co-producers, funders and sales agents interest aroused with the brief pitch version. Creating a
hype and going on into these Forums is quite important. That is what we found out with the Snail project. Being known and being reliable in the eyes of the Commissioning Editors is a key issue when you want to sell your projects internationally. And that is difficult if you don't ever meet these people face to face.
As as long as Film Arc can provide some support for you to get yourself to be known I recommend that you take it.
