NO BORDERS WITH FREE IN DEED
So fall has arrived in New York and with it comes the two major fall festivals – Toronto and New York – and squeezed in between lies Independent Film Week. For those unfamiliar with it, IFW grew out of the Independent Feature Project’s IFP Market. They rebranded a couple years ago, migrated from the Puck Building on Houston to FIT in Chelsea and in so doing have endeavored to further focus on being an important annual event for filmmakers and their projects. While Toronto and New York focus on work made in the year preceding, IFP looks at what’s in progress and coming up.
The week itself is broken into several sections. There are three sections which select projects to present – No Borders for features in development, Emerging Narrative for scripts, and Spotlight On Docs for documentary works in progress. This year I’ll be attending with filmmaker Jake Mahaffy and his film FREE IN DEED.
Four years ago, in the poor storefront church of an abandoned strip mall, a small congregation tried to perform the miraculous healing of an 8-year-old autistic boy. The boy was held down to the floor as church members prayed over him- his own mother was holding his feet- when he suddenly died. One man from that group was sentenced to prison for suffocating the child. FREE IN DEED is the story of a man who tries to perform a miracle and fails.
The project was in the Sundance labs, the Cannes Cinéfondation Atelier and will be in the Rome Film Festival’s New Cinema Network co-production market in October.
Jake and I opened a lot of conversations and relationships about the project at Cannes and are looking to continue some of those conversations this week in New York while also having the opportunity to meet with new producers, distributors and sales agents who haven’t met us or heard about the project yet. The audience at an event in like this in New York often is interested in different aspects of your pitch than those overseas (more of a focus on cast & marketing here) and thus you have to prepare your pitch somewhat differently to account for what your listeners want to know.
The keys to being successful at a co-production market, as I see it, are as follows:
1) Know your material: If you are stumped by any question then you’re in trouble. This doesn’t mean be a know-it-all, but rather, you should never be totally taken by surprise (or if you are, don’t show it). If you can’t talk fluidly about the work then people will question your commitment or competence. The worst is when someone has a rote pitch and they get thrown out of it by a question in the middle.
2) Know each other: The events can be long and tiring. You are going to pitch the same material again and again. You are going to have moments when you’re more on and moments when you’re less on. If you know each other and what the other person thinks & feels about the project then you can jump in if they are not on the ball for a moment. This fluidity means you’re not talking over each other and definitely not correcting each other. The kiss of death on this one is when one person says something about the project and the other disagrees. That’s a sign of trouble…
3) Do your research: You get a list of meetings in advance. Sit down with a industry directory and study the list. You should never not know who you’re talking to. You can still admit you don’t know a lot about what they do and that can be a great tactic to get them to tell you about their company and what they are looking for. Don’t be afraid to invite the pitchee into the conversation. Many of them want to be heard too so listen as well as talk.
4) Take notes: after every meeting write down who you met with, a note about the meeting and what follow up action needs to happen (send a script, send a DVD, etc…).
I feel pretty good about things right now. We actually have two projects in the pipeline and I think both are very unique and very engaging. The marketplace seems to be loosening up a little bit (despite slow sales in Toronto). I think that we’ll start to see financing coming back into the system as the stock market is nearing 10,000 again. This is good for us and good for these markets.
The past couple years have been a gut-wrenching time. Every day seemed to carry a new wisdom about how films should be made: what budget, what story, what location, what cast. Now it seems that everything has bottomed and we’re building from a solid ground again. Budgets are a fraction of what they were and sales & distribution options are completely changed. This will continue to evolve but I think the films being made now will be arriving in a marketplace that is starting to swing back again.
