Swissdirector Marcel Schuepbach's documentary Carla's List about the work of Carla Del Ponte, the prosecutor ofthe International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), wascreating a buzz among international buyers ahead of its world premiere at theweekend in Locarno's Piazza Grande open-air prorgamme, according to the film'ssales agent Wide Management.

WideManagement's Loic Magneron told ScreenDaily.com that two French companies hadalready signalled interest in the film as well as 'a number of bigdistributors' from Germany who had asked for screeners ahead of theLocarno premiere. In addition, he had been 'quite surprised' by the'strong interest' shown for Carla's List by a number of US theatricaldistributors given the difficulty of the US market for theatricaldocumentaries.

Schuepbach'sfilm, which goes behind the scenes of the ICTY to follow the day-by-day work ofDel Ponte in her quest to have such fugitive war criminals as Ratko Mladic,Radovan Karadzic and Ante Gotovina arrested and brought to justice in TheHague, will be released in Switzerland by Filmcoopi this autumn and has alreadybeen picked up for Italy by the independent distributor Ripley.

Speakingexclusively to ScreenDaily.com in the presence of four bodyguards, Del Ponte -whose mandate as prosecutor at the ICTY will come to an end in September 2007 -said that her hope was that the film would return the issue of internationaljustice to the centre of public debate: 'We need this message. It isimportant that the film comes out now so that we can catch these people and Ithink the film can help us to reach our goal.'

Shestressed that she hadn't exerted any influence on the film's portrayal of herwork - 'there was no censorship and nothing was staged, everything is asit happened' - although she admitted that one had to get used to having acamera team following one's every move. 'Sometimes, at the beginning, Iwould show the camera team the door when I had had enough,' Del Ponterecalled. 'But they were very quiet, restrained and veryprofessional.'