mk2 Films managing director Fionnuala Jamison shared insights on securing a festival berth at Cannes through to prejudices in the international sales market at a London Film Festival ‘Spotlight’ interview on Wednesday (October 12).
Paris-based producer, sales agent and distributor mk2’s slate includes break out arthouse successes The Worst Person In The World, Portrait Of A Lady On Fire and Cold War. This year’s Golden Bear winner Alcarràs by Carla Simón is also repped by MK2.
The firm had six films in Cannes selection this year, and seven in 2021.
Having had so many films in Cannes and experienced so many festivals, Jamison said mk2 can “really feel when it feels like a right moment in the festival for the film to play, be it earlier, be it later, how we think the press is going to be and how that is going to impact, and do we want to show it to buyers before we show it to press or not.”
For films hoping to win an award, she spoke about trying to land the “golden award slot” which tends to be towards the end of a festival. This “can be tricky for sales, though, because you don’t have your press out yet. But Thursday night, for example, tends to be a good omen for getting prize in Cannes. Friday, the last day, is not a good time to digest yet the film [for] the jury.”
Jamison spoke of the things sales agents or distributors can try in order to secure certain festival slots. “Well, there’s things like ‘So and so can only be there then’, or ‘We’re not finished, and we’ll be ready then.’”
International prejudices
Jamison also spoke of the challenges of selling certain kinds of films around the world. She alluded to Mati Diop’s Cannes Grand Prix winner Atlantics. “We knew that was something that’s much stronger for English- speaking territories, and more for the strong arthouse markets like Benelux, Scandinavia, and North America. And for the rest of the world, it could be a little bit tricky.”
Jamison said that “the very sad reality is that you still have a lot of countries in the world that are very racist, and that if the cast of a film is one colour then it is not for them…The further east you go, the more problematic it is.”
She said the situation has “gotten better.” In Italy, it has become easier to sell films with a Black cast since the success of Barry Jenkins’ 2016 film Moonlight.
She added that it is now possible to sell Asian films in most parts of the world whereas before it was difficult, apart from the US and the UK. “Before [2013] Like Father, Like Son, distributors would say not even Kore-Eda worked in a lot of places.”
Strong propositions
Elsewhere in the discussion, Jamison lamented the fact the release of one of mk2’s biggest successes – Portrait Of A Lady On Fire – which opened theatrically just ahead of the Covid pandemic in 2020 “got cut short in some countries, including the US and the UK… I’d say in the US and UK combined there was still few million more to be had.”
Asked whether she had thought that Joachim Trier’s Worst Person in the World would be such a “juggernaut,” Jamison said she felt the film would be something “wonderful and special” but was worried that maybe not every US buyer would go for it the way we hoped would. “I wasn’t sure. Because when we first launched it, it was just after Black Lives Matters and it was super white.” She also noted the film was younger skewing - when foreign-language films generally play better for older audiences - and did not necessarily have an overt political message.
Jamison spoke about how tough it is to get audiences into theatres to see films, but said she was “very optimistic about the future.”
“What’s working is really strong propositions…films that are a little bit weak, that have got some soft spots are having a harder time holding up than before, be that for sales and also for acquisition.”
“But there are still a lot of films that are performing really well. Some numbers are a bit soft because in general markets are down by 30% for various reasons, but you need really strong propositions.”
The hardest films to make work are “the really tricky inbetweeners” that don’t necessarily appeal to a specific audience. She gave an example of a horror tinged with magical realism, with a 12-year-old protagonist, “where it it’s skewing younger, but it’s got a really hard, difficult, tough subject matter as well. So, it’s not going to be for a younger audience, older audience or genre audience.”
MK2 has six films playing at the LFF - Del Kathryn Barton’s Blaze, Carla Simón’s Alcarras, Soudade Kadan’s Nezouh, Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, Koji Fukada’s Love Life and Mikhaël Hers’s The Passengers of the Night.
Irish-born Jamison took over from Juliette Schrameck at family-owned mk2 in 2020, having joined the company in 2012. She previously worked at the Coproduction Office in Paris.
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