Nine talking points from San Sebastian’s Creative Investors’ Conference

San Sebastian’s Creative Investors Conference, organised in association with CAA Media Finance and Screen contributing editor Wendy Mitchell, in her capacity as festival adviser, brought together a wealth of top US and international executives to talk about how they are adapting and thriving in a fast-changing market.

When the thorny topic of AI came up, many said they were using it as a useful tool to “create efficiencies” while not letting it anywhere near the creative side of the business.

Screen highlights nine other major themes discussed during the two-day conference.

Powerhouse priorities

Top execs from Fremantle, Vuelta Group, Mediawan and TF1 explained how they work to support, finance and distribute European films of scale that are finding audiences.

“We want to be a Swiss Army Knife to the producers we work with, to offer as many tools as possible,” said David Atlan-Jackson, chief content officer at Vuelta Group, which owns Scanbox, which is producing Alexander Payne’s Danish-language Somebody Out There and will release the film in the Nordic region. He added Vuelta-owned Playtime is in talks to handle sales on the project. “Maybe we can offer theatrical distribution in one territory for example. We are always trying to find a cooperation between at least two of our territories.”

Bringing together production companies across countries allows access to national incentives and soft money mechanisms. “It took a while for the producers to trust each other and work together but it creates good efficiencies,” said Fremantle’s CEO of global drama, Christian Vesper.

Europe is almost the “perfect market”, according to Elisabeth d’Arvien, CEO of Mediawan Pictures. “It has great shooting locations, technical talent, tax incentives and subsidies and a set of regulations that, in terms of IP ownership, protects indie producers.” The collapse of the US presale market, she added, has “pushed us to be nimble and agile, and share IP acquisition and creation costs”.

The size of Mediawan means “we can support our producers through distribution and also through gap financing, [through] the last mile…We bring scale in terms of back office [services] and financing.”

And risks can be taken, equity can be invested. Vesper explained that Fremantle greenlit Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, produced by Fremantle-owned Element Pictures, before taking it to market. “We were on the hook for fully financing it had we not been able to finance it [via pre-sales].”

He believes creativity matters to his corporate owners, Germany’s RTL Group: “They fly me in to their corporate meetings to talk about celebrities and movies.”

A Killer view

As ever, an alternative perspective came from Christine Vachon, co-founder with Pam Koffler of New York-based Killer Films, celebrating its 30^th anniversary this year. “It’s an extremely American thing to grow your company as big as you can and sell it,” she said. “We were a little bit on that trajectory, because it felt like it’s what you were supposed to do. It’s the capitalist system.

“But at a certain point, Pam and I both realised we didn’t want to grow our company, that what we actually wanted to do was keep our company as small as possible. [We would] hire young people who would understand that the upward mobility in our company would be limited, but they would come in and bring a fresh perspective and fresh ideas. After a few years, they would go get other jobs and most of them are more successful than us now.

“That has kept our perspective youthful and energetic, and it’s also kept the company, something that we completely control.

“Am I the richest of my colleagues? Absolutely not,” she laughed. “But am I leading the kind of creative and professional life that is exactly what I want? Pretty much. I could complain like every other producer in this room about lack of resources but we have managed to create a company on our own terms.” 

Teresa Moneo’s next steps

After six years at Netflix in London, working in various roles in international and UK film, Moneo is now setting up as an independent producer on her own for now.

“I have a couple of projects myself, but I’m really led by talent to a degree,” she told the San Sebastian audience. “Being in London, we are fortunate enough to have a huge pool of writers, so I’m working with a couple of writers and I’m definitely going to be looking much more to Europe than I am the US. The biggest journey is the development journey, and making sure your script is right. It’s the part of the process that I really, really enjoy.”

Similarly, another exec now going it alone, Domingo Corral, formerly of Movistar Plus+, said he was focusing on his local talent pool in Spain.

“I would like to work here in Spain with the writers,” he told the audience. “There is a lot of talent here in Spain. I would like to make those stories as international as possible.”

As every speaker emphasised, Moneo said it was all about knowing who would pay to come and watch your film. “You need to really know your audience when you start a project, whatever channel distribution is going to be. I think people want to be surprised, and that is what cuts through everything, finding an originality that they have not seen.”

“The one consistent through-line is that we believe that for every single one of our projects there’s a clear audience,” said Tricky Knot CEO and co-founder Alex Tynion in another session. “It is a driving factor of our decision-making.”

“Cast is everything”

Producer Mike Goodridge of London’s Good Chaos was even more specific.

“Cast is everything, especially in the English language,” said the Ballad Of A Small Player producer. “Even at Protagonist [Pictures, where Goodridge was formerly CEO], I was all about the director and the cast the director could get. When we made The Lobster, [director] Yorgos [Lanthimos] was a CAA talent and suddenly there was a buzz in the agency, ‘Look at this crazy script and this crazy Greek director’.”

Agents would tell Goodridge, “‘You just don’t understand the volume that is coming into my not-even A-list client.’ [Actors] are getting so much when they reach a certain level. If they receive a project that is fresh and undeniable, they might just consider it.”

“YouTube is one of our key competitors,” is how Vuelta’s Atlan-Jackson put it of the battle for eyeballs. “The audience has become very picky and knowledgeable. We need to give them content they can respond to. And you have to stand out. That’s often with cast, offering [the audience] something they can see as a different proposition.” 

“We’re going to have to work out how to work with the YouTube phenomenon,” added Fremantle’s Vesper. “We’ve worked out how to work with the streamers, now on to YouTube.”

What the Next Narrative Africa Fund is looking for

Akunna Cook, founder of the Next Narrative Africa Fund, detailed the inspiration for, and development of, the nascent $40m film fund.

Since opening in July 2025, it has had applicants from across African countries, Europe, the US, the Caribbean, Turkey, Iran, Japan and more. Projects must meet certain criteria to qualify, including 50% of principal photography taking place on the continent.

Cook acknowledged a need for flexibility, as only Morocco, South Africa, and Mauritius offer incentives. “We don’t want ‘boy with a goat’ stories,” Cook added. “It doesn’t mean we won’t do a historical [project], but it has to resonate with a contemporary audience.”

Cook, who was previously US deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Joe Biden administration, launched the fund after seeing the under-exploited opportunity on the continent.

“It’s a strategic industry,” Cook said of the creative industries that were not being “strategically” invested in. “The creative industries are the largest employer of young people around the world, not just in Africa. Africa just happens to be the youngest continent with an average age of 19.”

She noted further factors such as “the ability to change the imagery around Africa, the ability to push much more capital into filmmaking and storytelling on the continent, and the ability to create a referral model for financing the creative industries” as the impetus for starting the fund.

There’s a growing pool of private equity – for the right project

Andrea Scarso, a partner in IPR.VC, said the Finland-based fund, launched 10 years ago, was working hard to prove the film industry was a sound investment.

“We are consistently raising money from institutional investors. Our investors are pension funds, insurance companies. It is not about offering them an involvement in films. We put ourselves in the same category of real estate, clean energy and so on. And then we invest in content, and we try to apply professionalism to doing that.”

Alex Tynion, who co-founded US-based Tricky Knot two years ago, says the company works with the next generation of movie stars. “We incubate their production companies,” she explained. “We invest, we provide operational support, we provide development support, and then ongoing finance and support.”

Tricky Knot now has eight partners, and backed Harris Dickinson and his directorial debut Urchin. “It’s the smallest project we’re making,” Tynion admitted, saying they wanted to be in the Harris Dickinson business, someone with a clear relationship to an audience. 

“Rather than putting all of our eggs in one basket, this year we have seven projects, and those seven projects are with separate production companies.

“We are creative in the way in which we think about financing films and leveraging brands and working with fiscal sponsors, working across countries,” Tynion added.

Change is happening fast

There is no point having a five-year plan, said Frederic Fiore, president of Logical Pictures, who pointed out that the last five years had seen the collapse of the distribution markets in both the US and South Korea.

“For us, it’s about trying to monetise cycles, market by market, and trying to monetise each cycle,” he explained. 

Tricky Knot’s Tynion agreed: “Every quarter, I make it a point to meet with all of the distributors, to meet with all the studios and try to understand what they’re looking for. It’s pretty incredible to see, even quarter by quarter, how much is changing with investment mandates and acquisition mandates across all of the independent studios and larger studios.”

Working with brands

Across the conference, various speakers noted how working creatively with brands is increasing and generating fresh avenues for investment.

“There is a lot of capital to unlock,” said Tricky Knot’s Tynion, whose recent brand collaborationsinclude working with Adidas on Baton from Danny Ramirez, a football film with David Beckham; and a brand partnership with CashApp. “There are a lot of folks who are entering this in a meaningful way, and we’re excited to keep exploring those options.”

However, the question of compromising creative vision was raised by David Taghioff, CEO of US producer-financier Library Pictures International. But Killer Films’ Vachon said it was similar to the box-checking one might need to undertake to access an incentive.

Vachon added that the filmmakers she works with would not compromise their vision but were also pragmatists, if visions can be aligned.

It can be win-win, said Iconoclast’s Robert Walak. Working with filmmakers can offer brands a more nuanced way of reaching a customer base that is savvy to product placement and a bombardment of logos.

Time for action in Latin America

Latin American cinema is brimming with talent, but economic constraints are calling for resourceful strategies. With public funding proving increasingly unstable, distribution channels growing more fragmented, and theatrical box office staying modest, producers are having to flex their creative muscles well beyond the screen.

Amazon MGM Studios’ Javiera Balmaceda, head of international originals Latin America, Canada, Australia, said a promising path ahead involves exploring genres less commonly linked to the region’s cinematic tradition, like action. Amazon is going to release the Mexican action thriller Venganza theatrically. Balmaceda stressed that theatrical distribution is “working for us as a multiplier versus a distractor”.

Producer Juan de Dios Larraín, CEO and co-founder of Chile’s Fabula, agreed. “There is room for action and we are working towards that with Pablo Larraín, Amat Escalante. We need to move forward with ideas,” he said.

“We have explored the past, politics, and all that happened in Latin America, many times. We have seen it in Chile, in Brazil, in Mexico with the narco world. But it’s probably time to move on and focus on productions that have international appeal. At Fabula we are exploring adult comedies and action.”

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