Sunny Side of the Doc is the summertime chance within Europe to meet most of the vital movers and shakers in the documentary broadcast world. This, the 17th festival moved this year to La Rochelle from Marseilles, its usual home. La Rochelle is Marseilles in miniature so those used to the southern capital of France could make an easy transfer.
Less sprawling than Marseilles the Espace Encan at the Vieux Port allows for easy access to the commissioning editors who were plentiful and chase-able.
Kevin Dawson from IPU at RTE and Micheal O'Meallaigh TG4 were present for the European Broadcast Unit meeting and both remained around for the market. There was however a surprising lack of Irish Producers: Tile Films, Crossing the Line and Smirsh, all old hands. Tile were seeking co-productions and pre-buys for a three part series on 'Saving Civilisation' concerned with the double pronged regeneration of Europe from the Dark Ages by the Celts of the North West and the Arab from the South East, they were seeking a budget of just under one million euro. John Murray was seeking funding for a sumptuously shot doco on an Indian Tiger in Rajasthan and was also seeking to sell past product. Smirsh were seeking co-producers and pre-buys for its new documentary following both the process of construction of a Noah-like Seed Vault being built next year in the Arctic and also the process of the duplicates of all the world's existing food seeds being gathered for it, SVT Sweden and ARTE showed healthy interest.
What was uncanny was the lack of new Irish blood. Are the doco whipper snappers not looking to the international market? Marseilles used bring plenty of Irish producers out of
the woodwork, if even for the sake of the suntan.
From the smaller stations there seemed to be a content shift away from obsession with strands and slots and more willingness to simply show the best available programming be they stand-alone docs or series. The bigger stations appeared ever more impenetrable with their need for iconic and extremely clear programme ideas: The Ice Age, Scenario 2100. Yet Channel 4's Peter Dale enthused much about FourDocs which seems a possible route for persons wanting to invade the UK clever doc sector but it seems only Big Brother soundalike people can crack that market. Overall there is little access anymore to UK market to Irish documentary makers even if their subject matter has global intent.
A large slice of the Espace Encan Hall were stalls of eager youngsters flogging HD machines, massive screens of perfect fish floating, camels weeping, perfect Argentines shooting perfect goals. As if in reaction to every jacked-up blogs-mad, backpacker being a could-a-be doco maker, HD is here to sift. On the display screens across the entire festival HD dominated which meant when you spied for example a cheap screen with Cambodian peasants being followed by some wobbling PD150 - no matter how tribally sexy they might be - they were cutting no mustard in comparison to an opposite screen showing perfect Touregs sauntering across the desert in gleamy HD. This must surely spell the end for badly made good films and the proliferation of well made mediocre to dreadful films.
Stories will surely have to become prettier to indulge the full pixels of HD.
Email: Colum Stapleton
