Films Transit International has announced it is set to start making its documentaries available for public viewing on the web through a new strategic partnership with Scottish VOD specialist Distrify.
“A new partnership will make the Films Transit documentary catalogue available for instant online streaming via audience-based distribution”, the companies said in a joint statement on Saturday.” Under the deal, a first group of Films Transit titles will be put online on January 1, 2012. These will include Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb, Ron Mann’s Twist, Heddy Honigmann’s Forever and Meema Spadola’s Breasts. As well as Christian Frei’s Oscar-nominated War Photographer, IDFA winners such as Rick Minnich’s Forgetting Dad and Luc Cote and Patricio Henriquez’s You Don’t Like the Truth and Emmy Winners such as Jeff Stimmel’s The Art of Failure. Top sellers such as Real Dirt on Farmer John, The Last Victory, the multiple award-winning Steam of Life, the controversial exploration of Michael Moore’s filming techniques Manufacturing Dissent will also go up online. There are also plans to create an online ‘The Films of…’ section, showcasing collected works by the same filmmaker.
Steps
“We’ve got quite a big catalogue, so we’ll do it in steps”, says Films Transit chief Jan Rofekamp. “We’ll also keep a window of about a year between a film’s premiere and putting it onto the internet. Rofekamp said negotiations began following a demonstration by Distrify at the Nordisk Panorama in Denmark in September. “I saw the presentation and went up to them and said, ‘I think you have found a deal’ and I sat down with them half an hour later”, he reveals.
Word-of-mouth
Distrify’s direct-to-audience distribution allows distributors and filmmakers to set up their own VOD platforms or to offer VOD from a film’s existing website by embedding a film trailer with built-in rent and buy buttons. “Most documentaries are discovered by word-of-mouth – Distrify turns digital word-of-mouth into a sales mechanism, allowing people to pay and watch a new film the moment a friend shares a trailer or the moment they see a trailer embedded in a blog-post”, says Distrify co-founder Peter Gerard, who will be at IDFA with partner Andy Green from November 20-22. “Distrify is the first Video-on-Demand service that enables film companies to promote their film on all platforms at the same time, from the cinema to a smartphone”, he adds.
Partnerships
The Scotland-based start-up has previously announced partnerships with British newspaper The Guardian and distributor Artificial Eye for a one-off film event, as well as the D-Word documentary community. “I have been looking for a long time for a site that enables people to share films”, says Rofekamp. He adds that he had looked into more established platforms like iTunes, but decided against using them for financial and control reasons. “iTunes isn’t a good deal. Also, it requires us to go aggregator, so you have no control of what happens to your films. All you can do is put it up there and that’s it”, he explains. “What I like about Distrify is that you can set up the site as you want and have control over the content.”
Stir
The move marks quite a departure for Montreal and New York-based Films Transit, one of the longest running sales agencies specialising in quality documentaries for theatrical release. Titles on its IDFA line-up include mid-length competition contender
The Next Life, Green Screen Competition titles
The Island President and
Bitter Seeds, Dutch competition film
Justice for Sale and
G-Spotting: A Story of Pleasure and Promise, which is screening in Reflecting Images. Rofekamp expects the announcement to create a bit of a stir in the documentary selling scene.
“A lot of colleagues talk about using the web, but everybody has been sitting on the fence a bit”, he says. “They ask, ‘is this something we can do ourselves, or something I do with partners or something I hand over to a third party’; nobody really knows what to do or has taken any decision.”
“We are the first major documentary sales agent to take a major decision and go with a worldwide platform”, he adds. “It’s a bit of a jump in the dark, but it’s an interesting one.”
By Melanie Goodfellow