Week 17 - 2022

Weekly Updates
Written By Sarah Mosses

Intro

It’s been a busy few weeks, including another trip to NYC, new clients, and new team members. I’m holding myself accountable for coming back to my weekly updates. It’s been a fantastic week, I’m feeling energized about the number of wonderful projects we have the privilege to be supporting at the moment, and hope to see you at some of our festivals over the coming weeks.

✅ Sundance Film Festival: London lineup announced

It has been wonderful to work with the Picturehouse team to support the launch of the Sundance Film Festival: London 2022 taking place from 9 to 12 June at Picturehouse Central, presented in association with Adobe. The festival will present 12 feature films from the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, U.S.A., selected for London by the Sundance Institute programming team in collaboration with Picturehouse. The festival will open on Thurs 9th June with Good Luck to you, Leo Grande, featuring the incredible Emma Thompson. The festival will close four days later on 12th June with the UK premiere screening of British filmmaker Jim Archer’s feature Brian and Charles.

Alongside the opening and closing night films, the festival will present a selection of remarkable and wide-ranging filmmaking. Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul is an American dark comedy satire written, directed and produced by Adamma Ebo in her directorial debut, and featuring a stellar cast that includes Regina Hall, Sterling K. Brown and Nicole Beharie. Other titles include Resurrection (Dir. Andrew Semans), A Love Song (Dir. Max Walker-Silverman), Sharp Stick (Dir. Lena Dunham), Watcher (Dir. Chloe Okuno), Fire of Love (Dir. Sara Dosa, winner of the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival), The Princess (Dir. Ed Perkins), We Met in Virtual Reality (Dir. Joe Hunting), Free Chol Soo Lee (Dir. Julie Ha and Eugene Yi), and Hatching (Dir. Hanna Bergholm).

The festival’s first dedicated Industry Programme - curated by Wendy Mitchell - will run alongside the festival’s public screenings and events featuring funders Eva Yates (BBC Films), Farhana Bhula (Film4), Producers John Battsek, Alison Owen, Ameenah Ayub Allen, and Filmmakers Prano Bailey-Bond, Rubikah Shah. The festival is thrilled to welcome iconic US producer Christine Vachon to London to deliver an in-person industry keynote talk.

✅ Sheffield DocFest MeetMarket projects announced

I’ve been attending Sheffield DocFest since 2008 and have sat on both sides of the table at the MeetMarket (as a pitching Producer and Decision Maker). It’s one of the foremost industry events to find collaborators for projects. It’s the place where Johanna Schwartz and I met with Janet Pierson to pitch They Will Have To Kill Us First in 2014, and where she fell in love with our trailer. It set the course for our World Premiere at SXSW 2015.

It was therefore a delight this week to be able to announce the 35 projects that have been selected for the 2022 MeetMarket taking place June 27-28th. New work will be presented from directors Chico Pereira (Donkeyote), Kim Longinotto (Divorce Iranian Style), Kimberly Reed (Dark Money), Mark Cousins (The Story of Looking), Mehrdad Oskouei (Sunless Shadows), and Paul Sng (Poly Styrene: I am a Cliché) and from producers David Felix Sutcliffe ((T)error), Ina Fichman (Fire of Love), Kat Mansoor (COW, Rebellion), and Natasha Dack Ojumu (Dying to Divorce, The Lovers and the Despot). 

The MeetMarket selection also includes eleven first-time feature directors including Asmahan Bkerat following a nomadic Bedouin family in Concrete Land, Daniel Chein blending vérité with cyberpunk-inspired science fiction in Time Hunters, and Ragini Nath & Chinmoy Sonowal environmental project Our Hoolocks. 

Around 300 decision makers from 20 countries are expected with execs including those from Netflix, ARTE, DR, VPRO, SVT, POV, SBS, New York Times, ESPN, Al Jazeera, as well as all UK broadcasters and funds confirmed.

To learn more about the MeetMarket, and wider industry programming at Sheffield, I hosted a Twitter Space with Charlie Phillips, EP, Industry Participation. You can listen to the recording of this session, and look out for further live chats on the Sheffield Twitter feed over the coming weeks.

✅ Fashion Reimagined Partnership meeting

We are thrilled that Fashion Reimagined will have its World Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on 11th June. To prepare for the launch of our Impact Campaign, this week we hosted a partnership meeting with leaders in the fashion and sustainability sectors. I love hosting these kinds of coalition meetings, sometimes called a stakeholder event, or brains trust, whereby we invite a range of leading organizations to advise on our developing strategies and the ways in which we can collaborate.

The enthusiasm in the room was fantastic. Each partner provided their feedback on our plans and contributed ideas about screening events, additional partners, influencer engagement, and more. We listened to their needs, what the current challenges and opportunities are in the sustainable fashion industry and how we can further engage both brands, policymakers, and consumers over the coming year.

If you are interested in being involved in the campaign for Fashion Reimagined, please reach out. We would love to speak with further fashion editorial partners, brands, and fashion/textile investors who are passionate about a more sustainable future for fashion.

✅ Positive Funding Meeting & celebrating team performance

We had the pleasure to interview with the trustees of a major UK Foundation this week to discuss some of our upcoming projects. It marked a major milestone for one of our team members. Alana Jeffery, our Head of Strategy, joined our team during the first week of lockdown in March 2020. As part of her personal development plan (which each team member has as part of their line management 1:1s), we had put a focus on fundraising potential for impact projects. The trustee’s meeting this week was the culmination of a year’s worth of strategic development on a range of climate-themed films, detailed research on the current fundraising landscape in the UK, and drafting materials to engage funders to support our new non-profit foundation.

We are keeping our fingers crossed for a positive outcome on this round, but whatever the result, I’m super proud of Alana’s growth over the past 2 years and her proactive approach to building relationships with Foundation partners for our projects. We have frequently ‘hired for potential’ and it was apparent from the first meeting with Alana that she had incredible potential. I can’t wait to see what she achieves next!

Do you have a personal development plan for each member of your team? Do you set annual targets based on personal development in addition to business deliverables? How else can you encourage your team members to increase their skills?

Feedback this week

“You are such an inspiration to us all” - A friend unexpectedly said this to me this week whilst at a party as a reflection on what I’ve achieved so far this year. It made me tear up slightly. A reminder to take notice of each small compliment as it happens.

Sarah Mosses
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