Much more than a festival, Hot Docs, now in its sixth year, is very much a haven for Canadian doc producers to foster international copros and financing opportunities.

‘We didn’t initiate the festival with the intent to make it a market, but we found that it was happening anyway,’ says executive director Debbie Nightingale.

She says that around the third year, they really began to see that it was important to the filmmakers that international buyers be present, and in many cases, they were already coming on their own because of the high quality of films.

This year, the festival has bolstered its efforts to woo international buyers and is confirming the attendance of distributors, programmers and commissioning editors from many European countries, including vrt in Belgium, La Cinquieme and Canal Plus/Docstar in France, Channel 4 and the bbc in the u.k., and for the first time, a Japanese buyer from public broadcaster nhk.

There is also a considerable presence from u.s. broadcasters like a&e, cnn and The Learning Channel as well as niche specialty buyers from American Movie Classics and Real tv.

Following is what some of the international buyers are saying they will be scoping out this year in Toronto.

AMC shakes off the dust

Marc Juris, senior vp original programming at American Movie Classics, says he tries to find producers with a unique sensibility to create projects that will make classic movies resonate with a younger audience.

‘I want to shake the dust off of us with a little bit of riskier programming. We are not going to move ourselves forward as a network unless we find interesting cool topics that will generate a little press and get viewers to think differently about us,’ says Juris.

Although amc does participate in coproductions, Juris says when there is a project that they feel is important enough they will often commission it and carry 100% of the financial burden.

Aside from the obvious biographies on Hollywood personalities which amc does, Juris looks for what he calls their ‘Tiffany’ documentaries: one-hour or feature-length, high-profile projects, with sometimes controversial themes such as blacklisting or censorship.

amc is also looking for unique edgy series, programming like The Hollywood Fashion Machine (13 x 26 minutes) produced by World of Wonder Productions based in l.a.

One-off opps

Documentary program executive Andrew Solomon at Docstar, the international distribution subsidiary of Canal Plus in France, says Docstar will be a major partner on approximately 60 hours of coproductions this year.

‘We look at half-hour and 52-minute series, however the easiest program length is really a 52-minute one-off. Exceptionally we do look at 90 minutes, but that is rarer,’ says Solomon.

Docstar looks for programs on wildlife, history, science, biography, adventure and people and places.

Searching for commissions, acquisitions and copros for cnn’s news/issues doc strand Perspective, Jennifer Hyde, director of development says they do single-hour programs in almost every case, and that only in an extraordinary situation would they consider a multipart series.

Of the docs airing on cnn, approximately 25% come from international sources, with the lion’s share of that originating in Canada and the u.k.

Hyde says that it can be a challenge to find programming ahead of time that will be relevant to what is happening around the world on a daily basis, so she looks for ongoing themes.

‘What’s so difficult with documentaries,’ says Hyde, ‘is that by the time you have an idea approved, in the pipeline and then produced and on the schedule, the event which precipitated the documentary in the first place is over and done with.’

Series seekers

Ann Julienne, head of acquisitions and international coproductions at La Cinquieme, is interested in both 52-minute one-offs and half-hour series featuring wildlife, history, discovery, people and cultures, and science themes.

She says that in the past, La Cinquieme has generally brought around 20% of the financing to the table on coproductions, but that they are looking to be stronger partners on projects in the future.

For the most part, half-hour doc series are not in great demand by broadcasters, but Julienne feels that this format works well on her channel. ‘For us as an educational, knowledge-based channel, half-hours are a really good format for daytime,’ she says.

Even though there are a lot of half-hour series out there, she says it is getting harder to find what she is looking for. ‘I find that the quality of half-hour series is getting shoddier. Maybe that means the genre is dying out, but I think that when they are well done, half-hours can be really good television,’ says Julienne.

She also says that she is in search of 13-minute series for their daytime programming blocks.

Mary Barlow, managing director of u.k. distributor Jane Balfour Films Int’l, will be at Hot Docs searching out 52-minute one-offs as well as three- and four-part one-hour series.

At mip-tv this year, Barlow figures they launched about 25 new documentary properties, of which about 30% came from the u.k.

She says that generally programmers are much less outward looking when acquiring product. ‘It’s getting tougher because broadcasters are under more pressure from the new channels coming up around them, and they often have to be more ratings driven, which means that they are very interested in their own domestic stories,’ says Barlow.

Commissioning between 50 and 60 hours of programming per year, Amy Briamonte, supervising producer, doc specials at a&e, is on the watch for one-hour contemporary, single-topic docs to air as part of their Investigative Reports series as well as two-hour, feature-length projects for their Sunday Night Special Presentation strand.

‘I am always astonished by the wealth of really great stuff out there. And I am frequently frustrated by how few hours there are in a day that we get to program,’ says Briamonte. ‘I think there is a big explosion right now in documentary, and people are being more daring, more truthful than ever before. It’s a great time to be making documentaries’