The leaders of Vancouver-based Screen Siren Pictures are leaning into the current market interest in coproductions to strengthen their 2023 production and development slate, using their 25-year history of productions to attract a wide range of partners.

“Right now, with the recession looming and everything else, consolidation and coproductions seem to be the word on the street, and [when] I came out of Content London, that really hit home… everybody talked about coproduction and consolidation,” Screen Siren Pictures producer Christine Haebler tells Playback Daily.

Haebler has been concentrating on new business and partnerships since October to get the prodco’s next year lined up and says that they’ve been seeking “a lot of international coproductions.”

“We’re very comfortable in the international coproduction space. We’ve done it many times before; we often coproduce even in Canada,” she says, noting they’re seeking producing and financing partnerships for international copros with England, Germany, Mexico, and potentially South American countries such as Chile or Colombia.

The company’s development slate includes Marie Clements’ feature film Tombs, based on her play Tombs of the Vanishing Indian, and her limited series McLean Brothers; Kyle Rideout and Josh Epstein’s sci-fi series Cage the Fallen; a limited series adaptation of Freya North’s novel Little Wing, which will be set in Scotland and London; and a series adaptation of Chilean-Canadian playwright and actor Carmen Aguirre’s novel Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, with Aguirre and Canadian playwright Dennis Foon attached as screenwriters.

“We [also] have a new feature film project that we’re jumping on board called Fado! with Gareth Wiley. He was Woody Allen’s producer and did about four movies with Woody and many other things,” says Haebler. “It’ll be shooting in Portugal, Lisbon and Vancouver, and that’s a comedy-drama. We’re out for a big actress but I can’t name who it is yet.”

She adds that they’re currently in conversation with CBC and other broadcasters about partnerships, as well as with U.K.-based prodco Endor Productions about doing multiple projects together.

Screen Siren Pictures was founded in 1997 by president and producer Trish Dolman and hit its 25th anniversary in November. It is best known for producing feature films like Marie Clements’ Bones of Crows, which is also being produced into a CBC miniseries; Stephen Campanelli’s Indian Horse; and Peter Chelsom’s Hector And The Search For Happiness.

The company has also produced documentaries like Dolman’s Citizen Bio and Eco-Pirate: The Story of Paul Watson, Kevin Eastwood’s British Columbia: An Untold History, and Ron Chapman’s Revival69: The Concert That Rocked The World, among others.

In 2009, Dolman joined forces with Haebler to spearhead the company. Their first film together was Michael Goldbach’s Daydream Nation. These days, business is bustling.

“We’re getting a lot of positive feedback about our work [and] the quality of our work. The creative partnerships that we have are with very talented and smart people like Marie, Graeme Manson, and Carmen Aguirre,” says Dolman.

The prodco is also in development on the feature film The Keeper, written by Manson with Helen Shaver set to direct and Alyssa Wapanatâhk attached as one of the lead roles. CAA is on board for the packaging and financing of the film.

“We’re developing projects that are ripe for partnerships, but then we also have a lot of people coming to us, so that’s exciting,” says Dolman.

For their 2023 content slate, they’re planning for “bigger-budgeted, elevated, featured documentaries [and] generally with a festival and/or theatrical release. And we’re doing premium series, generally, limited series on the doc space. We have a slate of all those things in development, and the mandate [is to] just chase quality. There are generally some socially conscious undertones thematically in the storytelling,” says Dolman.

“In the scripted space, we have a plate of feature films that got put to the side a bit during COVID, that we’re in the process of financing and getting off the ground. The intent with them is they’re either very commercial, or they’re indie arthouse films. And that’s going to be interesting to see what happens with that marketplace.”

Dolman has a positive outlook on the future of indie arthouse cinema, noting industry watchers have noticed “there’s actually a new audience that comes to arthouse cinema that got turned on by all this premium scripted television and it’s a younger audience.”

In 2023, they hope to be in production on Tombs and Fado! and “really amp up” development on projects. “It won’t be just a production year; 2022 was entirely production, we couldn’t handle [more]. Bones of Crows was so ambitious and so big that we really couldn’t do much else of anything,” says Haebler.

“This year, we did seven hours of content at a high level. That’s a lot, and that’s just on Bones of Crows, and then Trish did another four hours [in-house]. So, you look at it, that’s 11 hours of content. That’s a lot of content and we want to be hitting that [in 2023] as well.”

Image courtesy of Screen Siren Pictures. From left to right: Christine Haebler and Trish Dolman.