Veteran doc distributor Jan Rofekamp is this year’s winner of the Doc Mogul Award, to be presented May 4 during the 17th annual Hot Docs bonanza (April 29 to May 9) in Toronto.

‘I’m of course very happy with this,’ says Rofekamp. ‘And I think it’s a good thing they celebrate someone from my profession [distribution]. We are the guys behind the scenes who always have to pay for the lunches and never get invited anywhere. We are the work horses,’ he says, chuckling.

Rofekamp came to Canada from Holland and hung up his shingle – Films Transit International – in Montreal in 1982 when the market was ripe for independent fiction distributors. He had a huge hit with Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, just before that market bottomed out in the late ’80s with the birth of the mini-majors (such as the former Miramax).

Rofekamp quickly refocused his passion on docs in the early ’90s and has since distributed titles from the obscure to household names, such as Shelley Saywell’s international human-interest docs to the launch of the restored version of the 1970 Rolling Stones tour movie Gimme Shelter. He has been an outspoken voice of the doc genre ever since.

Regarding the state of the doc industry today, he says: ‘There’s one huge problem, to put it in a nutshell, if you look at the supply and demand in the documentary business. There’s an insane number of documentaries from everywhere and there’s no way the [global] broadcast market can absorb this, and it’s still the only market that pays any money.’

Rofekamp says there’s a glut of ‘auteur’ docs for sale arouind the world annually (5,000 to 7,000 titles), but notes that ‘there’s only a place for maybe 300 or 400 of them. [The buyers] look for the Oscar nominations and films that get festival exposure, and occasionally there’s a wild card. It’s tough because of the volumes.’

Films Transit takes on 20 to 30 new docs for distribution each year. To merit the risk, Rofekamp says he has to feel he will be able to pitch the film with the same level of enthusiasm as the filmmaker does, for about two years. And his criteria are simple – he has to like the film and believe it has relevance so that he feels he’s doing something useful as he pitches.

As for buyers, over the last couple of years Rofekamp has seen television buyers lose the autonomy they once had.

‘We used to go to a market or a festival and the buyer would say to us, ‘What a wonderful film, we’ll buy it and we’ll worry about where to put it later.” Now, he says, buyers are looking specifically for programs that fit their doc slots, and as feature doc slots come and go, there is less opportunity to sell a doc simply because it’s good.

Rofekamp underlines that pubcasters are still the only buyers for ‘real’ docs. ‘Public broadcasting is the only broadcast branch which supports these kinds of documentaries, and I see them slowly going down the drain because of a lack of funding and political will in almost every country,’ he says, adding that Canada is no exception.

Facing the current decline in television budgets and the changes to traditional broadcasting methods, Rofekamp is especially pleased to see a distributor receive the Doc Mogul Award at this year’s Hot Docs, both because he’s unsure what distribution will look like in five years, and because he feels it is an important link in the system.

‘The sales agents are filters and the buyers see us as filters. We get advice requests from a zillion film festivals,’ he says. ‘They just trust us.’

Rofekamp believes distributors are still important, but he’s not sure they will exist as a business in five years.

As he sees broadcasters move away from traditional broadcast and into a more on-demand mode, he believes sales will change from single program sales for decent-sized licence fees to smaller sales that come in bits and pieces, which will only work if a company creates volume. This means problems for companies like his that carry a small catalog.

The vet also says that online distribution may be the way of the future, but warns that only docs about ‘animals, sports, music, adventure and sex’ will work in the mobile platform. ‘So if you deliver to those markets, you’ll make some money, but if you try a documentary about homeless people in Bangladesh, I don’t think so.’

Aside from his current success, his talent for sales and his love for the documentary form, Rofekamp stays in the world of doc distribution because it’s a community he has come to love.

‘I find the documentary world quite a nice world,’ he says. ‘The filmmakers are good people – people you [can] have conversations with because they’re smart. A very nice group of 400 to 500 people worldwide buy these types of docs for primetime and it’s a lovely group. It’s a pleasure to be with these people.’

With files from Lindsay Gibb