After five days of wheeling and dealing at a financiers club and pitch session as well as schmoozing at an array of parties and screenings, Hot Docs!, Toronto’s fourth annual international documentary festival, wrapped March 23 with both Canadian and foreign attendees noting the festival is beginning to carve out a niche for itself in the market circuit.

High Road Productions’ vp television David Ostriker says the Toronto company ‘did some real business’ at the festival and predicts that if Hot Docs! can attract more buyers from the u.k., Australia, Japan and Germany, it will become an active deal-making forum.

‘As a selling strategy there is a potential momentum which could be built by opening a dialogue at Hot Docs!, closing it at Banff, with mip in between,’ says Ostriker.

Registration for Hot Docs! ’97 was stepped up from last year’s 500 participants to 750 reps, 15% of whom came from outside Canada.

The financiers club, a matchmaking service linking buyers and producers with projects in development, was the chief vehicle used to drive up the market orientation of this year’s festival, but, according to the festival’s executive director Debbie Nightingale, numbers fell short of expectation, with roughly only 40 commissioning editors in attendance.

However, Ostriker says it’s just a part of the festival’s growing pangs. ‘In terms of the market element, Hot Docs! is where Banff was five years ago, and at the rate it’s growing it shows potential.’

George Matta, president of Montreal-based Mundovision, made good use of the pre-mip timing of the festival, testing the waters among European buyers on new properties the company is launching in Cannes.

At Hot Docs!, Matta scored offers from Canal+ and Bravo! for Kalamazoo’s Hollywood Rated ‘R’, a $500,000 50-minute exploration of the Hollywood b movie machine and its million-dollar home video industry.

Matta also generated some buzz around the Mundovision/Kuive Productions’ doc on an infamous Middle East terrorist, Carlos: Man, Myth or Monster. The 50-minute $400,000 program has just wrapped production and a number of European broadcasters requested screening tapes.

The timing of Hot Docs! works well to gauge early interest, says Matta, who now has an idea of who to target at mip.

Vancouver ‘s Eva Wunderman will be following up leads at a&e, Turner Original Productions and cbc on two projects she shopped at the financier’s club: an $80,000 per half-hour series on weird and unusual homes in North America and a biography on Leslie Neilsen, both coproductions with Yaletown Entertainment.

‘The festival was bigger and better this year,’ says Wunderman, who makes an annual stop at Banff and says Hot Docs! is beginning to offer some of the same market opportunities.

Joan Prowse of Toronto’s Cinefocus Canada has been producing docs for almost 10 years and found the financiers club useful to gauge interest in potential projects before she spends the time and money to pursue them further at other market events.

She also looked to Hot Docs! to pick up the last 25% of financing on the one-hour $150,000 to $175,000 Beauty and the Beach, a history of the swimsuit, which met with bites from Turner Original Productions and Radio-Canada, where it is now being considered for a late August strand. Jerry McIntosh at CBC Newsworld’s Roughcuts’ also asked to see a screening tape.

‘The quality of the projects was outstanding,’ says a&e’s Amy Briamonte. She says the festival is part of her strategy to keep up to date on what’s in development in Canada. She met with numerous producers including High Road’s Ostriker. ‘It gave me the opportunity to look at his development slate and talk about projects we might develop together,’ she says. Of particular interest, she says, were the Toronto company’s Lord High Executioner and Giants, both historical programs in development.

European producers will foster the newly formed contacts made at Hot Docs!, says John Marshall, whose u.k.-based media consulting company organized a contingent from Economic Union countries.

‘Our producers came away with deals in progress and discussions which will come to fruition in coproductions,’ says Marshall, who is already planning to work through Telefilm Canada to invite Canadian producers to Docs Without Frontiers, a five-day workshop and pitching session held every August in Denmark.

‘Hot Docs was the first step and now we have to make this a two-way street,’ he says, noting that tvo’s Rudy Buttignol expressed interest in the Danish event.

Plans to bring North American and foreign producers together to talk business are also in the works at the English Language Coproduction Steering Committee, which held its second meeting in tandem with Hot Docs! The group decided to create a documentary forum involving a day-long pitching session and is now looking at ways to finance the venture, targeting Commonwealth partnership initiatives, Telefilm and other funding avenues in the u.s. and Australia.

The Hot Docs! pitching session left Andrew Munger and Mala Rayner of Toronto’s Ultramagnetic Productions, new players on the documentary block, with promising financing leads.

They pitched Xanadu: In Search of Domestic Perfection, a one-hour examination of the quest for monster dream homes. Using archival footage, original material, animation and interviews, the $200,000 project is Munger’s second film (his first film Make Some Noise took the special jury prize at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1994) and marks Rayner’s first coproducing credit.

After the pitch, Buttignol scheduled a meeting with the producers to talk about the possibility of airing it on A View From Here, the nfb requested a written proposal and there’s funding potential at a&e.

Christina Craton and Tim Schwab of First Light Films International also went up to bat with a one-hour program, Geography of Nowhere, based on a book by James Kunstler, an entertaining look at the evolution of North American cities.

The pitch generated more interest than Schwab expected among European broadcasters such as arte, leading him to reconsider his plan to shoot only in North America if he can garner some front-end money to help put together the $300,000 film. In addition to the pitching workshop, Schwab, with 15 years experience producing in the u.s., says the networking opportunities of the festival are crucial.

‘There aren’t many opportunities for documentary filmmakers to get together,’ says Schwab, ‘and at mixed festivals our projects often get overshadowed by all the features and drama series.’