During the Toronto International Film Festival, Universal Film & Television Journal’s Amir Ganjavie interviewed Anick Poirier an independent freelancer in international sales who has over 35 years of industry experience with a background working for studios (10 years in Home Video at Disney, CINAR, E-One for Séville for 18 years, and then Sphere Media Productions for four years).
Amir Ganjavie, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): What is your definition of a good movie?
Anick Poirier (AP): It’s interesting because the way that I’ve handled selecting films is very driven by passion. Falling in love with the film, having a film that speaks to your heart, having a film that you’re not questioning yourself, “Is this credible?” “Are you taken out of the story because you don’t believe how the story is being told?” A film needs to charm you. You need to emotionally connect with the film. And that’s what makes the audience fall in love with films. A good film for some could be an ordinary film for others. When I select films and say, okay, we want this film for X and X reasons, it’s a question of saying, am I capable of being able to defend the film and explain to people why this could work for them?
It’s a very wide question, but it’s a very wide answer for something like that because there’s no formula. We’re into creation, we’re into storytelling. It’s an art. And art, you can’t put it in cookie-cutter mode. Each film has its own voice. Then you have the bigger films that are formulaic. Marvel films, for example, which is fine, but I have no interest in that. I find that there are really interesting perspectives in independent cinema, and that’s really what I’ve destined my professional life to promote.
(UM): I talked to some distributors and they told me that if they see a film and there are some classical music elements, they feel that it might be more successful for distribution or the festival circuit, is this something you’ve noticed?
(AP): It can be, but on the other hand, lately, we’ve seen a lot of classical music films and films about conductors. There’s one here. Once you’ve said, oh my God, this works, everyone goes towards that idea, and then you have many replicas until the idea gets used up and it’s no longer of interest. So, the talent is finding films that are different and have a different perspective. Look at Parasite, the filmmaking, amazing directing, beautiful camera, wonderful acting, and original story. You didn’t know what was happening there. For me, that’s a masterpiece.
When I get really excited by a project, it’s because there’s something. There’s a strong message and it’s a message that could speak widely to people, like strong voices for women or strong voices for LGBTQ. Like Billy Elliot. Billy Elliot when it launched, was a film that charmed you. But there have been people in the past and after that saying, it’s like Billy Elliott, there’s only one Billy Elliott. Right? It’s like Incendies. We had Incendies, we sold Incendies internationally. I remember I was trying to pre-sell Incendies to buyers, but no one wanted it. After it went to Venice and after Tiff buyers were lining up in our office to buy the film and the film worked. It had an amazing soundtrack, it had an amazing message, but it also was something emotionally striking. And that’s something, that’s the power of the film.
(UM): And do you find that it’s becoming a problem with people’s ideologies coming through and their desire to be seen as good where they are trying to not just entertain but educate?
(AP): You have to be careful about educating versus telling people how they should think. I think that’s very different. We’re in a type of world where people are comforting themselves in their own beliefs. They’re listening to the news that they want to hear and they’re going towards that type of information. People are segregating themselves and they’re doing that to themselves.
I saw this film Iranian film, Achilles, it was interesting because it wasn’t a perfect film, but there was a really interesting message. (It closed with the text: “Dedicated to the people of Iran who can no longer tolerate the walls.”) There can be a lot of politics in cinema and I don’t have an issue with that. If it makes people think, why not? Is it good or bad? It depends on how it’s done, how it’s approached, and how the message is delivered. If it moves the people and if it strikes an emotional chord, then that means they’ve succeeded. That’s how I see it.
(UM): What have you noticed to be the main challenges to distribution within Canada?
(AP): Well, first of all, I’ve done more international than local distribution. I can give you my perspective on local distribution. Canada is a very big country. Culturally, there are two solitudes: Quebec and the rest of Canada and the languages. There are many new cultures coming into Canada, making it more fruitful in terms of idea exchange. Like we’re here in TIFF, the cinemas are full of people watching Iranian films. But they’re only watching them for two weeks and the rest of the year, they’re not interested in independent cinema. I think that’s very sad. And that’s always been the situation and now it’s even worse because people have less time.
People are busy and they’re very busy with the streamers. Cinema has lost its value to the eye of the public. They’re not willing to pay the money. Although Barbie and Oppenheimer have proven differently this year, bringing people back to the cinema experience, I’m not sure if they liked it so much because the ones that were brought back to the cinema experience either had someone who was talking beside them or had someone eating popcorn and it was disturbing them and people are used to the comfort of their homes. There’s a challenge there. The experience is quite expensive going to the cinema as you’re parking, you’re buying two tickets, and you’re buying popcorn. Everything is really expensive.
I find that it’s hard to find distributors like Canadian distributors that are able to do the job because it’s expensive. When you’re a distributor, you acquire films, you pay for them, and then you build up your whole marketing. You load up the investment for the first weekends because that’s how it works. And then if there’s been a streak of really terrible weather, and then it’s a beautiful weekend, all the money that you’ve lined up, you could put it directly in the garbage and that’s where it’s going to go because it’s very dependent on bad weather. It thrives on bad weather. We had a really terrible summer in terms of weather. It was the fires in Quebec, it was raining, and the cinemas did much better than people had expected because people said, “God, what are we going to do?” And then, went to the cinema.
(UM): And what about in Quebec where the industry is more supported but even established filmmakers like Xavier Dolan are leaving?
(AP): Our group redistributed Xavier’s last four or five films. So, I can tell you about Xavier. First of all, Xavier is young. Every year he had a film. Xavier’s been very lucky to have that streak. At one point, he went up and up and up and up, but his film before the last was maybe not the success he expected. I think he just got tired and he made that statement from a very spontaneous point of view. Maybe he planned it, but I don’t think he did. It’s like Miyazaki who said this is my last film three films ago. It’s very common that they want to get attention and therefore they say, “This is my last film. I’m so upset with this business.” These people are filmmakers. It’s in their veins. They can’t not do films. So, Xavier said what he said, he meant it, but I think he’ll change his mind.
(UM): And filmmakers like Monia Chokri who are always at Cannes or Sundance, is it important to Quebec audiences when movies premiere at the festivals for the box office?
(AP): Quebec is interesting because Quebec has its own ingrained star system. Sundance is okay, but Cannes is something that stands out more. It’s good to have these festival laurels. But it’s more of who’s acting in it, they want to go see the stars that they recognize. That’s the element that makes Quebec people want to go see the film. They want to see the stars that they know. They want to have an emotional connection. That works for Quebec. For the rest of Canada, it’s different. It’s not like, oh my god, there’s a Canadian film let’s run to it. They just don’t. Blackberry was a success for Canada. It had some good stars, so that was good. The festivals are really important because it’s a curation. It shows that professionals in the business who do this and evaluate films have specifically selected the film.
(UM): Is it easy to distribute Canadian films internationally?
(AP): First off, it’s hard to distribute films internationally. I could tell you I’m the one who distributed the most Canadian films or the most Quebec films in the world. It’s extremely hard. But it depends on the film. Foreign film has its merit. When we sold Xavier Dolan’s Mommy, it sold all over the world. When we sold, It’s Only the End of The World, also from Dolan, it was pre-sold all over the world. Do we have those at this point? No. There are emergent filmmakers happening. It’s not easy to sell anything internationally, anywhere, anyhow now. It’s really difficult because what you’re seeing in Canada is replicating all over the world. Distributors are being challenged. They’re competing against streamers. They’re competing against big projects that have budgets and the independent film is being pushed aside. So, your independent film needs to have either amazing buzz or has to be extremely original. It’s not because it’s a Canadian film, it’s because the film has its own merit and has been recognized.
But in Canada lately, the genre films are doing okay. They’re stunning. Atom Egoyan is here. He has this film Seven Veils. Monia Chokri has a following, but it’s not easy. They’re not doing the numbers that they used to be doing. The Canadian films have a little bit of export help from Telefilm Canada but they’re competing against European films that are extremely supportive and sometimes that’s difficult to compete.
(UM): I had a conversation with a Canadian festival director and he feels the problem with Canadian cinema is that it’s too polite that it doesn’t push boundaries. He says that this comes from what gets funded from Telefilm. I’m curious if you have any opinions or ideas on this.
(AP): Festival programmers have an editorial line that they need to fill. They need to say, we’ve discovered this talent, and a voice or something a little bit more on the edgy side will make that happen and that has merit, but those don’t necessarily work with the public as well. Everyone has their own interest in this business. The festivals want to have something funky that stands out, that’s controversial, and that will stir up their whole programming. When distributors are taking films, sometimes it’s great to have that, but it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to be that lucrative either. It’s a delicate question. It depends on the perspective you’re seeing in a film now.
(UM): What is your perspective on how the streamers’ arrival has changed distribution?
(AP): Oh, it’s changed enormously and COVID made the people who didn’t know how the streamers work have their grandchildren, or whoever, show them, so now they’ve discovered it. The streamers are really focused on series, they’re not that focused on film. It’s series more than films that people are going to see on streamers. And it’s made it difficult for independent cinema because the streamers are looking for something that fits in the parameters and if you open Netflix, it’s all the same crap. It has different languages, but that’s my personal view. They’re like studios now. They bring the talent. They basically identify directors and then they bring them in-house and they direct for them, it’s part of the mechanism, it’s almost a sausage factory.
(UM): Okay. Last question, I saw that after COVID, there was a discussion that with some successful stories, Netflix and other streamers were no longer looking for only English movies, they’re open to more international movies with subtitles. I’m curious if this was something really happening, for example, in terms of Quebec films that had subtitles.
(AP): It’s interesting because I’ve seen, I don’t know if it’s about streamers. Streamers have participated, but since Parasite and Minari won prizes at the Oscars, it’s opened up the eyes of Americans to being a little more friendly towards subtitles. Because when I was selling catalogs years before, the US was a challenge. After all, it was a foreign language. And then you saw distributors saying, “Oh, no, no, no, we’re open to foreign language films.” They’re seeing that more films are coming from Asia, that there’s a whole Korean wave of films. And the streamers continued that because they needed to open up and add more, they needed content. They’re so thirsty for content that they have to bring content from overseas. And so that opened up in the US which is quite surprising.
(UM): Is there anything else you like to add?
(AP): We need to be loyal to cinema. We have to continue going to see films and we all need to purposely say, “Hey, I’m doing it for the love of cinema.” And we all need to fall back in love with it.
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