During the Red Sea International Film Festival (Red Sea IFF), Universal Cinema Film & TV Journal’s Amir Ganjavie was able to interview Alexis Hofmann, who has overseen acquisitions for Paris-based French distributor BAC Films since 2014, a company he joined as a programmer in 2006.
Amir Ganjavie, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): Can you speak a little about your work with BAC Films?
Alexis Hofmann (AH): We release between 8-10 films per year from all over the world in every genre. We’re working with already famous directors and strong auteurs such as Ruben Östlund. We did the Force Majeure, The Square, Triangle of Sadness. We are working with Park Chan-wook, we released The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave, which won Park Chan-wook the Best Director award at Cannes last year. We are also working with Kirill Serebrennikov. At the same time, we are involved with many first and second feature films to discover new talents and to follow them, movie after movie, and they are coming from all over the world. For example, we’ve got a second feature film by Cesar Diaz, who is coming from Guatemala, he won the Caméra d’Or with his first feature (Our Mothers). We’ve got a first movie from South Korea, and a second movie from Egypt. I’m in charge of the acquisition for the company, and since COVID, because the theaters were closed, we started to develop our own projects as a producer and we continue to co-produce movies. So now we launch our own projects from scratch, we develop the scripts, but my main activity is to find movies to distribute in France.
(UM): What’s the importance of Red Sea IFF for you?
(AH): It’s a network of international actors in the industry. When I say actors, I mean producers, investors, sales agents, etc. Red Sea IFF built this network very quickly with an incredible team. I’m here, they’re all very professional, and very involved, and I can see how they built this network. Also, they are financing development, they are financing post-production on domestic and international feature films. I think the Red Sea IFF will become stronger and stronger, and it will be an event that the people of the industry can’t miss if you’re interested in Arabic and African movies.
(UM): You’re not an international distributor, you are mostly in France?
(AH): Yes. We used to be a sales agent for many years with a small lineup between three and four titles per year and now we can finance MGs for the sales. We’ve got one person in the team who is in charge of the festival and the coordination of the sales, but I would say for the sales team we are working with other sales agents.
(UM): Do you have criteria when you pick a film?
(AH): We are focused on auteur feature films, except for animation, because we also do many animation (for kids and adults / young adults). The most important thing for us is the topic and the treatment of this topic. For example, a love story, there are many ways to tell a love story. So, it is about the vision of the director, his topic, the singularity of the topic or its treatment, and of course, we try to follow directors who could be selected for a festival. Most of our movies are in Cannes, Venice, Berlin, etc. It’s really important for us because it’s a real label of quality and in France, for the release, the agents need to get these kinds of festival labels, because there are so many movies in France that are released every week, between 10-12, so it’s very competitive, especially for arthouse feature films. That’s why it’s important for us that we get these labels from the festivals, for the promotion, for the press.
(UM): When I talk with distributors, all of them mention France as a very good example for distributing international titles.
(AH): We are super lucky in France. We’ve got a very strong cinephile background, it’s historical. We’ve led with the Lumiere Brothers to the New Wave, so we’ve got this culture of cinema and we’ve got a system of financing that is unique and so the audience gets a strong relationship with cinema and with directors, actors, but we are also very lucky because we’ve got a lot of theaters in France. There are 2000 theaters in France and 5000 screens, that’s big. In Paris, I think there are more than 200 screens. In Paris, you’ve got a minimum of four or five cinemas per district. That’s why the French Market is so important for the sales agent and the foreign producer because in France you can screen a movie from South Korea, Pakistan, etc.
(UM): Is France supportive of international literature or just cinema?
(AH): I don’t know how it works for the other arts, but there are supports for publishers, for bookshops. The culture in France is very protectionist, but in the same time opened to the world. For literature, music, of course, but we’ve got a protection system and so we can get strong support, financing support and it’s not public money, it comes from the inside, because there is a tax on the ticket and if you go to see a foreign movie, there will be the same tax, and money from this tax is shared with all the French, so it’s a system, but this money is shared in several support for the distributors, the directors,and the scriptwriters…
(UM): After Covid, fewer people were going to the festivals.
(AH): After the lockdown, all over the world, the economic situation was tough, especially for culture, especially for cinemas, because the theaters were closed for more than six months. The audience was scared to come back because of the contamination and also because during the lockdown they discovered the streaming platforms, and the screeners, and also because the ticket is quite expensive in France. But we’ve got a strong proposition of movies. As I told you, we are releasing between 10-12 movies every week in France. Every Wednesday you’ve got 10-12 new films, if you are a cinephile, you’ve always got something to see. So, the situation came back quite normal six months ago.
(UM): When you are distributing a movie in France, is it important for there to be stars attached to international films? Does the French audience recognize international stars?
(AH): For the kind of film that we are releasing, the star is the director.
(UM): The director?
(AH): It doesn’t matter if you get– Of course, if you get a strong name, it’s better, but it’s not like American movies. For American movies, you need to get a star, but when we are releasing The Square, Triangle of Sadness, or Decision to Leave, the name behind them is the director.
Also, it’s difficult for us to get movies with international stars. Most of the time we release movies with stars when they are French movies because it’s less expensive to get the rights to the movies, but American movies with stars released by independent distributors have become more and more rare. Those movies are released by studios, but for the independent distributors-backed films– I think the last one we did was Infinity Polar Bear with Mark Ruffalo. Mark Ruffalo is a big star, we also did JACKIE by Pablo Larrain starring Natalie Portman, which aren’t usually with stars.
(UM): What kind of marketing methods are more common right now in France? Is it social media?
(AH): The difficulty is that the audience becomes older and older, especially for auteur future films. It’s difficult to bring young audiences to screen auteur future film. Of course, we are more and more involved in social media, TikTok, Instagram, etc. We are doing partnerships with them; we are producing videos and posts. The press is really important, so we are organizing.
(UM): Is getting a positive review still important?
(AH): It’s very important for arthouse movies in France. There are four or five press titles it’s important to get good reviews: Télérama, Le Monde, Libération, and Le Figaro. If you get a good review, it will be easier to book theaters.
(UM): How is your relationship with the theaters? Do you own any theaters? Do you rent theaters?
(AH): No. Not currently. We are thinking about it, but not currently. It’s a daily relationship that we get. We’ve got three people in the company who are talking every day with the exhibitors and with the programmers by phone or email. There are no contracts. It’s a daily job and it’s essential because you can write a movie, direct it, produce and distribute it but if you don’t get a theater, you miss something essential.
(UM): One of my friends who was very involved in French distribution from the beginning, told me that 10 years ago it was much easier to distribute independent or arthouse movies because there were fewer titles, your movie could be shown for two or three months but–
(AH): Now in two weeks, if you don’t do good admissions it’s done and it becomes very rare that an auteur feature film gets the time to find its audience. Before 20 years ago, when you were releasing a movie there could be word-of-mouth campaigns, “Did you see it?” “You have to go to see it.” Even if it was released three or four weeks ago, you could find a theater to screen it. Now with twelve movies per week, if you don’t go to see the movie in the first two weeks and it’s an arthouse one, a very independent one, it will be more and more difficult to find it.
(UM): Is it because more films are being produced?
(AH): Yeah.
(UM): But the number of films being admitted to Cannes or Berlin didn’t change, so still the number of good films is limited, so why don’t good movies still get more exposure?
(AH): It’s a good question. What is a good movie? I can imagine that you’re cinephile, but I know people who are not especially cinephile, are crazy about some movies that I consider bad movies, so no, it depends on the budget, including the marketing budget. We try to find new ideas. We work a lot on social media and with cinephiles associations. We try to build communities of cinephiles and within education. In France, we are very lucky that when you’re at school, teachers bring the kids to the cinema. So, to me, it’s also a question of education. When you’re young, you’ve got access to theaters, books, and music to find what is your taste and it’s essential for us to bring kids to the cinema and not only screen American blockbusters. There are good American blockbusters, but they need to know that there are also French movies, movies from Morocco, Algeria, Sweden, Argentina, etc. that are also very good. And that they don’t need superheroes, a star, or to be in English to be interesting.
(UM): Everyone is talking about diversity and having more inclusiveness and some distributors have told me that’s also sometimes causing problems or difficulties.
(AH): In BAC Films, we are very involved. I don’t like the word diversity because to me it’s not diversity, to me, it is life. Unfortunately, I know that many people don’t operate the same, but I don’t care if you’re white, black, Arabic, etc. When we are involved in a movie, we don’t think if it’s Arabic, if it’s African, if it comes from Scandinavia. Yes, we’ve done many French movies, one with Arabic and African characters from the diaspora, but we also did many Arabic movies. We did The Man Who Sold His Skin by Kaouther Ben Hania. We did The Blessed by Sofia Djama. For the upcoming ones, we’ve got WOLFMOTHER by Ismael El Iraki, Once Upon a Time in Gaza by the Nasser brothers and THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL SON by Rani Massalha.
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