16/03/2021 - Connecting creators, professionals and a target audience has been an ongoing, fruitful challenge at the RealYoung workshop, held for the seventh time at the M:brane Forum

RealYoung workshop moderator and head tutor Ove Rishøj Jensen with youth experts Petter Åkerberg, David Nyed and Agnes Rishøj Pedersen (© M:brane/Edwin Philip)

The “Real” stands for the documentary form and “Young” for the target audience. The RealYoung meeting point at the M:brane financing forum in Malmö connects this young audience with creators, funders, distributors and publishers. During this pre-pitch workshop, the latter receive direct feedback from the former, providing their straight and honest opinions. The event took place for the seventh time on Monday 15 March, providing the overture to the 15^th edition of M:brane, kicking off on 16 March.

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Eight new projects were presented under this banner, four of them at the early-development stage: #iseeyou (Germany/Belgium), an Instagram documentary following five protagonists from different European locations over six months; Ancestral Secret VR (Chile), offering an interactive take on a highly topical Inca prophecy; Daughters (Sweden), an encounter with three young sisters, dealing with their mother’s suicide; and Fantastique (Belgium), about an acrobat girl wonder from the slums of Conakry, Guinea. The second quartet will also be presented at the forthcoming M:brane pitch forum later in the week: Behind Lucy (Spain), following the NASA Lucy mission into planet Jupiter’s trojans; My Dream. My Story (Germany), a partly animated series of portraits of famous persons at a young age that “set them off”; VERTICAL REPUBLIC (of skateboard) (France), following a world-class skater towards a hopeful Olympic debut; and Five Football Dreams (Jordan), with more hope and sports in a Middle Eastern refugee camp, where a Brazilian football scout aims to find new talents.

Providing assorted questions for the creators were professional experts Ulla Hæstrup, Denmark; Meike Statema, the Netherlands; Elizabeth Klinck, Canada; and Charlotte Madsen, Sweden. The latter is no newcomer to the workshop: “Though I’ve participated in at least four editions so far, it does not get any easier,” said Madsen, who is commissioning editor at the Documentary department of national Swedish broadcaster SVT. She admits that she is far from always considering the age group at hand. “And this is the reason why I keep coming back, because I learn new things all the time regarding this imperative target group. It’s a professional challenge I like to expose myself to from time to time.”

The moderator and head tutor was Ove Rishøj Jensen, with youth experts David Nyed, Petter Åkerberg, Maya Starup Vernier and Agnes Rishøj Pedersen in charge of dishing out straight and honest opinions.