From 12 pm to 2 pm on Thursday 23 April, a free, online workshop will be held in Madrid. The Spanish-language event is intended to be a guide for producers who are gearing up for their first meeting with a potential sales agent. It will be led, from their respective homes, by Peter Andermatt, director of MEDIA Desk Spain, and Fabrizia Palazzo, international sales executive from sales agent Latido Films. People will be able to take part in the event via the BlueJeans Network (more information can be found here).

Cineuropa got in touch with Fabrizia Palazzo to glean some more details about the workshop: “MEDIA had the idea for this initiative because it has two support schemes – one for development, the deadline for which is 12 May, and another for television distribution, which ends on 14 May – and in that case, the sales agent is quite important. The workshop is aimed at clearing up any doubts that producers may have when making those applications, and explaining why to choose one sales agent over another: it explores which is the best for any given film,” she states.

"Some producers, especially newcomers working on their first film, are not completely sure about what a sales agent’s role is,” Palazzo continues. “At our company, we attempt to have guidelines and to orient ourselves by sticking to a concept, a defined target market and an idea that’s easy to sell, but we also fall in love with films, and in these cases, we rely on our instinct or our taste, but we always do so with movies that have a market or a run on the festival circuit. We bear in mind the prestige that a title can end up acquiring. At Latido, for example, we pay particular attention to Spanish or Latin American cinema, although in the last few years, we’ve been edging closer to the Eastern European market – to Polish films, for instance – because we believe that there are some very interesting things being done there.”

The workshop will make use of a case study on The Platform [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia
fiche film], which won an award at Sitges, got a quiet release in Spain and has now proven to be a worldwide smash hit on Netflix. But does the future lie in streaming? Will this crisis constitute a definitive endorsement for watching films online at the expense of the movie theatres, which are now shuttered? “While it was already complicated to put up a fight before, the situation now would appear even more challenging. But we continue to support markets and festivals, even though they may be held online, turning each film and each festival into a strategy. And there’s no point denying it: it’s clear that the platforms play an extremely important role, which is even more crucial during the current crisis,” replies the Italian-born sales agent.

The speakers will also shed light on the first meeting with a sales agent: “The most important thing of all is to know who you’re going to be presenting to: know who you’re going to be selling to, what type of work it is they do and what style of films they have in their catalogue. Imagine it’s a job interview: you have to prepare and know what material you have to have ready (an information pack with a synopsis, the film’s genre, a teaser, a shooting and production schedule, a confirmed cast and so on), what initial email to send and what unique concept the project has to pique people’s interest. In short, we’re going to talk about the tools to use when selling yourself to a sales agent,” sums up Palazzo.

The online workshop is being organised in cooperation with the MEDIA Desk Spain Cultural Foundation, the ICAA (the Spanish Institute of Film and Audiovisual Arts), EGEDA (the Society for Audiovisual Producers’ Rights Management), IVC (the Valencian Cultural Institute), AGADIC (the Galician Agency for the Cultural Industries) and Canarias Cultura en Red.