European Film Market Head Tanja Meissner has hailed this year’s edition as the busiest since the Covid pandemic with accreditations expected to come in at least three percent higher than last year although final figures have yet to confirmed.
“Everything’s running super smoothly, and everything’s packed, really, really packed,” Meissner told Deadline in a quick sit-down in the second half of the market, noting on accreditations. “It looks like we’re at least 3% up on last year.
Meissner, who is marking her second edition in the role, suggested the uptick in attendance was due partly to a raft of new initiatives.
These included the EFM Animation Days, in partnership with France’s Annecy International Animation Festival, and the EFM Frontières Focus genre project showcase, organized by the Montreal-based Fantasia International Film Festival, which joined the burgeoning DocSalon and Berlinale Series Market.
The Producers and Innovation Hub also laid on the new EFM Beyond strand, exploring the art of creating crossmedia IP, as well as the Cross-IP Accelerator Programme and Film-to-Game Accelerator.
“It’s always a gamble, you never know how it will go… We invited a lot of new people, not with nights or anything, but we reached out to people telling them about our new animation focus, the fact we were doing more on cross IP and engaging more with the game industry with a different kind of capital and new creative energy and a lot people showed up,” she said.
The Animations Days – revolving around the pitching of 28 early-stage animation projects seeking coproduction partners and sales agents – was particularly successful with participants including I, Chihuahua! and Fifteen Dogs.
“The Animation Days ended up being an incredible success. We organized a lunch – these matchmaking events are super important for our industry – and it was so packed, people were standing outside. Every single showcase, pitching sessions was packed,” said Meissner.
Other highlights included case studies on The Last Whale Singer, The Amazing Maurice 2 and animated doc-series Fritzi’s Journey.
Meissner suggested the timing of the Animation Days from the first Thursday (February 12) had also been a gamble.
“Seller and buyers are already in place, but a lot of producers and institutions arrive on the Friday, so we were asking them to come one day earlier but they showed up. I talked to a lot of animation producers who were here for the first time and they loved it. I think the EFM is well placed to create this networking atmosphere with other industry branches like documentary or series. That’s something that specialized events cannot do so easily.”
Meissner emphasized that these new events were not an attempt to encroach on the work of specialized events like Annecy, but rather to complement their work.
“I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes. I often get asked whether I see Cannes or, even TIFF, as competitors but they’re not. It’s very important to have events throughout the year. I used to be a sales agent. I really know what I’m talking about,” added the market head, who spent two decades in film sales in France, firstly at Celluloid Dreams and then at Memento (rebranded as Paradise City).
“You have to have capacity to build momentum around the projects every two, three months. When I do well as a market, other markets do well as well… this is a sign of the independent film industry working together.”
She noted that the move to create a focus on animation had also been fuelled by the growing presence of animation sales companies in the market.
“It doesn’t come out of nowhere, if you go into the market, we have a lot of companies selling animation, out of Asia, Germany, where it’s a big industry. The Germans are happy with the initiative but so are the British and the Canadians which both came with big delegations.”
Meissner suggests that bringing in new attendees from parts of the audiovisual industry not previously present at the EFM makes sense because traditional attendees such as sales companies, distributors, institutions and film festivals have been scaling back their teams on the ground.
“Some of the sales and acquisition companies are bringing fewer people so we have to think about that… the bigger companies still have a lot of attendees but not everyone can to this anymore,” she said.
Sales & Acquisition
Outside of the new initiatives and networking events, the heart of the market remains sales and acquisitions, around both big ticket packages and indie fare.
“It’s not only about the big English-language packages, there’s also a lot of European dealmaking going on,” said Meissner. “I haven’t talked to too many sales agents yet, but what I hear from some of the buyers that I meet on the street is that they’re finding stuff and buying, for both pre-sales and titles in the festival.
Berlin Film Festival director Tricia Tuttle told Deadline on the eve of the festival that she and her programmers had worked hard this year to build a lineup that could also chime with indie buyers’ needs. The U.S. deal for competition title Josephine, admittedly on the back of its strong reception at Sundance, gave a fillip to the market around festival titles over the weekend and suggests these efforts have paid-off.
However, Meissner says that while she is in constant dialogue with Tuttle, she tries to remain agnostic about the selection.
“There is a paper wall between us. The festival does the curation, the selection and I make it a point of not being too aware of that, because I’m dealing with everybody in a very agnostic way. It’s actually part of my job to be agnostic. Everybody’s welcome in the market… every film, every genre,” she said.
With accreditations up and the festival main hubs of the Gropius Bau and Marriott Hotel packed to full capacity, Meissner said she is constantly on the lookout for potential new venues in and around the main Gropius Bau and Potsdamer Platz hubs.
“We have more requests for exhibition space than we can actually handle. I’ve been looking into that already, but I have to look into it again. Rent is high in this part of Berlin so I also have to see how I can make it worthwhile because I don’t want to raise prices,” she said.
Meissner dispels the rumors of recent years that the market might move out of the Gropius Bau altogether, saying it remains a great location.
“I think Berlin is still a place where it’s very easy to do business. It’s very compact. There’s a lot of serendipity and people bumping into one another. People often tell me these chance meetings are the most important ones,” she said.
