Former IFC Films president Arianna Bocco, Berlinale managing director Mariette Rissenbeek and the British Film Institute’s head of industry and international policy Agnieszka Moody are set as keynote speakers for the upcoming Locarno Film Festival’s StepIN think tank on the most pressing issues in the indie film industry.
The Swiss fest’s unique event, now at its 11th edition, will explore various aspects of this year’s timely theme, which is “What’s the Deal With Independent Cinema?”
A select group of European and international industry players — distributors, exhibitors, producers, sales agents, film institutions, financiers, streaming platforms, broadcasters and film festival and markets reps — will be participating in closed working sessions to exchange thoughts on practices and business models and propose new ideas and strategies.
The themes of this year’s four StepIN roundtables are: the theatrical battlefield between independents, majors and streamers; how to protect the “biodiversity of content and voices” in the current production ecosystem; the dynamics of film festivals torn between commercial constraints and cultural considerations; and the state of gender equality and diversity representation five years after France’s Collectif 50/50 took to Cannes to protest the lack of female representation and diversity across the film industry.
Of course, other themes impacting the European indie industry — such as the overseas reverberations of the current actors’ and writers’ strikes in the U.S. and the on ongoing wave of consolidation that is seeing bigger players such as Fremantle, Banijay, and Mediawan snapping up smartly run indie outfits — will also be part of the conversation.
“While we don’t believe independents will ever die (after all their death is periodically predicted every decade) we cannot deny that that their struggle is real,” said StepIN project manager Marcello Paolillo, who is an Italian producer, in his introduction.
The Aug. 4 event will kick off with an “out-of-the-box” introduction by U.S. producer Ted Hope. Hope has been in the indie trenches since 1990, when he founded production company Good Machine in New York with James Schamus and produced the first Ang Lee films including “The Wedding Banquet” (1993) and “Eat Drink Man Woman” (1994). In 2015, he leaped to the other side of the fence when he joined Amazon Studios as head of motion picture production, but continued to operate with an indie ethos. Hope stepped down from the role in 2020, while maintaining a first-look producing deal. His introductory talk will be titled “Indie Film: 50 Years of Building the Wrong Thing.”
Expected attendees at this year’s StepIN include Susan Wendt, managing director of Scandinavia’s TrustNordisk; prominent Belgian producer Diana Elbaum (“Lingui”); Paris-based producer Nicholas Kaiser of Paradise City, whose credits include Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me by Your Name”; Christine Eloy, head of EU-funded org Europa Distribution, which reps more than 130 independent distributors from 28 countries; and French film producer Laurence Lascary, whose De l’autre côté du périph’ shingle shepherds films from young auteurs from diverse backgrounds.