ITVS rolls out global indie doc exchange

Originally published in Current, Oct. 9, 2007
By Jeremy Egner

A $19 million deal between the Independent Television
Service and three big U.S. foundations will bring close to
100 docs from China, Israel, Pakistan and other nations to
public TV and other channels over the next three years starting this fall.

Eight-year-olds run for classroom monitor in the Chinese film Please Vote for Me, airing Oct. 23 on Independent Lens. (Photo: ITVS.)

Meanwhile, a less-typical public broadcasting partner, the U.S. Department of State, will help ITVS find new international audiences for U.S. films. A new series, True Stories: Life in America, will export dozens of existing domestic docs to give viewers in Peru, Malawi and elsewhere “all the different perspectives about America and what it represents,” says Alina Romanowski, deputy assistant secretary in State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Work on this two-way pipeline, called the Global Perspectives Project, began in 2005. The goal was to create new opportunities for filmmakers while filling gaps in viewers’ understanding of life on the other side of cultural
divides.

With more than 50 films now completed or in production, the project is ready to start meeting some of its original goals, its planners say.

“We’re calling it citizen-to-citizen diplomacy,” says Sally Jo Fifer, president of ITVS.“We’re saying, ‘We want your stories, we want to listen. At the same time, here’s what
Americans look like when they’re not being Hollywoodized.’”

ITVS gets its funding from CPB — it will receive $11.8 million in fiscal 2008 — but has been routinely required to spend that money on American productions for public TV.
For the international exchange project, the Hewlett, Ford and MacArthur foundations finance the foreign films, and the State Department pays to distribute the American
exports.

“This is new money” for ITVS and for the filmmakers as well, Fifer says. International producers get finishing funds and a chance to break into the competitive U.S. market, she
says. American indies, meanwhile, gain access to “new audiences and license fees they’re not going to earn otherwise,” Fifer says. “They were never going to make any
money in Malawi,” she jokes.

On cable and cellphones, too

The idea for a doc exchange program began in 2005 at Input, the international public TV screeners’ conference held that year in San Francisco.

Post-9/11 Pew Research Center findings had indicated that most Americans lacked the context to follow international news, while Input was showing off a vast array of captivating foreign docs, Fifer recalls.

Also in attendance at Input: reps from the foundations that would finance the Global Perspectives Project, and former U.S. Ambassador James F. Collins, who became an
adviser.

The indie exchange plan was essentially born at the conference, Fifer says. “Our goal was to help people want to read that story on page 17 of the paper about Ghana,” she says.

Since 2005, the project has commissioned and partially financed 54 docs from more than 40 countries and aims to nearly double that total by 2010. The participating foundations agreed two years ago to pitch in a total
of $3.5 million a year through 2010.

To arrange its slate of imports, ITVS added an international call to its schedule of outreach to producers. It limits the requests to films already in production.

Some fruits of this effort will roll out on public TV this fall, starting with Please Vote for Me by Chinese director Weijun Chen, scheduled to air Oct. 23 on Independent Lens.
The film follows a rare democratic election held in a third-grade class in Wuhan in central China — cameras capture the eight-year-old candidates as they hatch Machiavellian political plots one minute and then openly weep and beg for forgiveness the next. [ITVS news release.]

Other films scheduled include Storm of Emotions, which documents Israelis’ pullout from the Gaza Strip and will air Oct. 30 on Independent Lens. [ITVS news release.]

Unmistakable Child, an Israeli doc, follows a Tibetan spiritual leader’s search for the reincarnation of his late master, and a Pakistani film, Dinner with the President,
is about controversial President Pervez Musharraf. Both films will air next year on Independent Lens.

Other imports will air on pubTV strands such as Wide Angle, P.O.V. and Frontline/ World, as well as Global Voices, ITVS’s new series on the PBS World multicast channel.
The Global Perspectives Project doesn’t aim to become a series or a brand. If Wide Angle chooses to air one of its imports, Fifer says, it will be presented as a Wide Angle
program.

A list of the international docs along with broadcast information and trailers are at ITVS.org/international.

Around 60 percent of the international films will air on public TV, says Jim Sommers, ITVS v.p. for broadcast and communication.

The rest will run on other outlets, including Link TV, the Sundance Channel and National Geographic Channel. ITVS also secured digital distribution deals with AOL, Current TV, an online indie film depot called Jaman, and cell-phone content provider iThentic, which will beam snippets to handheld devices.

“The spirit of this is to try new things and new partnerships and see what catches on,” Fifer says.

Uncle Sam need not apply

For the export side of the equation, ITVS launched True Stories, slated to air on pubcasting systems in Peru, Malawi, Bahrain, Colombia, Hong Kong and Indonesia. The collection of American films is designed to educate foreign viewers about the U.S. without having “Uncle Sam written all over them,” Collins says.

Films slated for showing abroad include past public TV features such as Heart of the Sea, about a famous Hawaiian surfer who succumbed to breast cancer, and Okie Noodling, which follows Southern fishermen who catch enormous catfish, using their hands as bait. Producers interested in having their films considered should contact ITVS, Fifer says.

The State Department has pledged a total of $1.5 million over two years to cover rights and other overseas broadcast costs. ITVS is trying to secure enough funding from additional public and private sources to expand the series to as many as 40 countries by 2010. The department may kick in more money if it likes what it sees in the series’ first two years, Romanowski says.

But does this mean public TV docs are being incorporated into some sort of propaganda campaign?

No, according to the principals, who say the feds don’t decide which films are included or exert any editorial control over the project.

“The productions aren’t funded by the government, they’re not made by the government, and they’re not curated by the government,” Fifer says. To do otherwise, she says,
“would be a mistake.”