31/05/2010

Founded in 1999, Agora Films distributes about a dozen films per year. Managing director Laurent Dutoit maintains high standards in a trilingual market that has to adapt to the pace of its French, German and Italian neighbours.

Cineuropa: What is your film acquisition policy?
Laurent Dutoit: We buy the films we like and want to promote among Swiss audiences. We don’t practise a “big hits” policy and we don’t gamble the company’s viability on a film. We’re cautious. We need one or two well-performing titles per year to pay our overheads, but every time we’ve bought films which didn’t really bowl us over but which we thought would be a big success, we’ve been mistaken.

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Our biggest hit of all time, Nicolas Philibert’s To Be and To Have, is, however, a fine example. We loved it straightaway and, taking more of an activist than commercial approach, we decided to back it, thinking we’d attract between 2,000-2,500 viewers. The film garnered 140,000 admissions. Surprises like these make a distributor’s job interesting.

What is your ideal film?
For me, my ideal film is one I want to see again when I leave the cinema and one that makes me feel something. I’m open to all genres, and I don’t pay much attention to the often questionable distinction between auteur and mainstream films. What matters is the quality of the end result.

Where and how do you buy films?
At festivals, mostly. Whether films are completed or bought on the basis of the screenplay, Cannes, Berlin and Toronto are special opportunities for meeting international sellers. So that’s where sales are usually clinched. Moreover, with Agora Films being one of the most recently-founded distributors in French-speaking Switzerland, we are naturally oriented towards the French market. And in three-and-a-half hours by train, we can be in Paris to see films!

Do you come up against strong competition when it comes to obtaining films?
Switzerland is quite a competitive market because it includes a certain number of independent companies all looking for that gem! Everything also depends on the price that sellers are asking for a film and our estimation of its profitability on Swiss territory. Their requests are sometimes so excessive that films of cultural interest and small commercial potential are sometimes not distributed.

What are the specificities of the Swiss market?
The division of the country into three linguistic regions involves three releases, for they are usually aligned with the Italian, German and French markets and we’re dependent on the work and choices of our big neighbours. German, French and Italian distributors also often want to keep the distribution rights for the related Swiss linguistic region because it’s a bonus that doesn’t cost them anything. As a result, it is increasingly difficult to obtain all the video and television rights for our own territory and this practice is really undermining us. In order to cover our investment in a film’s theatrical release, we need to have all the ancillary rights.

In what kind of cinemas do you release your films?
Insofar as we distribute mainly auteur films, we have a special relationship with arthouse theatres. But our films also sometimes find their place in multiplexes!