An extensive array of non-fiction titles will be launched at this year’s Digital MIPTV online spring market, running April 12-16. Ahead of the excitement, Realscreen presents the first in a series of roundups highlighting the titles being shopped.
3BOXMEDIA
The international distributor has an robust slate of documentary series for buyers. A few highlights are Superhuman (6 x 52 minutes), a series that follows adventurer Raúl Gómez as he explores ancestral cultures and the people who have adapted their bodies to the place where they live, including in the midst of rain, drought, deserts, jungles, and extreme temperatures. He travels to Bolivia, Indonesia and Ethiopia, among other places, in search of these “superpowers.”
In the doc special Island of the Hippos (1 x 50 minutes), a unique hippo colony exists on the beaches of the Bissagos Islands, off the coast of Guinea Bissau, in the Atlantic. The film explores how this population lives in coastal waters and is the most western one in the range of this species, related to cetaceans.
Also on the slate is Fast Fashion Made in Ethiopia (1 x 26 minute), which explores how H&M has opened factories in the African nation with wages almost ten times lower than in China, making Ethiopia the new Eldorado of the fashion industry. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian government is opening the floodgates to Chinese investors ready to get large-scale industrial plants off the ground to boost the country’s development.
Climate Exodus (1 x 52 minutes or 1 x 63 minutes), meanwhile, follows the stories of three women who have lost everything due to climate change and now emigrate to start a new life.
The distributor is also shopping Trees at the End of the World (8 x 24 minutes), which explores unknown and ancient trees that have adapted to extreme conditions, defying the climate and humans, including in deserts, impenetrable forests or mountain summits.
For a full list of titles go to 3boxmedia.com
RUPTLY
German news and multimedia agency, Ruptly, which launched its new label Ruptly Documentary Collection last year, has unveiled its latest doc slate in the lead up to this year’s MIPTV 2021 market.
With a catalogue of over 230 titles, Ruptly’s key titles this spring include Niger’s Route of Death (pictured), an exposé on the European Union’s militarization of migratory routes across the Mediterranean and Africa, which has incited violence, hurt economies and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
There is also Justice for the Dead, which follows the fight for justice by the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala, whose livelihoods and loved ones were massacred at the hands of U.S.-backed armed forces.
Occupied Kashmir features the voices of the families and fighters whose lives have been blown apart by the failed two-state solution in Kashmir, as Indian colonial-style forces move towards a ‘West Bank’ style of occupation.
And in Fighting for Survival, the emotional stories and silenced struggles of Mexican transgender workers are explored as they try to get by and uphold their loved ones’ legacies in the world’s second deadliest country for trans people.
Elsewhere, Genocide in Indonesia explores the mass killings of 1965-66, and the efforts of various military forces to extinguish the PKI against the backdrop of Cold War hysteria. And in Digital Colonialism, filmmakers examine the digital revolution sweeping Africa with global tech giants at the helm, asking “Is this technological liberation or just another form of colonialism?”
For a full catalog of titles go to docs.ruptly.tv