Kabul Korrespondence

I was lucky enough to be invited to take part in the 2011 DocsBarcelona Forum. The main idea of the festival is that industry head weights are put in the same room as new kids on the block filmmakers. The filmmakers pitch their Doco ideas. The panel critique it. Then the organisers match filmmaker to broadcaster and you have one on one meeting and talk 'shop'.

Day 1, we pitched our ideas off the bat, most of us sucked, but we kept doing it and the tutors kept breaking it down for us until we had a better understanding of our films and their direction.

Day 2, they focused on teaching us what the broadcasters and agents wanted to see and therefore taught how to customise our pitch doco's accordingly. By the end of the second day we were actually starting convince ourselves!

Day 3 was D-day. The auditorium was packed with 25 industry budget allocators and 100 onlookers. I was lucky enough to be last on the first day, so I got to watch the others do there thing. Some were complete pros and had obviously done this before. Others were clearly nervous and were eaten alive by the sympathetic, but challenging panel.

My nerves had been building all day, but after so much repetition in the workshops, when it came to my turn I just went into automatic pilot and kicked into it. It went really well and the response from the panel was all positive. I was buzzing all through Lunch.

After lunch we were having the one on one meetings with the panel. Meetings were chosen on who showed interest in your project or who had slots in their programing that fitted your doco style. We were told that would have probably 8-9 meetings. I had 13. It was mad, I did not stop talking for 5 hours!

So after all that it is time for the wheeling and dealing behind close doors or on the phone. Thank god I have a producer to do that! Keep your ears out for Crack in the Radio coming to a cinema near you in early 2012.