New Irish documentary fund announced

Coinciding with Dublin's Stranger Than Fiction documentary festival, Bord Scannan na hEireann/the Irish Film Board (BSE/IFB) and the Irish Arts Council has announced a new fund for creative arts-based documentaries, 'Documenting the Arts'.
The Documenting the Arts Fund is slated to commence in January 2005 in a partnership between BSE/IFB and the Arts Council, which have previously partnered on the Cultural Cinema Consortium, the CineMobile project and short film schemes.
The new fund is open to submissions for Irish language, English language or bilingual documentaries. While BSE/IFB's documentary investment efforts are largely targeted towards feature length documentaries, this fund aims to combine the resources of the BSE/IFB and the Arts Council to part-finance between 10 to 12 quality national interest documentaries a year which apply to the Fund with a broadcaster presale in place. The Fund, which shall see BSE/IFB and the Arts Council committing a templated amount to eligible documentaries, shall be structured to enable producers to apply to the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland's new content funding scheme for further co-financing.
"This exciting partnership with the Arts Council has been crafted to leverage BSE/IFB's existing documentary funding across more projects to better serve our documentary clients," said BSE/IFB CEO Mark Woods. "All the Irish broadcasters have expressed support for the fund and this is a great example of cross agency cooperation providing more opportunties for Irish filmmakers to get their stories on the screens."
"The 'Documenting the Arts' Fund is a unique opportunity to stimulate diverse, innovative, creative documentary filmmmaking and will continue to build on the partnership the Arts Council enjoys with the Irish Film Board and broadcasters," added Arts Council Film Specialist, Jane Doolan.
"TG4 welcomes this initiative," commented TG4's Proinsias Ni Ghrainne. "Single documentaries that embrace experimentation and creative storytelling are consistently popular with TG4 audiences. Many are inherently bilingual in their storytelling and audiences clearly connect with this. We welcome the opportunity to assess projects suitable to TG4 on a project by project basis".
Draft guidelines for the Fund shall be drawn up and sent out for industry consultation in the coming months. Woods noted that BSE/IFB was considering modest bonus levels of investment for documentaries which apply with a foreign sales agent attached in an effort to incentivise and reward producers who secure the widest possible distribution for their creative documentaries.
Just recently, UK-based sales agent High Point took international rights to Robert Quinn's award winning BSE/IFB and TG4-backed documentary ‘Cinegael Paradiso’.
High Point Managing Director Carey Fitzgerald, who saw the documentary while attending the Galway Film Fleadh to participate in the BSE/IFB co-sponsored Reel Deal Screen Financing Seminar, is launching Cinegael Paradiso at next month's MIPCOM TV market in Cannes.
"We saw Cinegael Paradiso at this year's Galway Film Fleadh and just fell in love with it," said Fitzgerald. "We are sure that the international marketplace will also embrace it and we look forward to seeing more creative documentaries coming out of Ireland."
Fitzgerald is back in Ireland this week attending the Stranger Than Fiction's market sidebar, which affords documentary producers the opportunity to pitch their projects to key international co-financiers. Co-sponsored by BSE/IFB, other content financing participants in Stranger Than Fiction market include the UK's Channel 5, BBC, History & Biography Channel, Channel 4 International, Beyond Distribution and Alliance Atlantis.
(GB)