BERLIN — Operation Kino has picked up rights to Golden Bear candidate An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker for Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria and the countries of the former Yugoslavia.
Operation Kino is a joint distribution initiative launched by the Istanbul, Transylvania, Sofia and Sarajevo film festivals.
Danis Tanovic’s film, which revolves around an impoverished Roma woman’s struggle to get treatment following her stillbirth, will be released under the Media Mundus-supported label, with the individual festivals showing the title in their program and then touring it around the countries’ peripheral regions.
“’[The] festivals-as-distributors business model proved attractive to the rights-holders, especially in the developing markets such as ours, since it guarantees a blend of festival publicity and classic P&A spending for their films, giving them sufficient visibility to achieve attractiveness in the ever-saturating market for films,” said Jovan Marjanovic, Sarajevo Film Festival’s head of industry.
He added: “The fact that the films acquired for Operation Kino get wider releases with more publicity and marketing adds to the competitiveness of the model in relation to traditional distributors in these territories.”
Additional acquisitions will follow, said Istanbul festival director Azize Tan and Transylvania festival head Tudor Giurgiu. According to the initiative’s plans, Iron Picker will also be made available on VOD platforms.
The title is repped at the European Film Market by the Match Factory.
