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TV REAL
HISTORY in the U.K. commissioned Sean Bean on Waterloo to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the infamous battle.
The BBC in the U.K. is one of the world’s biggest commissioners and buyers of factual content, with responsibilities split across numerous departments. One of the most interesting is Storyville, an 18-year-old strand that has provided a home to some of the world’s most compelling and important documentaries. Commissioning editor Nick Fraser admits that it’s tough to keep up standards because budgets are so tight, and because new players like Netflix and Amazon are changing the rights landscape, “but we try to stay very alert and make sure we are talking directly to the people whose ideas have the potential to illuminate the world.”
INSIDE STORYVILLE Located on BBC Four, Storyville has around 20 slots a year for films ranging in length from about 60 to 90 minutes (the length is usually decided at rough-cut stage, says Fraser). Titles coming up this autumn and winter include A Nazi Legacy, which follows international human rights lawyer Philippe Sands as he travels with two septuagenarian sons of convicted Nazi war criminals and discovers their opposing views on the legacies of their fathers’ actions. There is also The Show of Shows: 100 Years of Vaudeville, Circuses and Carnivals, which Fraser says is the latest in a line of Storyville films that juxtaposes archive material with contemporary music. This film, out of Iceland, will explore the history of circuses and be accompanied by the music of Sigur Rós. Fraser also highlights Sean McAllister’s A Syrian Love Story, which follows a Syrian-Palestinian family over a period of five years in the wake of their exile from Syria; and Cartel Land, Matthew Heineman’s Sundance awardwinning documentary on the Mexican drug wars “which is like watching a real-life horror story,” Fraser says.
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With around $100,000 to offer per film, co-production is important to Storyville, but the idiosyncratic nature of the strand’s films means that the pool of partners is not the same as the global pay-TV factual brands. “We work a lot with Scandinavia and the Netherlands,” says Fraser, “because they have similar tastes as ours. Sometimes we also work with Canadian producers and broadcasters. If you look at something like India’s Daughter, one of our most globally watched films, partners came from Denmark, Scandinavia, Canada and PBS in the U.S. ARTE can also be a very good partner and worked with us on Notes on Blindness.” While Storyville doesn’t have a lot of money to put up for production, there are other benefits for producers, adds Fraser. “The BBC has very good lawyers, which is an asset with some of the controversial subjects we deal with. Our films are also aired internationally in a couple of key ways. One is Storyville Global, a strand that appears on international BBC services like BBC World News. The other is an initiative called World Stories, which enables some of the films we co-produce to be made available to broadcasters that don’t have the budgets to acquire them in the usual way.” Fraser isn’t editorially prescriptive, but he is adamant that Storyville shows need to provoke and unsettle their audiences. “You get something like Show of Shows, in which nostalgia for circuses mixes with guilt about animal cruelty, or A Nazi Legacy, which views the horror of Nazism in an entertaining way. Our films can’t just be statements, because the BBC does that so well through all of its news output. Storyville subjects need to have drama, conflict and sophisticated themes.” Increasingly, that’s true for any factual channel that wants to have a future.