For our October Distributor of the Month interview, we head to Switzerland to speak to Laurent Dutoit, CEO of Agora Films. Our conversation touched on the challenges faced by Swiss distributors.

Cineuropa: Could you talk about the Agora Films’ editorial line, and how it has evolved over the years?
Laurent Dutoit: Agora Films was founded in 1999, so we have been in business for over 25 years. We are one of the few distribution companies based in the French part of Switzerland. Most distributors are in the German-speaking part, so we focus more on French-language feature films. We handle fiction, documentary, and animation, so we cover quite a range of films, but our focus is primarily on European arthouse cinema. We release one to two Swiss films per year.

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In general, we distribute around 12 to 15 titles per year, which is a modest amount compared to some of our competitors who release 20 to 40 films a year. We are a small distribution company, with less than 1 percent market share in Switzerland, but we focus on films we truly believe in and are dedicated to releasing. As for our catalogue, we don’t sell films we don’t genuinely like, even if they have a commercial potential. We focus on finding films that move us. Sometimes they are not entirely arthouse films; they can also be crossover movies that appeal to a wider audience. But we try not to limit ourselves to any single type of film.

Besides this distribution activity, we also run cinemas, the main arthouse cinemas in Geneva, which gives us three cinemas with a total of six screens.

At what stages do you acquire these titles?
It’s about 50-50 - almost half of the films in our catalogue are pre-bought, so they are taken at the script stage: sometimes with just a script, or a script and a promo reel. The other 50 percent are finished films, which either come to us, or that we scout at festivals.

What are some of the notable titles in your catalogue?
This year, we’ve had great success with the Canadian film Shepherds [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] by Sophie Deraspe that drew more than 20,000 spectators in cinemas, which is quite good for Switzerland. Films about nature tend to appeal to audiences across both urban and rural areas. As for earlier titles, we have a Palme d'Or title, Titane [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Julia Ducournau, Vincent L…
scheda film], by Julia Ducournau. Another notable title to mention is László Nemes’ Son of Saul [+leggi anche:
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Q&A: László Nemes
intervista: László Rajk
scheda film], an Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, which, to me, is one of the best titles in our catalogue. But it was a tough one since many people didn’t want to confront this story, and it didn’t perform that well.

Could you talk about some of the challenges faced by Swiss distributors?
Switzerland is a relatively small nation, with only about nine million inhabitants and three different languages. That means, as a distributor, that if we are releasing a film across the whole territory, we need three different releases, which are usually linked to releases in France, Germany, and Italy. We can learn from the first part of the country and replicate what worked and avoid what flopped when releasing it in the second part.

Our larger neighbouring countries tend to buy the rights for Switzerland. That’s what happens with Germany, for example. Germany often acquires the rights for Austria, and sometimes there is a tendency to buy the rights for Switzerland as well. This leads to some films being bought by a German distributor but never released in Switzerland because there is limited interest in entering only a sub-distribution deal with Germany. So there is a challenge at the buying stage.

You’ve mentioned the neighbouring countries. Are there any issues when it comes to release dates?
In our contracts, we’ve had holdbacks on release dates. For French films, for example, we usually can’t release them before France. Sometimes we also have holdbacks with Germany and Italy. We try to avoid them in the contracts or, if necessary, we may say: “Okay, if you haven’t sold Germany, we aren’t going to wait three years for you to do so before releasing the film; or if you have sold it but the distributor isn’t willing to release it, we have an opportunity to do it.” We can always discuss this with a sales agent. We know that just because a film is released in Switzerland, it won’t necessarily have an impact on the markets in Germany, Italy, or France.

Do festivals continue to act as a launchpad for films?
There are some 9,000 films produced every year in the world. Around 2,500 films are produced in Europe. In countries like Switzerland, there are about 450 films that are released annually, and we, as a distributor, release 12-15 films per year. We are always on the lookout for good films and we try to find an audience that can connect with them. One of the main issues we have with festivals nowadays is that they are going for smaller and smaller films that don’t necessarily appeal to wider audiences. As distributors, our goal is to find gems and then make them visible. We do everything we can to find an audience and connect it with a film. But some films are just too difficult to find an audience for.

Nowadays, from what I see, for Swiss films and most European films, the festival stage often marks the end of the story. Producers and public bodies that finance films are happy when their film is selected at a festival, but after that, they aren’t concerned as much if the film is visible to a wider audience beyond that. Of course, it’s great to have a film screen at a festival, but festivals usually only reach a few hundred or a few thousand people. If broader audiences don’t see the film outside the festival, it’s a disappointment because that’s not why these films were made. I think a festival should give difficult films visibility with a cinephile audience that is going to that festival but also act as a launchpad for bigger (arthouse) films and broader releases. 

I think Cannes and Venice are among the few festivals that can still impact a film’s release. Berlin, not so much anymore. For example, this year at Cannes, after seeing all the competition titles, it was clear to me that most films were too difficult for wider audiences to connect with. They were just less accessible. Last year, six films from the competition had over 500,000 admissions in France, which is considerable. This year, Óliver Laxe’s Sirāt [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Óliver Laxe
scheda film] is likely to achieve success in drawing audiences, and maybe the French film Dominik Moll’s Case 137 [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Dominik Moll
scheda film]. The other films that aren’t released yet don’t seem likely to reach those figures. It is difficult for the ecosystem when we don’t have big arthouse titles because we need them: not just for cinemas but also for attracting audiences to other, smaller arthouse films. When audiences see a film they like, they watch trailers of other movies and come back. It’s a cycle, and you need some bigger arthouse titles to keep it going.