Italian state broadcaster RAI’s RAI Cinema film arm is launching a new standalone film sales unit at the European Film Market.
The nascent sales company — which is called RAI Cinema International Distribution — aims to fill a gap within RAI’s content sales force given that RAI’s existing RAI Com sales unit is “mostly dedicated to TV product,” said RAI Cinema CEO Paolo Del Brocco.
It will also provide a new international distribution outlet to Italian cinema often sold by French outfits such as Newen Connect, which is the international distributor for Berlinale competition title “Another End” by Italy’s Piero Messina and starring Gael Garcia Bernal.
RAI Cinema, which invests up to €80 million ($85 million) a year in production, is the main driver of Italian indie cinema, with a hand in roughly 60 feature films a year. But Del Brocco underlined that they have no intention of imposing themselves as a sales company on the movies they co-finance.
“It’s obvious that we can’t internationally distribute all the films that we finance, nor do we want to,” Del Brocco pointed out. “And we won’t be looking to make that a pre-condition for us boarding a project.”
Del Brocco said RAI Cinema International Distribution will be soft launching at the EFM and plans to take a step-by-step approach. The company is headed by Fulvio Firrito with the RAI Com sales agent moving over to RAI Cinema. The plan is to further build out the sales team going forward.
RAI Cinema International’s EFM lineup is toplined by Berlinale competition entry “Gloria!,” a musical comedy by first-time director Margherita Vicario set in an 18th century Venetian girls’ boarding school where a young rebel leads a group of performers to challenge classical canons. Other titles in the RAI Cinema slate comprise Trudie Styler-directed doc “Posso entrare? An ode to Naples,” Roberta Torre’s “In the Mirror,” an unconventional portrait of Italian icon Monica Vitti, played by Alba Rohrwacher, and Gianni Amelio’s next film, a World War I drama titled “Battlefield.”
