Piemonte vaunts the first regional support Fund for documentaries: the Piemonte Doc Film Fund which was set up by the Film Commission Torino Piemonte in 2007 with an allocation established at € 350,000 Euros per year for a total, to date, of 173 projects financed and completed. “ Things have changed in these ten years”, comments Paolo Manera, director of the Film Commission Torino Piemonte which has followed the Doc Film Fund from the beginning, “at one time there was the documentary for TV, some independent products and arthouse films. Now there are mainly creation documentaries devised for movie theaters”.
Some of the most recent ones are “Un altro me” by Claudio Casazza, produced by Enrica Capra for Graffiti Doc which, after winning the Audience Award for the international section of the Festival dei Popoli 2016, also won over the audience at Il Mese del Documentario, a popular festival organized by Doc/it – Associazione Documentaristi Italiani [Association of Italian Documentary-makers], which named it the best documentary of the 2017 edition. There are around thirty production companies that are fully operational in the region.
We have the “veterans” like the aforementioned Enrica Capra, Stefano Tealdi, Edoardo Fracchia and Elena Filippini with Stefilm, Davide Ferrario with Rossofuoco, and then the younger names: from Alessandro Pugno with Papavero Films and Alessandro Borrelli with La Sarraz, to Simone Catania with Indyca.
“A good half of them,” Manera cannot hide his satisfaction, “were born and grew up together with the Fund which has been decisive in supporting first the development and then the production of many of their projects”.
Is it possible to talk about a Piemontese “brand”? “Definitely”, concludes the director of the Film Commission Torino Piedmont, “in addition to the prevailing theatrical slant, another identifying characteristic is the international production dimension. There are, in fact, 50 co-productions, around one third of the total. This is also due to the fact that we have been at the cutting edge of participation in European projects, from Eurodoc to Eave”.
