Sales strategies

Yasmine Benkiran
Head of Sales and Acquisitions
Compagnie des Phares & Balises
France

What products will you offer during the World Content Market?

I'm in charge of the distribution for La Compagnie des Phares et Balises, which is primarily a production company. I therefore sell films that are produced in-house, but I am also in charge of their financing (initial buying and international co-productions).

The films we distribute can be extremely varied. “Afghanistan, the last outpost” is a documentary by Yuri Maldavky and Timothy Grucza (recently awarded an Emmy) about a combat zone on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, it's one of the rare films to portray the Afghan point of view of the conflict.

In addition, we distribute many historical documentaries, among them a beautiful portrait of “Alexander Soljenystine”, but also social documentaries such as “SuperMom”. This is a film about the competition to be “the best Mom of the year” held in the US, it's an unusual theme that helps understand the American society better. The film was selected at Nyons and awarded at the Telluride Mountain film festival in the US.

The documentary films that we distribute may vary in the themes they tackle, but these are always dealt with the same objective of precision and quality.

La Compagnie des Phares et Balises also distributes fictions and TV series. Here we are presenting the beautiful costume series “Nicolas Le Floch”. After a real success with the audience in France for the first season, the series is now being presented to its international audience and is proving that French series have nothing to envy about American productions.

What rights do you offer?

Our productions are developed for French television. We therefore offer television and DVD rights. We are also open to new technologies and offer VOD rights to any platforms who may be interested in our programs.

Buyers from what countries do you target?

We have a real desire to work with all five continents. “Nicolas Le Floch”, for instance, has been sold in Russia, in the Czech Republic, in Japan, in Switzerland and we are hoping to sell it in Latin America soon. Our objective is to broadcast the programs we are working on as widely as possible.

For the world content market, we are targeting Eastern Europe in particular. We wish to work with the countries that are now part of Europe's 27 and with those countries that constitute tomorrow's European Union.