The bankruptcy of Off the Fence, the increasing importance of National Geographic and the endless ‘friend or foe’ debate about AI were all high on the agenda at Sunny Side of the Doc in La Rochelle last week.
Sunny Side of the Doc 2025
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If Off the Fence isn’t safe, who is?
C21’s exclusive report from La Rochelle that European producer and distributor Off the Fence (OTF) has entered bankruptcy proceedings in the Netherlands sent ructions through the unscripted industry last week.
OTF is still hoping to find a buyer for its business as a whole, although the general consensus in La Rochelle is that it’s the distribution catalogue of 6,500-plus hours that will be of most interest to other companies. Outfits like Blue Ant Media have been looking to sweep up IP in the current climate. We understand half a dozen prospective buyers have already been looking at it, with two particularly keen.
Bo Stehmeier
While it is desperately sad for OTF, a well-established company with many experienced and likeable execs, not least CEO Bo Stehmeier, it is also terrible news for an embattled unscripted industry. A company that’s been around since 1994, bought by ZDF Enterprises in 2019 and an Oscar winner in 2022 with My Octopus Teacher – if that business isn’t safe, then whose is?
There were similar sentiments expressed last year when Danny Fenton’s Zig Zag Productions found itself in difficulties. It, like OTF, found that sometimes it’s not the green lights that are hard to find, it’s getting those green lights fully financed and into production so cash starts flowing. One buyer who is actively commissioning projects remarked last week that often they were finding that having put 50-60% of budget up for something they want, the delay in getting the other 40% from other broadcasters or a distribution advance is often withering projects on the vine.
These fears are being felt particularly acutely in natural history and our breaking news story was buzzing around the Bristol WhatsApp groups last Tuesday. An expensive genre with notoriously long lead times, it is also one of the genres most susceptible to being overtaken by artificial intelligence (AI).
Fears expressed at the Wildscreen Conference last November will only have been exacerbated by OTF’s collapse, and anyone who spent a fortnight at Sheffield Doc/Fest and Sunny Side of the Doc – where sports docs and true crime were in vogue but traditional natural history very much was not – would share such worries.
Nat Geo bucks the trend
In these troubled times, National Geographic is increasingly standing out as a beacon of hope – commissioning and acquiring shows by the truckload and actually spending some money.
Furnished with chunks of cash from the deep pockets of parent Disney, the US side of the business, led by Tom McDonald (second in the running to Kate Phillips for the content chief job at the BBC, we hear), is churning out proper, definitive, landmark commissions such as the forthcoming five-parter on Hurricane Katrina.
Ben Noot
While those green lights still tend to go to the same big-name producers – Nutopia, Rogan, Lightbox, 72 Films – the international and acquisitions teams are proving to be a vital lifeline and source of money lower down the food chain. Head of acquisitions Ben Noot is omnipresent at industry events now, looking for up to 600 hours a year just for the linear Nat Geo and Nat Geo Wild networks before we even get to the tile on Disney+.
“The message I want to get out is we are buying. We do have budget and we are looking up to 2027 and beyond. We’re actively in the market for hundreds of hours a year. Come have a conversation with us,” said Noot, described by BossaNova CEO Paul Heaney as “the busiest man in television” right now. At Le Pass’Port bar on the quayside, another producer remarked, less delicately: “I’m right up his arse at the moment. It’s definitely the right arse to be up.”
You can read about more conventional ways of getting a slice of that Nat Geo pie in our recent Content Strategies piece here.
The MipTV bounce
My takeaways from Sheffield Doc/Fest last week included the declining number of buyers from the halcyon days when that event would have separate panels for factual, specialist factual, factual entertainment, formats, documentary and more, attended by all the main UK channels and others besides.
It’s the opposite at Sunny Side, which seems to be rapidly growing as an event and has a more upbeat atmosphere where it feels like business is being done. As we surmised last year, that’s because it’s a coproduction market and coproduction is basically the only way anybody is getting anything away at the moment.
But Sunny Side is also benefitting from the demise of another French market. The lack of a MipTV in March or April is depriving sellers of places to market their wares between the London Screenings at the start of the year and Mipcom in October. In unscripted, La Rochelle is filling that gap.
This has led to some debate about how Sunny Side can expand beyond its current documentary focus. The most obvious would be to broaden its definition of factual/unscripted to the sort of formats and reality business that has become commonplace at January’s RealScreen Summit.
L-R: TV Brasil’s Antonia Pellegrino, Sunny Side’s Aurélie Reman and France Télévisions’ Caroline Behar, who leads the Global Doc initiative
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Sunny Side MD Aurélie Reman told the C21Podcast: “It’s a debate we’re having with our advisory committee – the definition of documentary and what new formats or aspects of that unscripted industry could be focused at Sunny Side. We’ve made a test working with [nonfiction market] LatAm Content Meeting, working on our first factual entertainment pitching sessions over there. I think it’s a genre that is really appealing to Lat Am and Brazilian audiences, and a chance to better understand that genre in terms of narrative, production and the types of partners.”
So perhaps we should watch out for the producers of Real Housewives and the like trying to get a reservation at Le Panier de Crabes.
Trust is key in AI
There was the usual big focus on whether AI is a friend or foe here this week. Factual TV continues to veer between embracing it as a technology, which can vastly reduce production time and costs, or fearing it as something that’s going to take production away from humans altogether and kill their jobs. It’s a particular quandary for public service broadcasters (PSBs).
Caroline Behar, head of international coproductions and documentary acquisitions at France Télévisions, told delegates: “It can be a transformative opportunity and feed an appetite for innovation, but also it’s vital the creator keeps control of their film. In every meeting people are very cautious about its use. We are receiving more and more treatments written with AI. There is no emotion in these treatments and emotion is key to attracting viewers. We need producers to have a lot of emotion. PSBs have responsibility to ensure veracity of information, and we need to set a clear contact with our audience so we’re clear whether it’s AI or not.”
LatAm Content Meeting’s lunch presentation
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Lat Am in the spotlight
As in Sheffield last week, the looming threat to PBS in the US and the potential for another US$1bn to go out of the unscripted coproduction market at the worst possible moment was high on the agenda at Sunny Side.
Interestingly, though, there was a lot more activity and positivity from South America, and Brazil in particular.
LatAm Content Meeting held a special lunch presentation in La Rochelle to announce a partnership with Sunny Side and confirm São Paulo as the host city for its second edition, scheduled to take place in April next year. TV Brasil chief Antonia Pellegrino was also in town to deliver the opening keynote, revealing the Brazilian pubcaster is joining the Global Doc coproduction alliance.
With the World Congress of Science Producers also scheduled to take place in Rio this December, it does feel like potential new markets are opening up as the traditional ones diminish.
