Meet the Mentor: Elias Ribeiro

“CineMart, IFFR and the Hubert Bals Fund have always been spaces of freedom"

He is mentoring three projects at CineMart 2022, two from Brazil and one from South Africa; Deaf Love 1500 by Grace Passô, Mother of Gold by Madiano Marcheti, both Brazilian, and Carissa by Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar (South Africa). “I love the fact that I can tailor the mentorship to whatever the teams need,” Elias says of his Rotterdam involvement in 2022. “CineMart, IFFR and the Hubert Bals Fund have always been spaces of freedom. And they've given me a lot of freedom in how I structure and work with the teams.”

Elias Ribeiro, left, at CineMart in 2020

What the project rights holders must bear in mind, and therefore actively prepare for, is the lack of true personal contact with potential investors, given the pandemic times in which we live, Elias reminds IFFR Pro. “No shaking hands, no feeling the temperature of their skin, their smell – it becomes much harder to trust your gut,” he stresses. “We have to consider this new platform, this new impersonal computerised medium that we are having to deliver the pitches on. How do we manage to create real meaningful human interactions and emotional engagement in our exchanges?” 

“The real magic will happen later"

The main point of these meetings is therefore to grab the interest of potential partners from the word go. “The real magic will happen later. So how do we crack getting the interest immediately so that there's a follow up conversation, and then develop a relationship that can really breathe and flourish?”

Apart from offering the teams feedback on the creative and financial elements of their packages, Elias underlines the opportunity at hand to identify fellow professionals they can work with, and whose visions they share. “I've been in co-productions where I had a partner in Germany raising €300,000 for a film, but never giving one script note, but have been in other situations where it was really important for a French partner, for example, to get on board at treatment stage so we could develop a script together in a manner that would speak to their funding system as well.” 

"It needs to be a match"

Such collaborations were spawned as a result of personal contact/chemistry at co-pro events such as CineMart. “I'm a true believer that these spaces are important for finding the right fit. Because it needs to be a match, it needs to be a win-win from both sides in order to move ahead,” he underlines. 

In 2015 Elias co-founded the Realness African Screenwriters Residency, an incubator that has developed 30 audiovisual projects in over 16 countries in Africa to date and which evolved into the Realness Institute, now housing five capacity building programmes in the creative industry, catering to writers, producers, directors, programmers, sales & distribution professionals, most recently in partnership with Netflix, episodic content creators and development executives. Elias has maintained very close links with IFFR, both festival and industry, and other key European staging posts such as Locarno Film Festival and its Open Doors co-pro platform. He was recently appointed by Locarno as a regional manager of the Southern Africa Industry Academy.

"It’s like karma"

“I'm very much immersed in this mentorship space. I've travelled extensively in the different festivals here in Europe to share my network, my experience with emerging producers in Africa,” he says. “It's something that I do with really great pleasure. I feel like I'm paying back for the good things that were put in my basket in the years that I was building myself up.”

“So it’s like karma. You do good. You put good things out there. Good things come to you,” Elias concludes.