Seiichi SHINNO

 

Senior Producer of Content Develoment Center
NHK (Japan)

What are your expectations and objectives for this 34th edition of Sunny Side of the Doc? What will be your highlights not to be missed during these 4 days of the market?

I heard Sunny Side 2023 will have more producers and decision makers than the last year. NHK will send 14 delegates this year, a significant increase from 2022. Our biggest goal is to broaden and strengthen our relationships of mutual trust with overseas partners. In that sense, the session we will hold during the event is an important opportunity. In Meet NHK scheduled on the first day, we are planning to present some of our coproduction projects currently underway such as Scan Pyramids 2, Origin of Land II, and Mars-MMX. NHK producers will talk about these projects. I would like as many attendees as possible to come and listen to their raw voices and learn more about NHK.

Audience is the main thread of the 2023 edition, why do you think this topic is crucial for you, your company and the documentary industry as a whole? In your company, which documentary audiences do you want to target and where?

Creating documentary films that reach the “wide-ranging” audience is quite important for our survival as public broadcaster. This is also important for the development of the doc industry. Currently, a significant part of our audience is the aged group, and there is a pressure of necessity to reach the younger generations. We’ve discovered documentaries from outside Japan tend to be well received among young viewers in Japan. We expect discussing the theme of "viewers" with filmmakers from all over the world at the Sunny Side will be quite useful for use to develop measures to expand the viewership and make out the direction of production and broadcasting of doc programs.

2023 is the Year of the Documentary in France. On this occasion, can you tell us the challenges - in your opinion - of producing and distributing documentaries internationally today?

Today there are an unprecedentedly many different platforms, formats, and sub-genres of doc contents available for viewers. We must correctly plan who to reach, what to create, through which channel to deliver our contents. When doc industry players from the world join their knowledge and collaborate, we believe we will gain the strength to meet the challenge we face today.

We are convinced that integrating new actors contributes to the vivacity of the sector. How would you present / explain - in a few words - Sunny Side of the Doc to those who do not know about the marketplace yet?

At Sunny Side, we can meet personally with the people from various fields with all kinds of great ideas and different backgrounds. You can find someone who have the same interests as you, can give you useful advice, and may become your partners in materializing your project you’ve been aspiring.