Building fair co-productions: Case studies and solutions

According to EAVE Think Tank’s 2025 report Building Inclusive Co-productions: Best Practices for Producers, ethical co-production is defined as: “A framework that prioritizes fairness, transparency, and mutual respect in international partnerships, ensuring that all collaborators—especially those from low-production capacity regions or marginalized communities—benefit equitably.”

To explore how this plays out on the ground, this article draws on conversations with four producers from across Asia, Africa, and Europe, highlighting concrete examples of how co-productions can work towards these goals.

Indian director and producer Bipuljit Basu made his first feature-length documentary Redlight to Limelight, in Kolkata, where sex workers in one of the city's biggest brothels formed a collective to make a film about the lived experiences of their children. Their film eventually screened locally and shifted the community’s perception of the women, to see them as sex workers and storytellers.

This means Basu was impact producing before he even knew of the term. At Docedge Kolkata, the first of seven international forums he attended to pitch his film, he met Finnish producer John Webster, who became his mentor.

“John observed how the project grew and, after two years, he decided to join as a co-producer. This really elevated the project and helped me start to build my network,” Basu says.

Latvian producer Uldis Sekulis, joined the project when it was 50% financed, per his fund’s requirement. This highlights a common discrepancy between fund regulations and reality on the ground: Basu had to rely on private investors to keep the filming going between forums.

Belgian producer Rosa Spaliviero, of Twenty Nine Studio, shares her experience of working on Liti Liti by Senegalese director Mamadou Khouma Gueye. Born in Senegal, Spaliviero has known Gueye since 2009.

“The starting point for me is the relationship I have with the filmmakers and their respect for the context of their community,” she explains.

Given that Liti Liti is a deeply personal story rooted in Senegal’s economic and political circumstances, working with local producer Aminata Dao of Dakar-based Sine Films was crucial. Senegal is one of the few African countries with a national film fund, FOPICA, which contributed 25% of the budget.

“Co-production draws on the strengths of the community in and around the film, which is why it’s so important to work with African producers,” Spaliviero believes.

Kenyan filmmaker and producer Sam Soko also highlights this in his work on Zimbabwean director Nyasha Kadandara's Matabeleland. Soko finds a structural benefit in working with local crews. Creative choices, like hiring a Kenyan editor and collaborating with story consultant Niels Pagh Andersen, helped reduced the budget by nearly 75%.

“The positionality starts with looking at your budget and seeing where the money is going,” Soko says. Partnering with Canadian producer Bob Moore of EyeSteelFilm on post-production (who he worked with on his own directing debut Softie) further optimized resources. “Building and keeping these relationships is incredibly important, with so little financing available in our territories,” he says.

Financial challenges mean that producers often rely on smaller-scale international grants, which often impose formal structures misaligned with the filmmakers' vision. Matabeleland tackles exhumation and reburial of civil war victims from the protagonist's personal angle.

“Many funds wanted the film to be more political, asking if we had ‘more electrifying’ scenes, like police stopping the exhumations, but this was not the film we had set out to make. Zimbabweans know who the culprit is; our audience wouldn’t be interested in a hero-villain angle,” Soko explains.

He contrasts what he calls “agenda money”, which only finances a certain type of film, with funds such as Sundance or IDFA Bertha Fund, which he sees as taking more risks.

“We hope to encourage trust in the filmmaker speaking to the target audience, rather than imposing an agenda. You can't build an industry if you're just telling one type of story,” he argues.

Spaliviero found that some fund requirements helped refine stories, but she still engages a local expert, such as a Congolese dramaturgist on Nelson Makengo’s Rising Up at Night.

“It's important to strike a balance between the framework imposed by the funding body and the filmmaker's own voice. Embracing different worldviews and understanding others is key. Funds could harmonize their rules and regulations, standardize the application process and budget template, and be more flexible with scriptwriting, trusting the filmmaker’s vision. From my point of view, the script is an example of an imposed Western structure,” she says. She also criticizes the fact that many funds require spending in their own countries.

“These funds are built on colonial wealth extracted from the countries of applicants. Simply giving non-recoupable grants would be a fair and very effective way to return some of this wealth,” she believes.

Victor Ede of Marseille-based Cinephage worked on Petra Seliškar’s The Mountain Won’t Move, a Slovenian-French-Macedonian co-production. The film, shot in North Macedonia and centered on the lives of mountain shepherds, balanced financing from Cinemas du Monde and Region Sud by completing post-production in France. Since local funds could not match the levels available in France or even Slovenia, true ownership was ensured by employing a large Macedonian crew on location.

Ede is now producing Ukrainian director Zoya Laktionova’s Ashes Settling in Layers on the Surface, about her hometown of Mariupol between the Second World War and the Russian invasion, based on private and public archive materials Laktionova brought these to France. Ede assigned value to them based on the average price of archive and added it to her director’s fee, strengthening her ownership of the film while complying with fund regulations.

“Zoya is not giving these for free. These archives from Soviet times have never been seen. Showing her research in the visual material was enough proof for the funds,” he explains.

Another way to make a co-production fair is to make private revenue-sharing agreements. Ede applied this to both Laktionova’s project, which is still in financing, and to The Mountain Won’t Move, the budget of which is 51.64% Slovenian, 31.60% French, and 16.86% Macedonian.

“You have to set clear terms from the beginning, so we agreed to own one third of the project each. Some institutions may not recognize breaking proportionality between the financing and shares, but as private companies we can have private deals—an official agreement for the institutions, and a signed agreement among ourselves. I did this with the CNC, and because it's a private agreement, I have the right to share things differently with my partners,” he elaborates.

When the French co-producer Eugénie Michel-Villette of Les Films du Bilboquet raised more funds than Spaliviero in Belgium, the initial 50-50 agreement with Dao was amended to 40-40-20, with Michel-Vilette getting 20% of the shares, revenues, overheads and producer's fees. Plus, they split revenues for France equally—the only territory in which one can realistically make some revenue with a non-commercial documentary.

“The splitting of fees and shares eventually reflected the actual distribution of work rather than being strictly linked to the percentage of funding raised,” Spaliviero explains.

On Matabeleland, Soko made sure the factual and symbolic ownership of the film remained local. Even though no funding came from Zimbabwe, it is listed a Kenya-Zimbabwe-Canada co-production.

“We co-own this project with Nyasha, and this collaboration involves joint consultations, cooperative efforts, and a shared commitment to revenue distribution,” he says.

Ownership is not only financial, and even though the value of a filmmaker’s personal investment is hard to calculate, it is undeniable.

“It’s about how you see the value of me as the African filmmaker and what value I'm bringing on board, rather than only sticking the conversation to a monetary-structured corner,” says Soko.

One way to do this is to foster more regional collaborations. Matabeleland was made by a crew from five African countries: Zimbabwe, Botswana, Kenya, South Africa, and Mozambique.

“I keep working to have more investor funds coming from this side of the world. For sustainability, support has to come from within,” Soko believes.

He is now in the rough cut stage with Jordanian director Asmahan Bkerat’s Concrete Land and considers it another experiment in South-South collaboration. Having joined in the post-production stage, he says they couldn’t have a traditional co-production, but built a relationship by leveraging their collective experience in both creative aspects and industry navigation. 

“The existing models of financing enforce certain structures and topics. Concrete Land touches immigration, climate change, and an Indigenous community—falling into no man's land,” Soko explains.

“While this journey has presented challenges, we are continuously adapting and learning. I believe fostering more South-South co-productions is crucial for the growth of regions that often face funding challenges. I encourage other filmmakers to keep exploring and innovating beyond existing models that predominantly rely on the Global North.”

This editorial was published in the IDFA 2025 Program Guide.
See the full Program Guide here.