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After Shari Redstone sold Paramount Global to David Ellison’s Skydance in 2024, she chose something unexpected for her next act: Sipur, a growing film and TV studio based out of Israel.
When Redstone joined as chair last year, it supercharged the company, says co-founder Emilio Schenker, who met Redstone two years ago when Paramount picked up the rights to Sipur’s Oct. 7 documentary “We Will Dance Again.” Today he considers her a “dear friend” as well as business partner.
“Bringing Shari Redstone on board was a game-changer,” Schenker tells Variety, in his first interview with recently-hired president Ludovic Attal, who joins from Amazon MGM Studios. Now Sipur, whose USP is high-end international co-pros on modest budgets, has opened a London office, a natural step for a company Schenker co-founded with investor Gideon Tadmor seven years ago.
The plan is to continue making smart investments into a range of international co-pros like Casper Kelly’s feature “Buddy,” popular fare such as “Mirame Asi, El Camino de Noa” starring Noa Kirel, high-end dramas such as “Heart of a Killer” (featuring “Tehran’s” Niv Sultan) and the upcoming Yariv Mozer doc “Blood Brothers,” about rival Iranian and Israeli Olympic judo players who form an unlikely friendship, which is being produced with Fox Entertainment Studio and Fulwell.
Ahead of Mipcom, Schenker and Attal sat down with Variety to talk about their plans for the company, what they’re looking for at Mipcom and give a glimpse into some of their upcoming projects – including Olivier Dahan’s upcoming project “Nana.” (Marvelous Productions are co-producing with ARP Sélection, who will also handle French distribution.)
Read on to find out more…
Why have you decided to open Sipur’s London office?
Emilio: My husband has lived here in London for a long time, so London always felt like a natural home for me. But from day one, we wanted to build a global entertainment studio, and I think that [for the first] seven years our headquarters’ focus was in Israel. This is a new beginning for Sipur … with a brand-new office in London, with new partners that we’re announcing soon.
The ambition is to become a global studio, and it’s also very important that Ludovic decided to join Sipur after a very, very long time that I’ve been chasing after him and trying to convince him to leave the very, very comfortable and amazing job he had at Amazon MGM Studios and to come to work for this crazy startup for content. So I’m so happy that he finally said yes.
Ludo, how did Emilio finally convince you?
Ludo: I met with Emilio in 2019 when Sipur signed the first-look deal with MGM. So I was on the other side. I met with Emilio, and we had a great professional collaboration. And I was seeing Sipur becoming something with a significant place in the market that has been able to pivot along the years for different reasons, based on the geopolitical situation and how they have been able to also invest in American films and international series. So I saw them first succeeding in everything they were doing and pivoting based on how the market was changing, and in a market that changes every single day in terms of technology, in terms of trends, in terms of everything, I think that being nimble today is one of the best qualities that a company can have.
And obviously having great partners in the company, like Shari Redstone, and also [Sipur co-founder] Gideon Tadmore, has been a very important point for me to make this decision, with the addition of the talent of Emilio and the team.
How have things changed since Shari has joined the company?
Emilio: Bringing Shari Redstone on board was a game changer… the fact that this iconic figure who built, ran one of the biggest empires in the history of the entertainment industry, deciding one day after she sold the company to invest in a very tiny – in comparison to Paramount, we are tiny — company that was based in Israel. This was a huge game changer for the company.
Having her — with all the relationships and all the knowledge and experience and connections — it’s something that would take us a hundred years to get to this place. And I think that she is amazing. She’s a dear, very close friend of mine, a dear friend, and an amazing chairwoman, and I’m so so so proud that she’s part of this company.
What was it about London — as opposed to say, L.A. — that seemed like the right place for Sipur to open an office?
Ludo: For co-production it’s much stronger to be in London, and on the television side specifically, we have a very curated content strategy. We’re not in the volume business. We’d rather have six shows per year that we would fight for than 30 shows that we would apologize for. The emphasis now is on English language international co-productions, and London is, I would say, the capital of co-production. I will not say that it’s a pivot for Sipur because Sipur has always done co-production. But what changes now is potentially the language and the scale. We’ve now got a very ambitious slate in development, and we’re going to announce things pretty soon, and that’s why I would say London makes the most sense for us at the moment.
There’s a lot of talk in the industry right now about consolidation; are you potentially looking for some kind of full or minority acquisition?
Ludo: I would say it’s rather the other way around. We are laser-focused on multiple M&A initiatives in Europe in order to create commercially-valuable partnerships with established production companies and also creators and writers and collaborators. So this is what we’re looking at very seriously. We are having strong discussions. So we are bidding rather than [looking to be] acquired. We don’t have the ambition to become a Banijay or a Mediawan, we want to remain a boutique studio, but we want to grow.
What’s bringing you to Mipcom this year?
Ludo: We don’t act as a traditional distributor. We’re not a distributor. We could sell shows ourselves, but we are also here to meet with partners.
At Mipcom, our focus is not so much about selling a show to TF1 or to Prime Video or to Mediaset. It’s to set up our shows that will be sold in the future by us or by others. So, in terms of finished shows, we have [Argentinian/Israeli co-pro] “Mirame Asi El Camino de Noa,” this one has been produced on spec. It has been sold already to Prime Video in Latin America, and now we’re bringing it to the rest of the world, for both English-speaking territories, but also everything else in Europe, in Asia, and in Australia, etc. This is a project that we’re very proud to bring to the world.
How do you split Sipur’s focus and resources between film and TV?
Ludo: I think that we have a split that is pretty balanced between film and TV. At least this is our ambition in terms of film. So as you know, we had “Oh, Canada” from Paul Schrader. We had “Dead Man’s Wire” from Gus Van Sant. We had “Nuremberg” [from James Vanderbilt]. We had “Buddy” [from Casper Kelly]. We had “Chasing Summer” [from Josephine Decker]. We had “Our Loves” from Avi Nesher that has just been presented in TIFF.
And I can tell you also exclusively in this conversation that we have boarded as a partner the new film from [“La Vie en Rose” director] Olivier Dahan, which is “Nana” [an adaptation of Émile Zola’s novel]. This film this is the return of Olivier to the grand period drama. “Nana” is a story about fame, about desire, about the ruin of powerful men. We have this hero Nana: she’s very sexy, she’s modern, she’s irreverent. She’s the Kim Kardashian of the belle epoque, and this film feels very relevant today.
How do you see the state of the industry at the moment?
Ludo: What we’re seeing is the industry is shifting under our feet. The cost-plus model, where a platform pays 100% of the budget plus a premium for the producer, it’s retreating. And now things are recalibrating, and platforms are offering more deficit financing structure instead, and the streamers basically they are moving towards shared window where a platform takes the first run of rights and maybe one territory or two territories, and the studio will keep the rights elsewhere, and that’s a problem for the producer who can only sell services, but it’s an opportunity for a studio that can put their own money on the table. So we invest sometimes very significantly in order to keep our rights. And this is exactly why being backed by someone like Shari Redstone changes the conversation. We can take positions that an independent maybe can’t.
Can you talk more about Sipur’s strategy?
Emilio: What I’m curious about is countries that have an amazing creative community that is untapped. That’s why I started in Israel. The only reason why we started Sipur in Israel is because of the amazing creative community that basically didn’t have enough resources to create the IP, and I think that from day one I knew there are other creative communities around the world in the same position… Argentina has a very similar amazing creative community — that I know very well because I am originally from Argentina — and also have the same problem. Don’t have enough resources. Don’t have enough film funds from the government. Don’t have enough broadcasters that are willing to invest in content, and for us this is a huge opportunity.
This is why, for example, one of our next big movies is an IP that you’ve never heard about. It’s called “Pimpinela,” [about] a huge band from the 80s, a brother and a sister that created, I would say, the Abba of the Latin world…. Apparently, for many years, many producers tried to secure this IP to create a kind of “Mamma Mia!” but we came with our Argentinian partners and we negotiated with them for a long time, and eventually we managed to secure those rights.
How do you see Sipur’s position in the market place?
Ludo: Sipur has always been in the premium content industry, even though we have been able to produce for less than the market [average], we have a company that remains premium, and we intend to continue to play into this area, and that’s the reason why we’re not going to play the card of replacing directors and writers and actors [with technology] in order to reduce our costs. We have, I would say, the expertise and the knowledge and the creativity to be able to create for less without killing the creative community, and that’s something that is very important for us.
Emilio: Ludo and I have a close friend, an executive producer of one of the top shows at Netflix, and this show at Netflix cost $30 million per episode to produce. This is not our game. We are not playing in this game, and I think that our game is ten thousand times more interesting if we can, for $500,000 per episode, create IP that can last for one hundred years and create revenues for a hundred years. This is the game that we try to play.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
English (US) ·