Dutch distributor Huub Roelvink, founder and managing director of Cherry Pickers Filmdistributie, has been chosen for the inaugural EFM Distributor Award recognizing his contribution and dedication to arthouse distribution.
He was chosen by a three-person skilled jury consisting of Natalie Jeung at French gross sales firm Kinolgy, Kim Foss at Danish distributor Digicam Movie and Leila Hamid at Germany’s X-Verleih.
Created in 2016, Cherry Pickers is a serious drive in arthouse distribution within the Netherlands with latest titles together with Exhausting Truths, The Kingdom and 2024 Berlinale titles No Different Land and My Favorite Cake.
The €7.5k ($7.8k) prize, sponsored by the Netherlands-based movie and TV rights administration firm Fintage Home, will probably be introduced to Roelvink on the European Movie Market (EFM) kick-off occasion on February 12.
Incoming Berlinale Professional director and EFM head Tanja Meissner has spearheaded the award.
“I needed to introduce an award throughout the EFM to recognise the essential societal and cultural worth of the work of European Arthouse Distributors which is commonly undervalued,” she stated.
“Whereas awards largely go to filmmakers and producers, movies solely actually exist as soon as they’re distributed and attain their meant audiences. We frequently focus on the significance of fostering cultural trade by upholding range and exhibiting totally different views, and cinema has a very highly effective function to play in that. Arthouse Distributors contribute not solely culturally, but in addition economically and politically by reinforcing the inspiration of European democracy.”
The jury stated they has chosen Roelvink for his passionate and pragmatic method to curating his slate.
“Huub Roelvink from Cherry Pickers Movie Distribution within the Netherlands is likely to be working in one of the crucial thriving territories of all of them, however that additionally means harsh competitors for content material – with steeper costs than in lots of different territories,” they stated.
“In his method to curation, Huub demonstrates a cautious stability of ardour and pragmatism. He evaluates movies primarily based on their creative benefit and their potential to interact viewers, understanding that profitable distribution requires each high quality content material and viewers attraction.”
Cherry Pickers releases roughly 12 to fifteen titles per yr. Previous to creating the corporate, Roelvink was managing director of Think about Filmdistributie Netherlands and founding father of Cinema Delicatessen, a distributor specialised in documentaries.
He additionally has intensive expertise in cinema programming and exploitation, beginning his profession as a scholar within the Kriterion cinema in Amsterdam, and subsequently programming varied arthouses and being managing director of arthouse LUX in Nijmegen. He holds a Grasp’s in Social Anthropology from the College of Amsterdam.
