Ten years of MIA, ten years of stories

USPA NEWS - The following is an excerpt from the international press conference with the director of MIA Gaia Tridente, that took place on October 10th 2024.

This year is the 10th edition of MIA, it is an anniversary edition. We will have five keynotes, and we are having some of the most interesting protagonists of series and shows from animation and films. One of the last confirmations we had, which is Owen Dennis, who is the creator and showrunner of “Among Us”, one of the most anticipated show, produced by CBS Studios. The show is still in production and Owen Dennis will be protagonist of the first day of MIA with an opening keynote about the crafting of the animated show “Among Us”. Then we will have Clayton Townsend, producer from Hollywood with a long running collaboration with Oliver Stone. He is also behind the production of “Ripley”, probably one of the most beautiful series released this year Netflix and awarded with four Emmy Awards. We will have several other interesting attendees: Odessa Rae, a Canadian actress and producer, she is behind “Navalny” which was a documentary awarded with the Oscar, and she will be protagonist of another keynote at MIA in the very beginning of the week.

We will have several other interesting attendees: Odessa Rae, a Canadian actress and producer, she is behind “Navalny” which was a documentary awarded with the Oscar, and she will be protagonist of another keynote at MIA in the very beginning of the week. We will be working for five days with more than 80 conferences, we will have panels around financing, there will be a big session that we are curating in collaboration with the European Commission. There will be keynote speakers that will be focusing on financing instruments, which are provided by European Commission through different kind of funds. There will be Luca Massimi, delegate of the European funds, who will explain more in depth all the facilities and the instrument that we are going to present.

Always speaking about Europe, there will be another huge conference focusing on AI and the role of AI into the mechanism and the role of the production today and what the future impact of AI will be for audiovisual producers.

We will have Darius Yablonsky, representing the APC, Miki Mistrati, Eric Barmack, Martin Dawson.

We will have 13 projects that will be showcased during the week; we will have a space within Palazzo Barberini, where to try and test 13 audiovisual works which are conceived for virtual reality films or mixed reality works so there will be a combination of different layers and different kind of technologies.

QUESTION 1:
How many exhibitors, do you have?

GAIA TRIDENTE:
In terms of numbers of exhibitors this year we have been working with around 45 companies which are represented within some umbrella space.

So, we have designed a space which is really conceived as very open, with tables and with space which are shared by the companies so there will be two or three rooms at the first floor devoted to this kind of a presentation.

QUESTION 2:
When you founded MIA 10 years ago it was sort of the peak of the international drama series boom when money was just flowing into the industry from the international streamers. That's been really cut back in recent years: budget cuts across the board.
How is that impacting the programming for MIA and is that sort of change in the industry, how is that going to be reflected in in this year's event?

GAIA TRIDENTE:
Of course the landscape around us is always changing, our industry is living different challenges year after year, there are some constraint in terms of budget of the big streamers.
So, of course, what we see is a new wave of co productions; we received about 600 projects for the coproduction market this year which is a huge number.
I think that this number is really the key to understand what is happening nowadays in our industry so probably more and more companies are joining forces.

For this special edition we are launching four new awards for MIA, so that will be something really new for us. We have established new for MIA Development Awards, which are will be assigned by four different juries. Each one will be evaluating the project selected in the four categories of the four co-production market and pitching forum; one will be for animation, one for film, one for drama and one for documentary.

I think that this is really something new and we would have loved to celebrate the industry and to celebrate people who trusted us in the in the past 10 years, so we really did our homework and we counted each project who have been presented to MIA since 2005 until today, and how many of them have been produced, so I've been entering to production, I've been finding creative, financing, co-producing or distributing partners at MIA, so we have a number, 104, that I think is a very good number for we are speaking about big movies and several TV dramas and a lot of documentaries and some animation films that you know how much is complicated to put together a budget for an animation project so I think we are super proud of that, and we will have a celebration on that side for the MIA Development Awards with a specific storytelling which will be released during even the communication of MIA and we will present a season during the press conference that will be celebrating this important part for us. It's really a landmark edition.

QUESTION 3:
Are you seeing a little shift in who's attending MIA, as the sort of funding models change, as we get private equity getting interested, brands getting interested?

GAIA TRIDENTE:
Actually there is a lot of interesting focus on the financing trends and this is something I think is crucial for any kind of discussion around our system.
I think that having an overview of the funding scheme or private possibility of funding of any kind of IPs or companies is crucial, because as you know, a lot of companies also need to have a support to survive even in such a challenging moment.