Cloë Pinot: "It would be nice to grow in Latin America"

Balanga is a French distribution agency specialising in documentary and drama that will be celebrating 10 year next year. The primary focus of the company was documentaries. "We started with mostly, history, science, current affairs, a bit of true crime as well, and some art and culture portraits," commented Cloë Pinot, Sales Executive at Balanga. "Very well curated, cherry-picked content with always high quality in mind," she said.

One of the outstanding Balanga documentaries is "The Mysteries of Picasso" (2x52'), produced for France Television to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his death back in April 2023. "It's a very broad and complete portrait of the artist," asserted Pinot. "It's not just Picasso as an artist, it's also Picasso as a man and his flaws, his relationship with women, his political involvement, the rivalries that he had with other artists, just to have kind of an idea of the man behind the artist," she added.

A few years ago, Balanga began to expand on the fiction field, and now has three fiction series in its catalogue. One of them is French-Canadian series“Paris, Paris” (13x26'). "We are selling the rights worldwide for season one, and season two is actually in post-production," anticipated Balanga Sales Executive. The storyline is a man in his 40s, he lives in Paris, Ontario, a very small city in the middle of Canada. He has always dreamed about French literature, theatres, wanting to be an artist but he ends up being a professor of French language in a small high school, and it feels like a failure for him. He's kind of disappointed with his life, he's having trouble with his wife, with his kids. One day he gets laid off at work, so he's very frustrated, and he decides to do some renovation in the basement to just keep himself occupied. And he discovers a tunnel in his basement, then he decides to enter the tunnel, and he ends up in Paris, France, where he can live the life that he always dreamed of. So he will begin to try to live both lives at the same time. "We are very happy about this series. It was sold to CBC in English-speaking in Canada, and we also made a sale in Australia to SBS," Pinot commented.

The sale agency is pretty much involved in the distribution of French true-crime series so it's promoting "Crime Time Solvers" (20x52'), a true crime doc focusing on the cases that have been solved very quickly by the police. "In the series, audiences are immersed with the police team and how they manage to do it so quickly," she detailed.

During its 10 year, Balanga has expanded its content offer and they will try to expand more on the fictional side, as well as continue to grow the catalogue on the documentary side. "We will try to find some new opportunities and new people to work with and just continue to grow the Balanga brand," said Pinot.

Another main goal for the company would be to grow in Latin America. "It's not the easiest territory to get into as a French distributor, but we have some content that could work in Latin America," she indicated. "We have been presented in Asia as well, we work with China, with Japan and we would like to grow business into Southeast Asia," she concluded.