French Broadcasters Find Good Market For The Truth

French commercial broadcasters are aggressively casting around for "living history" re-creations to schedule as well-publicized primetime events.

The drive has been spurred by the success of such docudramas as "Pompeii: The Last Day," "A Species Odyssey" and three D-Day films broadcast to mark the 50th anniversary of the Normandy invasion.

The trend, which experts say has taken awhile to catch on in France, was evident at the Sunny Side of the Doc, the four-day international documentary film festival that attracted a record 1,800 participants and closed Tuesday (HR 6/23).

"French commercial broadcasters are interested in programming that can be built up into events," said Alexandra Stainov, television manager in France for BBC Worldwide, which co-produced "Pompeii" and "D-Day" with French pubcaster France 2.

"Truth sells better than fiction, and we've always been interested in blue-chip documentaries with high artistic and technical quality," said Frederic Dezert of private French TV group M6. "Traditional documentaries tend to be boring," he said. M6 recently bought BBC's "Super Volcano," a futuristic look at what would happen to the world's ecosystem if the supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park erupted.

Though pubcasters France 2, 3 and 5 under the France Televisions umbrella, which will spend €66 million ($79.9 million) on documentaries this year, and Arte, the French-German arts channel, dominated the market at Sunny Side, private networks also made the rounds — "checkbooks in hand," as one producer put it.