A Portrait of Sales Company NEW DOCS

“Real life has always fascinated me – even as a child I preferred stories from real life over watching cartoons,” recalls Elina Kewitz of the world sales company NEW DOCS.

So, it’s not so surprising that Elina has spent the past two decades active in the field of documentaries, firstly for seven years as an international sales manager for non-fiction at united docs GmbH, a distribution subsidiary of Germany’s ARD public broadcaster network and its regional channels, and then setting up her own Cologne-based company in 2012.

“On a personal level, I’ve always found it satisfy­ing working with films that have a social relevance and can potentially have an impact,” she explains. “Documentaries about real people, events and places can generate a sense of empathy that one can’t always achieve with fiction. They can help widen your horizon and encourage you to change your point of view.”

“We are one of the few sales companies who have both feature and TV documentaries in our sales catalogue,” Elina notes, pointing out that NEW DOCS has between 6-8 feature documentaries and 20-25 TV documentaries added to its sales line-up each year.

Around 80% of the titles on offer are coming from German production companies – either as majority German productions or in co-production with international partners – with one-offs and series from the fields of history, science, current affairs, human interest, culture, art, travel and natural history. She stresses that the company remains resolutely independent – “we are not associated with any production company or distribution com­pany and don’t belong to a media conglomerate” – and adds that “wher­ever possible, we try to use the synergies existing between the feature and TV documentary formats and cater for all forms of exploitation.”

The stage when NEW DOCS can come onboard a project as a sales company is decided on a project-by-project basis. “If a project is still at the stage of development, we would only become involved if it is with producers that we have al­ready collaborated with for some time in the past because it’s important to have a relationship of trust with your partners,” Elina says.

While NEW DOCS picks up most of its projects through existing relationships with production companies, the rough cut screenings at such international industry events as IDFA, Sheffield DocFest and DOK Leipzig can be good places to make discoveries, and the project markets where producers are seeking financing can be useful to establish new contacts for the future.

NEW DOCS’ recent festival successes have included Florian Heinzen-Ziob’s DANCING PINA which celebrates the art of the legendary choreographer Pina Bausch and the people who interpret her work today as well as Niloufar Taghizadeh’s GOOGOOSH – MADE OF FIRE portraying the Iranian cult figure and pop icon Googoosh who has become a symbol of hope for her people’s struggle for freedom and humanity, and Thomas Riedelsheimer’s exploration of the most fascinating of natural phenomenon, TRACING LIGHT, which was the opening film of the 2024 edition of DOK Leipzig.

In 2025, the Berlinale’s Panorama section hosted the world premiere of Martina Priessner’s THE MOELLN LETTERS which Elina had picked up after seeing a teaser trailer of the film during German Films’ DOK Preview Germany in Leipzig in October 2024. And this year’s edition of CPH:DOX in March saw the world premiere of Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken’s WATCHING PEOPLE WATCHING BIRDS which follows people passionate about birdwatching – from the world-renowned American author Jonathan Franzen to professional ornithologists.

Most recently, festival invitations for New Docs titles were extended to Claudia Müller’s REBECCA HORN – THE SECRET LIFE OF THINGS, which had its world premiere in Munich International Film Festival’s New German Cinema section at the end of June, and to Rosa Friedrich for her feature documentary debut MY FRIEND THE PORN STAR which screened in this year’s Proxima Competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival at the beginning of July.

Martin Blaney