It’s shaping up to be a busy year for Teddy Leifer’s documentary-focused production company Rise Films as it marks its 20th anniversary.
Having previously conquered Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, IDFA and Tribeca, the London-based company will make its Venice debut in September with Erik Shirai’s Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing. The film, giving rare access to the hidden world of Japanese sumo wrestling, was announced on Thursday as as having been selected for Venice’s 83rd edition for its Venezia Spotlight section.
An ESPN presentation, Rise Films produced the film in association with Sigrid Dyekjær’s Copenhagen-based company Real Lava and Japan’s Generation11.
News of the selection follows on the heels of the UK theatrical release by Dogwoof of Rise Films’ Toronto 2025 title The Balloonists, about Swiss explorer Bertrand Piccard and a British flying instructor Brian Jones’s 1991 attempt to travel around the world nonstop in a hot-air balloon.
Next up is Sundance 2025-selected Teenage Wasteland (Middletown) which launches on Netflix on September 4, while its Nuisance Bear will release this fall following its worldwide acquisition by Mubi in May.
“That’s a really busy year in terms of stuff coming out,” says Leifer, noting that the bumper crop is the fruit of long development and production processes. “All those projects were many years in the making. I think we started Teenage Wasteland about eight years ago.”
It has a been a packed two decades for Rise Films since its launch in 2006 with We Are Together. The film, exploring the devastating social impact of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa through orphaned children living in the Agape Orphanage outside Durban who form a choir to help deal with the pain of losing their parents, set the tone for its future slate.
Leifer and director Paul W. Taylor began the production while still students at Arts University Bournemouth (AUB), after the latter bonded with some of the children and their extended families while working as volunteer at the orphanage over the summer of 2003.
“He returned, unexpectedly, with some incredible footage of the children – both of their singing and their lives… Since I was the only person on our course at Bournemouth University interested in producing, I think I was his only option and he asked me to work with him to produce the film,” recounts Leifer.
“Until then, I’d not considered producing documentaries, I’d produced short-scripted projects and a music video previously, but I was hooked making docs and have been ever since.”
Post-university, Leifer worked as a development intern at Endemol and then as an assistant to French producer Bertrand Faivre, founder of London and Paris-based company The Bureau, as he attempted to raise funding to complete the project.
“I’m not sure I did a very good job,” Leifer says of his time working for Faivre. “On my last day he gave me one piece of advice: ‘Assumption is the mother of all fuckups’.”
“When I started the company a year or so later, I wrote him an email and said, ‘God, I really know what you mean now when you said that to me on my last day. He replied with a single line email: ‘Yes, and remember Teddy, the lantern only lights the way for the person holding it.’ An amazing piece of advice which I interpreted to mean don’t assume people can see what you see.”
We Are Together world premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in 2006, winning the First Appearances and Audience Awards, the first in a raft of prizes at a dozen festivals including Edinburgh, Sheffield Doc and Tribeca.
As well as putting Leifer and Taylor on the map, the film also resulted in the creation of the Rise Foundation to fund the education and vocational training of children in the Agape Orphanage, which Leifer says is still going strong and has supported more than 30 children and young adults to date.
We Are Together would also lead to Leifer and Taylor producing Kim Longinotto’s Tough Aunties, about five women caring for sexually-abused children in Durban, which won a Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2009. Rise Films has since also produced Longinotto’s 2015 Sundance Directing Award winner Dreamcatcher.
“We’d loved so much of Kim’s previous work and had an idea for her, also in South Africa, where we had access to an extraordinary group of people,” Leifer says of Rough Aunties. “It was a very easy collaboration with Kim, as was Dreamcatcher, and I’m always on the look-out for another project we might work on together. She’s one of the most brilliant and fun directors I’ve been lucky enough to work with.”
Other landmark documentaries over Rise Films’ first two decades include Steve James’ 2011 Emmy winner The Interrupters; Ian Palmer’s Sundance-selected Knuckle; Kirby Dick’s Oscar-nominated The Invisible War; Bryan Fogel’s Oscar-winner Icarus; Dror Moreh’s The Human Factor; David Osit’s Emmy and Peabody winner Mayor; Taylor’s Emmy nominated The Art Of Political Murder; Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio’s two-part Primetime Emmy winning show George Carlin’s American Dream; true crime docu-thriller series Once Upon A Time In Londongrad and Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes.
The latter – about two brothers in New Delhi devoted to protecting the threatened black kite bird of prey – made history as the first film to win both the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and Best Documentary at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022.
“We saw a sample scene and were very impressed,” recounts Leifer of Rise Films’ involvement in the latter film.
“Visually it didn’t resemble the final film too closely, but the creative intention was there and when we met Shaunak, he had a such a clear plan for how he wanted to execute his vision – and it was obvious how we could support him in making that happen. He, rather than the initial material itself, which was still impressive, was the difference maker.”
Outside of factual content, Rise Films also produced ancient Roman sitcom Plebs, which ran on ITV2 for four seasons from 2013, and enjoyed a revival on Netflix last year. It was written and directed by Leifer’s brother Sam Leifer, who works under the separate Rise Comedy banner.
Back at Rise Films, Leifer says relationships with producers as well as directors have been at the heart of its success, name-checking as examples All The Breathes producer Aman Mann as well as Will N. Miller on Nuisance Bear.
He also expresses pride in the company’s homegrown team numbering around 10 permanent staff based in offices in the central London neighborhood of Fitzrovia.
“We don’t really want to be bigger than that… one of the things we’re really proud of is how long people stay… people join us at an entry level and go either through an assistant or a development route and get a chance to work on their own projects, working with me… it’s a homegrown method,” he says.
He points to in-house producers Guy Horlock, who produced Once Upon A Time In London and The Balloonists, and Sam Stanley, who worked on Sumo, as examples of this trajectory.
Another key development in the company’s trajectory was its sale in 2022 of a majority stake to Paris-based pan-European group TF1 Studio, then Newen Studios, after being approached by then CEO Romain Bessi and Head of International Philippe Lavasseur.
“They were really lovely…. we had multiple other offers, both from European buyers and from US buyers… even though we work non-stop for American streamers, broadcasters and equity financiers, there was a comfort in being owned by a European company,” says Leifner. “It’s been almost four years since they acquired us, and it’s been great. They’ve been really supportive. They really like what we do, and the films and television that we make, and I’m glad we did it,” says Leifer.
“TF1 Studio has been very good at the continuation of the independence of the individual labels. We’re in our own place. I meet with them monthly. I like that structure. After 17 years of being totally independent, it’s really nice.”
Rise Comedy was not included in the deal but continues to share offices with Rise Films. Sam Leifer, who stops by the interview with his brother, has several new project irons in the fire including a YA comedy drama for a streamer and a big Love Actually-style Christmas movie featuring a screenplay by Simon Blackwell.
Paul Robeson
Getty Images
Back at Rise Films, Teddy Leifer, who says he is not keen on revealing details of films in production, confirms he is reuniting with Shaunak and Mann on The Delicate. Currently in production, it started out as an intimate portrait of a New Delhi surgeon but took a different direction after the latter noticed the director’s rapid weight loss and then diagnosed cancer.
Other projects in the works include a bio-doc devoted to actor-singer-activist Paul Robeson from award-winning directorial duo Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson (Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, Black Girls Play: The Story of Hand Games, American Promise). Rise Films is joining forces with Rada Studio and Impact Partners on the production.
The company also is also developing features with two sets of award-winning directorial duos which are under wraps for now.
In another update, previously announced project Thank You & Goodbye, about the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, which was announced at the development stage back in 2021, has been indefinitely mothballed.
Asked on its status, Leifer replies: “Shelved, probably dead. But if not dead, then at least very unwell. It was deemed too ‘politically controversial’ when the BBC came to greenlight it to series, which the drama department was ready to do. But it was ultimately axed by Murdoch fearing executives higher up. A real shame. I think, for the better, things have changed since then.”
Looking to the future of documentary in general, Leifer acknowledges it is a complex time as streamers pare back documentary spending and seek more mainstream fare, while state broadcasters grapple with dwindling budgets, but says he is still optimistic for the genre.
“Whilst there’s not the volume there during the boom that began 10 years ago and as much easy access to finance… I feel that creatively, the best directors and the best producers still have their best work ahead of them,” he says.
“Documentaries are still getting better and better in terms of their creative ambition and risk taking,” he continues, adding that there are still opportunities to be had with the streamers. “It may be that they commission more true crime, celebrity-adjacent and music docs than we’d all love, but even within that there’s opportunity to do great work.”
Leifer also challenges suggestions that the state broadcaster funded model is on the way out pointing to this year’s Best Documentary Oscar winner Mr Nobody Against Putin, which was commissioned and co-produced by BBC Storyville, and backed by a raft of European film institutes and broadcasters.
He says that being flexible and creative in terms of partners as well as platform agnostic is key to getting big documentaries over the line. He points to how The Balloonists was equity financed by Red Bull and Anonymous Content, while Nuisance Bear was financed by A24 with some soft money ahead of being acquired by Mubi and Teenage Wasteland received support from now defunct Participant Media to now bow on Netflix.
Based on his experiences riding the up and downs of the doc scene over the past 20 years, Leifer adds luck and being in the right place at the right time also play their part.
“Making docs is hard. You need luck on each project, to bring it to the market at a moment when it lines up with appetite from a financier or a distributor. Sometimes you have that luck, and sometimes you don’t. You can drive yourself crazy trying to reason everything out,” he says.
“That’s not to diminish good analysis of the marketplace, but I think that if we’re all honest with each other, luck plays a huge role in filmmaking. You can rely on good taste and dedication and working as hard as you can, but you still need good fortune, and over 20 years, we’ve had it.”
